A Compendium of Sklansky Fallacies

[luckyme]

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If you assume that you fight a war to stop something from happening, and if you assume that not winning means you failed to stop it, then you can say that we shouldn't have fought the war if what we didn't stop, turned out not to be that bad.



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but you don't know what you stopped. The only way to assess is is to consider how things would have been if you hadn't had the war.

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But you do know what you DID NOT stop! And what you did not stop is what actually transpired. DS is saying that if what transpired is what you were trying to prevent, and what transpired "turned out not to be that bad", then you should not have fought that war.

Vietnam is actually a perfect example of this. DUCY?

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Let's see if I follow -
I decide to bluff the river with my Ace high and put on a "I'm strong" act because the outcome I want is "he folds".
He calls. Darn, my attempt to prevent that didn't work.
Oh, wait. He called with the only Ace I can beat.

That proves I should not have tried to prevent him from calling with a blank Ace?

In a black-white two variables only world the DS claim ( if it is as you've stated) would be correct. In this multifaceted world, actual outcomes are different and diffuse and there is no reason to call a conjectured outcome and an actual outcome the same nor do we have the ability to weigh all the causes.

Communist Vietnam post-war emerged into a different world because of the war than the one it would have emerged into if there were no war. Besides the direct legacy of the war, there were endless other political, economic, demographic, military etc, variations that were occurring during the war and others that would have occurred if there were no war. Never mind butterfly effects, there are 800 pound gorilla effects too.

To decide whether the war was right or wrong because of one aspect of the end position leaves ostriches with better views.

If the goal of the war was to prevent a communist Vietnam for fear of XYandZ, then after the war there is a communist Vietnam and XYandZ did not occur or were not that damaging, we'd need one hell of a lot of information on a grand scale to determine whether the war decision was correct or not and the actual post-war conditions may well be a minor part of the evaluation.

luckyme

[Kaj]

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Communist Vietnam post-war emerged into a different world because of the war than the one it would have emerged into if there were no war. Besides the direct legacy of the war, there were endless other political, economic, demographic, military etc, variations that were occurring during the war and others that would have occurred if there were no war. Never mind butterfly effects, there are 800 pound gorilla effects too.

To decide whether the war was right or wrong because of one aspect of the end position leaves ostriches with better views.

If the goal of the war was to prevent a communist Vietnam for fear of XYandZ, then after the war there is a communist Vietnam and XYandZ did not occur or were not that damaging, we'd need one hell of a lot of information on a grand scale to determine whether the war decision was correct or not and the actual post-war conditions may well be a minor part of the evaluation.

luckyme

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So would you hypothesize that the war stunted the spread of communism and produced a less hardline regime in Vietnam?

Because I think objective analysis would show that after Vietnam, the US and the world had no stomach and depleted resources to try the containment strategy like that again. And if anything, the communist regime in Vietnam should have emerged as dramatically more hardline and anti-West after the war, rather than be not nearly as dogmatic as we made them out to be before the war.

You are right that there are unaccounted for effects. But objectively, these effects are porbably a higher likelihood of hurting the case for war than helping the case. Since we can only guess, let's make the best guess we can given what we know about the times and the world. And if we do that, I think one can make a compelling case that we hyped the cause for war -- what was a struggle for nationalism, we turned into a global communist conspiracy. In fact, it was our actions to support the South that aligned the North more strongly with China and Russia. If we just shrug our shoulders and say "who knows?" then we fail to learn any lessons from history.

[oe39]

thought it said "sklansky phalluses"

that thread would be worthless without pics

[chezlaw]

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So would you hypothesize that the war stunted the spread of communism and produced a less hardline regime in Vietnam?

Because I think objective analysis would show that after Vietnam, the US and the world had no stomach and depleted resources to try the containment strategy like that again.

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That may be right but that analysis is part of what DS says isn't necessary to judge the war (when of course it is).

chez

[andyfox]

Your points are good ones, but David's point is a more limited one. If I understand it correctly, it is that if we fought the war to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist gulag, and we lost the war and the Communists took over, and it didn't become anything close to the disaster we said it would, then that it compelling evidence--not proof--that fighting the war was failure from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. It my well be that a no-war Vietnam would have been different than post-war Vietnam and that David's formula is therefore not "proof." But he is not claiming it is proof; just a compelling piece of evidence.

[andyfox]

Gosh, I sure hope this isn't a trend aimed at longtime posters because if there were a thread entitled "A Compendium of Fox Fallacies," you'd need a helluva lot more bandwidth.

[chezlaw]

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Your points are good ones, but David's point is a more limited one. If I understand it correctly, it is that if we fought the war to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist gulag, and we lost the war and the Communists took over, and it didn't become anything close to the disaster we said it would, then that it compelling evidence--not proof--that fighting the war was failure from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. It my well be that a no-war Vietnam would have been different than post-war Vietnam and that David's formula is therefore not "proof." But he is not claiming it is proof; just a compelling piece of evidence.

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Evidence yes, but his initial claim (that I was addressing)was that there was no need to consider anything else to conclude that the war was a mistake.

chez

[luckyme]

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Your points are good ones, but David's point is a more limited one. If I understand it correctly, it is that if we fought the war to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist gulag, and we lost the war and the Communists took over, and it didn't become anything close to the disaster we said it would, then that it compelling evidence--not proof--that fighting the war was failure from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. It my well be that a no-war Vietnam would have been different than post-war Vietnam and that David's formula is therefore not "proof." But he is not claiming it is proof; just a compelling piece of evidence.

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Evidence yes, but his initial claim (that I was addressing)was that there was no need to consider anything else to conclude that the war was a mistake.

chez

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And my spin is that without a good examination of lots of competing possible outcomes, including the butterfly and gorilla effects of random major/minor influences events there is no reason to assume there is a compelling connection between a specific condition of the world six or more years after the war and the similar looking specific condition that may have occurred without the war.

At the VERY least we'd have to rule out that the war achieved our goal even by losing it, for example, but I don't want to simplify it that much. Not unlike how standing up to bully and taking a beating may still dissuade him from further aggression ( very loose non-analogy).

luckyme.

[chezlaw]

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At the VERY least we'd have to rule out that the war achieved our goal even by losing it, for example, but I don't want to simplify it that much. Not unlike how standing up to bully and taking a beating may still dissuade him from further aggression ( very loose non-analogy).

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Absolutely. there's a gap between the focus of the war and the reason for the war. Vietnam wasn't fought because of concern for the vietnemese or because vietnam being communist was a big concern in itself. It was fought because of the feared consequences of vietnam being allowed to go communist if it wasn't fought. To judge the war it's necessary to consider the effect of the war on those consequences.

I was thinking about standing up to bullies but the Rhineland is a spiffing analogy because if we had fought over troops in the Rhineland and lost by DS's measure (i.e. germany ended with troops in the Rhineland) but stopped the expansionist plans of Germany then DS analysis would be as sound as it is for Vietnam and completely wrong. Again its because although the war would have been fought over troops in the Rhineland, it wasn't that that bothered anybody but the feared consequences of troops in the Rhineland. Sure it would be evidence that the war wasn't worth fighting but very weak evidence.

DS could argue then in the Rhineland case the war wasn't lost because the real goal of the war was to stop Germanies expansionist agression but the exact same claim could be made for vietnam AND to make the that judgement we need to consider the reasons for the war etc not merely look at the superficial result and how things turned out.

chez

[NLSoldier]

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Gosh, I sure hope this isn't a trend aimed at longtime posters because if there were a thread entitled "A Compendium of Fox Fallacies," you'd need a helluva lot more bandwidth.

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