Almost one year ago I made this post about how the Wikipedia page for the “Nothing to hide” argument removed the text stating that it is a logical fallacy. I advocated for it to be added back. Three days after that post it was added back.
Exactly one year, to the day, after the logical fallacy text was removed, it got removed again. On October 19th of this year, a different user removed the text from the Wikipedia page, despite plenty of evidence that the “Nothing to hide” argument is a logical fallacy.
I am back here, once again, advocating that the text be added back.
P.S. It’s an absolutely crazy coincidence that the same edit happened to the same page on the same day exactly one year apart.
If anyone utters this argument i´ll hit them with “okay give me your phone and let me look through your browser history, pictures and messages.”
My immediate knee jerk reaction whenever someone has said this to me has always been “the law is so labyrinthine and convoluted that I may be breaking the law and not even know it.” I don’t trust the law to not fuck me.
Oh, you have nothing to hide? Let me take a look at your butthole then
I’ve commented it in the other post, but in my opinion, the issue of the “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” statement is that in between lines (specially in the context for which it’s used) it seems to want to imply that having something to hide must be something rare or perhaps wrong… as if it were not possible to want to hide things that are good for society to keep hidden.
This isn’t a formal, logical fallacy, but an informal one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy
From a perspective free of presuppositions and biases, I don’t think the logic of the argument on itself is wrong, because of course I wouldn’t be worried about my privacy if I had no interest in keeping my private information hidden… but the premise isn’t true here! the context in which the argument is used is the problem… not the logic of it.
It’s not incorrect to say: “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” …what’s incorrect is assuming that the “nothing to hide” antecedent is true for all law abiding citizens …as if people didn’t have an interest in keeping perfectly legal and legitimate things hidden and safe from as many prying eyes as possible. The fallacy is in the way that it’s used, they are pretending that this means people shouldn’t be worried, when in fact it means the opposite, since everyone does, in fact, have information that should remain hidden. For our own safety and the safety of our society! …so everyone should in fact be worried about breaches in privacy.
All this babbling about complex constructs, it’s really quite simple.
When we have no moments to outselves, when everything we know, we think, we do, is being recorded and processed (which it luckily isn’t yet), then regurgitated in one way or the other, we lose identity.
Identity is a core part of being human. There are reasons that other people shouldn’t know what we think, I think you can figure those out for yourselves.So when someone says “They have nothing to hide”, then they ignore a fundamental part of themselves, which they need to live. It’s like saying someone doesn’t need eyebrows, because they have no emotions to show. It is just false.
Everybody has something they do not want others to know. Whether it is you thinking badly about your elders, which you do out of love and to protect them, or thinking how your colleague is doing something wrong, which will train you to be better than them in that instance.
Once these things are no longer private, identities break down and society does not work anymore. Socialism, capitalism, communism, all those depend on faces.
This is even true for the animal kindom. Or do you think a lion could catch prey, if the prey knows the lion’s thought, or the prey could escape the lion if the lion knew the prey’s thoughts?
There are places where privacy can be instrumentalized, but that’s where we can do something against it. The problem is about finding the fine line where we maximize privacy for a healthy society, while minimizing potential issues through it. We’re way past that line.
it seems to me that people are arguing over semantics why it shouldn’t be listed as a “logical fallacy”. kinda reminds me of people arguing about semantics on why i shouldn’t call people nazis when they’re not actually members of the NSDAP. fucking infuriating.
It’s more like calling “nazi” to all forms of authoritarian positions, even the left-wing authoritarians in the opposite side of the spectrum.
There’s a distinction between “informal fallacy” and “formal / logical fallacy”. Both have separate articles in wikipedia as well. Why not just call it “fallacy” without categorizing it into a specific subcategory it does not fit anyway?
This seems a good answer, let’s go with this!
Why does it need to be considered “formal” by some arbitrary standard to be both a fallacy and related to logic.
The “formal” part comes from “formal system”, which is essentially the use of rules of inference based on an initial set of presuppositions, with an exact/mathematical approach to “truth”.
The idea of “informal logic” is something some people have wanted to put forward, but it’s a much younger and not as well defined term, and whether it should really be considered “logic” is something that has criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_logic#Criticisms
Perhaps in the end all logic is formal logic, the problem is that we know from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems that not everything is computable and translatable into a formal system… to solve this you’d have to model the statements into a Gödel/Lobian machine (at which point you are essentially building an AI).
That is extremely interesting. I did not know the formal system could be put in mathematical terms. Ill check into that.
Okay, how about we rephrase “Nothing to hide” and change it to “Everything to show”. Doesn’t sound good, does it?
As an aside. this stupid, tired argument is old enough to be of drinking age. Let. It. Die.
