 The NYPD has recently come under fire for widespread corruption, even among its commanding officers. Those guys really should police their brass. Before we open this can of worms, a quick reminder to try and stem the tide of flame bait in the comments. Critiquing a particular argument in support of a position is totally different than critiquing the position itself, and both of those are light years away from critiquing the people who hold that position. There are certainly relationships between those, but until somebody explicitly invokes those relationships, please refrain from leaping to conclusions. And with that absurdly optimistic proviso, let's talk about some of the most emotionally charged and controversial topics of all time. Police brutality, gun control, this should go swimmingly. Well, actually that's not really what we're talking about here. The principle that I want to discuss is more of a fallacious line of reasoning that's central to arguments for all sorts of different debates. These two just happen to be hot topics right now. It doesn't really have an explicit name, as far as I know, but I'm sure that you can think of one. It's sort of a derivative of the false dilemma fallacy, with a little bit of post-hoc and just a sous-salle of Texas Sharpshooter thrown in for flavor. Mwah! Disgusting. Let's start with an example, one which Americans will have a little bit more familiarity with. Gun control. The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful political groups that has ever existed in the United States of America. It has 4.3 million members, pulls in around $205 million a year in revenue, and spends a hefty amount of that cash campaigning for pro-gun legislation. It's also a massive PR entity, which has created several media campaigns and slogans which have become famous, such as, Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People. One of its most recent media campaigns focused on a slightly more positive note than murder, asking, Do you still believe in the good guys? The implication here is pervasive in much of the NRA's media, that there are two kinds of people who get guns. The bad guys, irresponsible idiots and criminals who use them for nefarious purposes and should be stopped. And the good guys, upstanding citizens who only ever use guns responsibly for self-defense or sport and who shouldn't be hassled by gun laws. How can you tell which is which? Well, it's obvious. If someone uses a gun illegally and hurts someone, then they were clearly one of the bad guys. There are several problems with this line of reasoning. A quick reminder, I'm not critiquing the NRA's position on gun rights. I'm just saying that this particular ad campaign features some irrational assertions. For example, the presumption is that there are only two kinds of people to begin with. Those who will use firearms responsibly and those other people. It is true that at any particular point, we can sort everyone into two distinct and well-defined groups. Those who have used guns properly and those who haven't. But that's a categorization that takes place after the fact, not before. Reality, as usual, is not that simple. One in four firearm homicides in the United States are committed by first-time offenders, people with no previous criminal record, many of whom owned or purchased a gun legally before whatever situation caused them to kill someone with it. And, speaking of the situation, that plays a huge role in shootings as well, much more than the NRA slogan suggests. A normal person might not use guns illegally in any normal circumstances, but with 310 million firearms in the US, you're going to see a one in a million, bizarre situation with a gun about 300 times. Suggesting that there are two distinct categories of people who were just always faded to use guns responsibly or always faded to use them irresponsibly paints a very one-dimensional picture of an insanely complex and constantly changing constellation of both people and circumstances. It's very attractive to simplify everything to the point where someone can say, well of course she shot him, she's one of the bad guys, but the world just doesn't work that way. That brings me to my second example, which horrifyingly enough is much more worldwide than the gun control debate. There have been several highly publicized cases in the US of police brutality in the last few months. The outrage resulting from these cases has been magnified by the fact that several of the victims were unarmed and black again by what many see as purely token efforts at internal investigation or prosecution of the officers responsible. Even if you don't agree with the entirety of those accusations, you can understand why there is so much outrage surrounding these events. Police officers are symbols of law and order and we entrust them with our safety and our lives. Learning that those symbols are fallible or best and corrupt at worst is seriously troubling. However, many are taking these incidents as an indication that there are bad cops who should be removed from the force, who never should have made it past the screening procedures that evaluate psychological fitness for police work. Once again, it's very easy to look after the fact and categorize police officers into good cops who haven't screwed up and bad cops who have, but the reality of the situation is that police officers are people and people are complicated. There is no way that we could predict every incident of police brutality before it happened. Yes, looking back after the fact, there are several warning signs and indications and it's very easy to see a causal chain which makes some incidents seem obvious and preventable. But hindsight is actually way better than 2020. It allows us to pick out the causes which resulted in the incident in question, even though, before it happened, we probably couldn't have called it. Also, we tend to miss a whole lot of information about the situations these cops acted in. Considering just how drastically witnessed testimony varies and how terrible witness testimony is to begin with, how can we realistically evaluate whether or not an officer might have been responding reasonably to what the situation seemed like at the time, rather than what it actually was? This fallacious idea that there are just good people and bad people and we only need to concern ourselves with the bad ones has been used to justify laws, hiring practices, jail sentencing, all sorts of systems which cause a whole lot of suffering if they're implemented wrong. The point that I'm making is that there are no monolithic categories of good guys and bad guys, that people aren't easily sorted into groups based on what they're going to do, and we can't make good decisions about how to build those important systems reasoning as though they were. If we're going to have reasonable gun control laws and reasonable checks on law enforcement, we have to plan for a wide diversity of people in a huge number of different circumstances, every potential combination, and determine which of those are too high risk to allow. I mean, I like to think that I'm a pretty responsible dude, but there are certain situations where not even I should be a let- Do you have a decent name for this fallacy? Have you ever seen it used anywhere else? Please leave a comment below. And let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.