At risk of nit picking: you can shout fire in a crowded theater. That was a metaphor used in a historic case that’s been pretty radically walked back given how bad of an opinion it was.
I’m really surprised that it’s okay to shout fire in a crowded theater but not okay to hit the fire alarm.
I also don’t understand why the author of parent link calls it “appeal to authority”. It’s one of the most concise, self-explanatory examples of free speech crossing the line between stating opinion and being an action.
Except it’s not. Shouting “fire” isn’t an action. And the metaphor was used to explain something (handing out anti-war pamphlets) which is clearly protected speech.
It’s described as an appeal to authority because generally, the quote is invoked to imply ~”well a Supreme Court justice said there are limits on free speech, so clearly we can limit this speech we’re discussing”.
I was commenting in the context of this comment thread, where the person I was replying to referred to “shouting fire” as a clear example of the distinction “between stating opinion and being an action.”
1st Amendment jurisprudence is pretty clear that shouting is speech/expression, and is subject to the finite and well defined set of exceptions to 1st amendment protection.
False speech generally opens you for civil liability. If I shout fire in the theater, everyone rushes out, and I get sued by somebody who was injured, that seems clearly within the free speech exceptions to me.
But if I shout fire in the theater and nobody does anything… what crime have I committed / what liability do I potentially have?
Holmes was comparing “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” not to an example of false speech, but an example of inflammatory speech. Schenck wasn’t making false statements, he was encouraging resistance to the draft during wartime.
The thing is we dont know eachothers identities here. If the thread is about the right way to do something in gamedev and you tell me you used to work at Big Game Company, and the information you provide seems sound, it is truly evidence in favor of the value of your information. It need not be claimed explicitly "and they work on this there, therefore I also have valid experience there, and as such have experience in the domain" because we assume thats understood already.
People throw around appeal to authority as if relationship or prior experience with any institution or association with any well known name could not be causal evidence. And just throw the term out if they see a title, like it erases the strength of a position by mere utterance.
If somebody told me John Carmack said to use such and such spatial indexing structure for this case, it is good information. There is a sincere practicality here. Not just manipulation or weak rhetoric.
A good place to use it would be when someone with illegitimate authority is called upon, or the surrounding information is so weak or even untrue that it contradicts the association with said qualified authority.
Saying “you should do this because John Carmack did it” would absolutely be an appeal to authority. The fact that sometimes you really should do that thing doesn’t somehow negate the fact that the rhetorical strategy being used is ~”you should do this because an authority on the matter did it”.
The rhetorical strategy “appeal to authority” doesn’t have the conditions you’re implying about the proposed hypothesis being weak, or about the authority being illegitimate.
I mean appeal to authority in particular is a fallacy in structured, formal debate, where your argument is supposed to stand on its own because all that's being evaluated is the participants' ability to reason and skill in rhetoric. It doesn't apply nearly as well to standard discussion.
Unless it's narrower than I think of it. If "Appeal to authority" is supposed to only refer to authorities that aren't subject matter experts, and "appeal to expertise" wouldn't fall under the fallacy then I suppose it's a reasonable shorthand for "Oprah doesn't actually have much more credibility on Mad Cow Disease than, say, I do"
I think the gap here, in standard discussion, is that something involving a rhetorical fallacy doesn’t make it _wrong_.
At any number of points in my career, I’ve argued in favor of using a technology because the majority of the industry is using it. On one hand, that’s a bandwagon fallacy. But it’s also often the right answer: there are actual benefits in technology of using something with an active userbase, where new hires are likely to have familiarity, etc.
Likewise, appeals to authority are not fatal to a suggestion. If we’re debating two courses of action and I say “well $smart_engineer generally recommends option A”, that’s meaningful. But it’s still an appeal to authority. In a good discussion, the follow-up question would be “why do they generally recommend that?”, which is how you determine if the authority’s wisdom applies to your situation.
its not a bandwagon fallacy then... the fallacy part only applies if it has no causal influence on the point.
In the case of software, popularity causally equals tools. So it is not a fallacy. Someone deciding to make their railroad the same guage as everyone else is not a fallacy. The fallacy would be if everyone in the town said "we should make it different" and you ask why, and people respond "because thats what everyone else thinks, and the mayor"
I'd assume if you tell fire in a crowded space and there is a stampede (but no fire) you could face civil liability, but not necessarily criminal charges.
Probably. There’s plenty of areas where you can be liable for speech without the 1st amendment being relevant.
There’s parallels to the test for incitement. If you say “Let’s go burn down the grocery store” while you’re out with your friends, and everybody chuckles and nobody does anything to burn down the grocery store, you’re pretty much free and clear of incitement. Your random outburst wasn’t likely to cause imminent lawless action.
If you shout “fire” in the theatre and nothing happens, nobody has been damaged and so there’s no civil claim. But if you shout fire and that leads to a stampede and I get hurt, I have a decent pitch for holding you liable for the harm your statement caused me.
More relevant, you stand on stage in front of a crowd and tell they have to fight, and in the same speech tell them to march on the capital where violence then breaks out and leads to physical harm is what?
I guess you’re going to find out. But the answer is “it depends”. If I start every speech with “Carthago delenda est” for a year and nobody destroys Carthage, and then one day I say it and they do, was my comment directed to inciting imminent lawless action, and likely to produce it?
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha... Is a good read on the topic.