Schelling fences on slippery slopes

There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist -- whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude."

(By the way, speaking of slippery slopes, the following year the same court upheld another ten year conviction for a speech whose content was carefully crafted to remain within the bounds of the sedition laws, but which was still judged to be illegal on the grounds of intent and indirect implication.)

Thinking about this article a bit more, you're missing a very important point. Namely, a "Schelling fence" is often of supreme importance even when there aren't multiple interest groups involved. (Nor even time- or value-inconsistent versions of the same party.)

This is because in most cases of conflict, pre-commitments are difficult to communicate. If you're maintaining some line of defence against an opponent and you're credibly pre-committed to defend even if the cost of defence is higher than the value of the prize fought over, you're safe against a rational opponent who perceives this pre-commitment correctly. However, if you have no such pre-commitment, the opponent has the incentive to mount an overwhelming attack even if the cost of the attack is higher than the prize -- since in that case you'll find it rational to retreat and avoid fighting.

The trouble is, communicating pre-commitment credibly is difficult, since it's always in your interest to assert pre-commitment to defend as credibly as possible, but secretly plan to withdraw if your bluff gets called. So this is where the Schelling points come into play: a conspicuous Schelling point helps create a meeting of minds about pre-commitments between the conflicting parties. Your commitment to defend at that line is credible because by failing to defend it, you lose not only that particular prize, but also everything up to the next strong Schelling point, which may even be nonexistent. (And is certainly harder to use effectively once you have a reputation as a pushover who gives up on valuable Schelling points.)

So, in case of Holocaust denial laws, there might be rational reason to oppose them even if a single Holocaust denier didn't exist. The principle that the government can't legislate official truth is a very clear Schelling point. The same principle modified by an exemption for those cases where the truth is evident and its denial offensive, much less so. Who gets to decide what's evident and what's offensive anyway? So once you've conceded that the government can prohibit you to say that that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that 2+2=5, there isn't any clear Schelling point where you'd draw the line and pre-commit to fight the prohibition.

Or is there? Currently, in the Western world outside the U.S., there are several fairly strong Schelling points based on a general perception about a few extremely low-status kinds of people -- basically, speech restrictions are considered OK if and only if they specifically target these sorts of people. In most places, these groups include neo-Nazis (and right-wing extremists in general) and certain kinds of sexual deviants, and Holocaust denial prohibition is considered OK because it specifically targets the former. However, there is definitely an ongoing slippery-slope effect here -- in many countries, the class of speech restrictions that is vaguely associated with the "right-wing extremist" exception is increasingly used to enforce ideological conformity on a number of issues where dissent from the respectable opinion should not merit that title by any reasonable definition. (And where, arguably, honest pursuit of truth will lead one to disagree with the respectable opinion.)

Another approach to (or rather away from) slippery slopes is to see the entire slope as a single thing à la TDT. Gandhi, contemplating his willingness to make the trade to become 95% Gandhi, can also foresee that 95% Gandhi would make a similar trade to 90% Gandhi, and so on. So his first decision is acausally linked to the whole of the slope, and to decide to take one step is to decide to go all the way.

The concept predates explicit TDT and can be found in popular wisdom: how often have I heard "there is no just once" in fiction, whether a policeman asked to break the rules just this once, an alcoholic offered just one drink, etc. Kant's Categorical Imperative is similar.

Cf. the maxim "Everything you do is a decision about who you want to be", or the outside-view version, "The way a person does one thing is the way they do everything."

I'd like to mention that I had an entire family branch hacked off in the Holocaust, in fact have a great uncle still walking around with a number tattooed on his forearm, and have heard dozens of eye witness accounts of horrors I could scarce imagine. And I'm still not okay with Holocaust Denial laws, which do exist where I live.

In part, this is just my aversion to abandoning the Schelling point you mention; but lately, this is becoming more of an actual concern: My country is starting to legislate some more prohibitions on free speech, all of them targeting one side of the political spectrum, and one of the main arguments touted for such laws is "well, we're already banning Holocaust denial, nothing wrong came of that, right?".

The slope can be slippery indeed...

Given the discussion, strictly speaking the pill reduces Ghandi's reluctance to murder by 1 percentage point. Not 1%.

Couldn't the alien argue that slippery slopes slip both ways? If we start allowing Holocaust denial, soon it will be legal to yell "fire!" in a theater.

Very good post! I feel like I understand the concept of slippery slopes much better now. The breakdown into different categories of "slippery slope argument", and cases where they would be valid, is one I find especially useful.

It does make me wonder whether the existence of "slippery slopes" is based on the flawed design of human brains, i.e. hyperbolic discounting, and just the general tendency to alter beliefs for self-consistency or because they sound/feel better. (An example of this would be a real-life version of Gandhi's pill, where starting out with a small not-very-bad act which someone can justify within their moral system, like stealing candy, could lead someone to be more comfortable with stealing in general and end up stealing much bigger things.) Would a non-human 'perfectly rational' alien, one that didn't hyperbolically discount and had no tendency to automatically update their beliefs/moral system so that their past actions weren't evil, still need to worry about slippery slope arguments?

I think you are dismissing the abandoning the power of choice argument unfairly. I'll try to give it a better formulation than you did.

There is a decision to make. The question is not just "A or B?" It is "How shall this type of choice be made?" and "Who shall make this type of choice?"

Changing how decisions of this type are made and who makes them are dangerous. "Holocaust denial is verboten," implies "There are authorities who decide what beliefs are acceptable." and "Individuals cannot be trusted to seriously consider all alternatives for belief." The second is true, because by removing the ability to reject the holocaust removes the ability to consider if the histories are reliable.

For the Civilization example. "I should decide on when to go to sleep based on a prior rule I accepted." is a different principle than "I should decide on when to go to sleep based on my current enjoyment of whatever I am doing now."

Admittedly, I rarely make arguments of the slippery slope form. I prefer to point out the toxic principles being accepted.

A thought inspired by an exchange upthread with Vladimir, but more general than what we were immediately discussing:

It seems that (e.g., political) extremism may be a result of a certain perception of where the Schelling points are and an application of meta-level thinking to the slope, even where basic preferences aren't changed much. Suppose that it is 11:30 and you are playing Civ. You want to play until 11:40 and then stop, but you know that if you do you'll want to play until 11:50 and then stop, etc.

If you think everything is a nice round number, you can just say "I'm going to stop at 11:40" and then do it. This is great if you're not lying to yourself, which you probably are. If you think :00s and :30s are nice round numbers, you can compare how you feel about stopping now, 10 minutes earlier than your current ideal, to stopping at midnight, 20 minutes after it. Trivially so for whatever other round numbers you might see, &c.

But suppose to yourself: "but why should my night be dictated by what I think at 11:30?" Well, because that's who you are at this point in time, and thus whose desires reason consists in fulfilling, obviously. But: you are in a sense in a community of yourselves who will be making this decision for many nights in the future. And: perhaps you have preferences about your preferences not looking/being arbitrary - you look at your 11:00 self and sneer at her ignorance - wanting to end at 11:10! - and at your 12:00 self in horror - is this where we are headed? - but then realize how you must look to them, and reconsider. Even if your round numbers are every 10 minutes then you could stop at 11:40 like you naively prefer, you also realize that if you consistently applied whatever rule you're about to, you wouldn't get 11:40. So the choice is really between uninstalling the game and never sleeping again. If this tendency exhibits some pull and you're hyperbolically discounting, then the larger the distance between your perceived round numbers the more sense it makes to go all-or-nothing (i.e. if you place 12 hedons on being non-arbitrary, then if your round numbers are every ten minutes ending 0 minutes from your preferred time and being abitrary may be clearly better than never playing or never sleeping and being consistent, whereas if your round numbers are on the hour..)

This is consistent with most of my (our?) prior beliefs about the tails of the political spectrum: that compared to moderates extremists are more interested in and familiar with the perspective of other times and cultures (even ones with politics "on the other side",) less socially connected (to people in their own time and culture), prefer System 2 to System 1 reasoning, like big abstract ideas, &c. I don't know if this is just a clever (or not all that clever) reformulation of existing commonsensical explanations for these things or if you could think of testable predictions that would distinguish them.

In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it.

You should look closer, they're banning speech left and right all across Europe under variety of trivial reasons.

like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

Pedantic-lawyer Tim says the exception is for falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Edit: But the general point is right. Lots of law is some implementation of: "Better decided clearly now than decided correctly some vague time in the future."

Great post. Very clear and concise as usual. I recently read an interesting article by Eugene Volokh on slippery slopes focused specifically on gay marriage, which you can find in pdf form here. (If you don't like pdf's, the title is "Same-Sex Marriage and Slippery Slopes.") Interestingly, he also discusses the US's first amendment as something like a Schelling point, though he doesn't use the same terminology.

In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it. There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater

From what Volokh says in the article, it seems that many countries aside from the US don't have as strong of protections for freedom of speech. E.g., in Canada and Sweden ministers have been prosecuted for comments condemning homosexuality.

I am new to the website. So new that this is my first comment and I didn't even particularly want to sign up. I found it interesting having just come from reading Eleizer's post about 0 and 1 not being probabilities to here I immediately had a question form in my mind.

How certain of a thing do we have to be in order to prescribe that the state be able to end someone's life for their speaking it?

There are several points in this question that require some unpacking. The most prominent being about the state being able to end someone's life. Though people are generally self-seeking and somewhat rational in being so (so taking a prison sentence over engaging in a shootout with police), any action we ask the state to police is then done so with the threat that the state has total authority to use lethal force in the case of serious non-compliance. If we grant that the state has the right to put people in prison for an action, we grant that the state has the right to kill someone for refusing to comply with the states right to put them in prison.

So how certain of a thing do we have to be in order to grant the state the right to kill someone who questions it? Can any story told have a probability of 0 that every part of it is absolutely true in the telling?

In the example used here - specifically the Holocaust and laws against its denial - what quantitative value can we place on a political ideology that had just defeated the rival that existed with the singular aim of ensuring its extinction told no lies? What quantitative value can we place on a victorious military inventing no embellishments about the actions of its vanquished foe? What quantitative value can we place on the testimony of defeated soldiers rendered under torture having no falsehoods? What quantitative value can we place on the anecdotal evidence given at a series of trials that required no corroborating evidence?

As a burgeoning rationalist how can I accept that an event is so true it is illegal to question even one part of the telling thereof?

>Give up on the Holocaust deniers, and no one else can be sure what other Schelling point you've committed to, if any...
>
>...unless they can. In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it.

I'd say this has aged poorly, except it was evident at the time this was written as well, if not quite as much.  Europeans have managed to slippery-slope from banning Holocaust denial to banning political speech that could be painted as related to an oppressed group in any way, so you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration or to trans politics.

After I read Wikipedia’s article on Schelling points (a.k.a. “focal points”), this article made much more sense. I recommend reading it – it’s only three paragraphs at the moment.

In short, a Schelling point is a point that everybody agrees is an “obvious” cutoff point. That knowledge helped me understand this article’s point that Schelling points make good fences to precommit to because you can’t justify moving the fence anywhere else later – the other points are not nearly as “obvious”.

Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.

Isn't this all the time, though? Whenever a policy changes, if nothing else, the incumbent policy changes, which will affect people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies. Looking at the history of politics and law, it looks like slippery slope arguments are right more often than they're wrong.

I think I can describe the 'slippery slope' to an alien and I think this description offers an obvious (if difficult) solution.

The 'slippery slope' is what we call a situation in which good judgement and a certain algorithmic response to something correspond in one case, but not in others, such that following that algorithm in similar cases will cause us to diverge from our good judgement at some point. 'Slippery slopes' come up when our good judgement about something is partially but not entirely captured by a particular algorithm.

Our solution to slippery slopes in legal settings is the institution of the judiciary, who are supposed to make sure a law is applied in such a way that is consistant with good judgement rather than with the letter of the law, wherever these conflict. This is how we approach slippery slope problems generally, and it works so long as those in charge of applying algorithms have good judgement, which is common enough, if imperfect and difficult to teach.

Schelling fences are patches or qualifications on algorithms which attempt a better approximation of our good judgement, and while they're useful, they'll never be ultimately sufficient unless there actually is an algorithm which just is good judgement in general or in some specific sphere.

[comment deleted]

Regarding what you call abandoning the power of choice, here is an example from HPMoR that looks more like a slippery slope.

The point being, said his inner monitor, it's getting worse literally by the minute. The way spies turn people is, they get them to commit a little sin, and then they use the little sin to blackmail them into a bigger sin, and then they use THAT sin to make them do even bigger things and then the blackmailer owns their soul.

Didn't you once think about how the person being blackmailed, if they could foresee the whole path, would just decide to take the punch on the first step, take the hit of exposing that first sin?

I think your idea about a Schelling point deserves further thought. But, why (and how) select the point arbitrarily? Why now presume that rational 100% Gandhi would perform an optimisation, according to his personal utility function, calculating the good the offered money could do against the harm done to the world by becoming less pacific?

Since you've already posited a third party, in your example, engaged to destroy Gandhi's prized possessions for deviations, why not just have Gandhi charge the man to shoot him as soon as he shows any sign of going on a murderous rampage? That sounds pretty 100%-Gandhi-like to me.

In fact, it is never hard to boost global utility by engaging an robot enforcer. The trick is to do without or, sometimes, to include the enforcer's own utility function (can he be subverted?) into the calculation!

And Ghandi spoke, "I will pay you a million dollars to invent a pill that makes me 1% more pacifist."

"Refuse to adjust your utility function because you will no longer be you, unless the adjustment improves you in terms of your own values" seems to be an important general principle, and it should be enough for Gandhi to turn down the pill.

There is a potential negative consequence, when groups are together against a reasonable project, but can not agree on the alternative they actually prefer. That can be viewed in action in Germany with big infrastructure projects. In particular at the moment with the reconstruction of the Train Station in Stuttgart. Many groups are against the project, but have not compatible ideas on what to do instead. If contrarian groups get better at coordinating their protests you might end up in a situation where no productive project is possible any more.

In politics it leads to a part of the population to always vote for the other guy.

Maybe Gandhi's best option is to "fence off" an area of the slippery slope by establishing a Schelling point - an arbitrary point that takes on special value as a dividing line. If he can hold himself to the precommitment, he can maximize his winnings. For example, original Gandhi could swear a mighty oath to take only five pills - or if he didn't trust even his own legendary virtue, he could give all his most valuable possessions to a friend and tell the friend to destroy them if he took more than five pills. This would commit his future self to stick to the 95% boundary (even though that future self is itching to try to the same precommitment strategy to stick to its own 90% boundary).

makes me think about robert kiyosaki's idea that the more people make the more they spend. They have a "reasonable" budget but as they make more they re-evaluate it for each new level of income, and so the reasonableness grows to a level once unthinkable. (also perhaps like the overton window?).

Here's an argument I found that "hyperplastic agents" (i.e.,Strong AI) cannot make use of Schelling Fences: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidRoden/hyperapocalypse-rev

"One evening, I start playing Sid Meier's Civilization (IV, if you're wondering - V is terrible)" THANK YOU. ;D

The ban on holocaust denial undermines the concept of free speech - there is no agreed upon schelling point and arguments start. Many people don't really understand the concept of free speech because the example they see is actually a counterexample.

Not everyone is totally okay with it, I certainly am not.

Maybe Gandhi’s best option is to “fence off” an area of the slippery slope by establishing a Schelling point—an arbitrary point that takes on special value as a dividing line. If he can hold himself to the precommitment, he can maximize his winnings. For example, original Gandhi could swear a mighty oath to take only five pills—or if he didn’t trust even his own legendary virtue, he could give all his most valuable possessions to a friend and tell the friend to destroy them if he took more than five pills. This would commit his future self to stick to the 95% boundary (even though that future self is itching to try to the same precommitment strategy to stick to its own 90% boundary)

There's nothing "Schelling" about that. A Schelling point is a non arbItrary point that multiple people can agree on spontaneously -- without being told about it. But Gandhi's precommitment is arbitrary and only relevant to himself.

There can be fences across slippery slopes that work in a Schelling like way,and fences that don t. An example of a non Schelling fence is a speed limit. If everyone tried to overtake everyone else, that's clearly a slippery slope towards everyone driving at an unsafe speed. And the remedy is a speed limit ,an arbitrary number that is imposed by a top down process.

If something is Schelling in any strong sense, it doesn't need to be backed by law.

Man, this article hits different now that I know the psychopharmacology theory of the FTX crash...

[block]<quote>"There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater."</quote>[/block]

The case that this quote came from was overturned 40 years ago. If you intend to continue using the analogy, please read the attached link first. It makes a good argument for retiring the phrase. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/

Orthogonal to the main point, but I think the banning of holocaust denial seems a really stupid policy. Not for freedom of speech reasons, but because the policy is "aimed badly", failing to cover some of the people we would presumably like to restrict, and restricting (at least if the law is taken literally) some viewpoints that seem harmless.

If there is a person with Neo-Nazi politics running around in uniform intimidating people then I have a serious problem with that person and can see the point in a law designed to limit their neo-Nazi-ing. But, that person might not actually deny the holocaust (they may, for example think happened but not think it was a bad thing).

Now, imagine we meet Wilfred. He is more discerning (in his estimation) than the typical human and he has realised the truth that human history actually started on January first 1960. On this day the aliens put the first humans on Earth, gave them false memories and set up all the initial conditions for their bizarre experiment. Wilfred is in violation of the laws against holocaust denial, not because he has mentioned the holocaust in any of his confusing youtube videos, but because the general claim "everything before 1960 was false memories" obviously includes "the holocaust didn't happen" as a special case.

We can think of other people who are not neo-Nazis, who are harmlessly denying the holocaust. If you talk about the simulation hypothesis (we are all in the matrix) are you denying the holocaust? What if you propose that you are a boltzman brain?

I am a hyperbolic discounter. Now I can see it clearly. I always default on my own promise to myself that I will stop at doing things that just waste my time (like reading fanfiction, or just plainly procrastinating) at some specific point in time. Then when that time point finally arrives I just continue wasting my time, and I make the same promise as before. I tell myself the same lie as before. However, now I know the problem and I have the tool - the Shelling fence. Now I can face the problem straight ahead and concur it. Wish me well.

I've read the comments, and nobody seems to have mentioned the different functions of speech, and the different goals of limitations. Yvain's examples of Holocaust denial and "shouting fire" are not the same sort of thing.

Speech as an act causally linked to a desired consequence unrelated to communication, like falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, or commanding a subordinate to shoot someone, or etc., isn't really protected (I'm not very familiar with US Law, but I can't think of counterexamples). These limitations don't usually register as "censorship".

Speech as transmission of information is protected, but with many [mostly] uncontroversial exceptions, like privacy, intellectual property, and state secrets.

Most controversies seem to be about speech as expression of thought, be it opinions, theories, or art. Yvain's thoughts are about this (as are his and Vladimir's points about identifying the Right-Thinking People and legislating the truth), so the "shouting fire" example doesn't help much.

I'm not sure it's useful to speak of all three as "speech" and have a single set of general rules for them, unless this is also acting as a Schelling point (although some current debates - hate speech, blasphemy - seem to be essentially about the framing of the issue as the first or the third kind of speech, with speaker intention often acting as a [Schelling?] divide).

[edited after Lumifer's response]

I feel like the following game-theoretic model might be illustrative. Suppose that you have N people ordered by radicalness. These people will repeatedly vote on the proposition of killing the most radical among them (with a simple majority needed to succeed). Assume that each person's preferences are such that they would prefer to have people who are more radical than they are killed but not at the cost of being killed themselves.

This is a game of perfect information and is not hard to analyze. The result is that people will be killed until a power of 2 are left at which point the more radical half of those remaining will all vote to spare the remaining person (because if this person was killed, the same logic dictates that all of them would also end of dieing). This shows how a Schelling point can be established with no communication.

i really enjoyed reading this thank you. best article i've read on here so far. fantastic examples and the examples really 'make' it - i shall try not to plaguerise but from now on when arguing about this stuff i will definitely give examples that show the progression.

the big one here in europe at the minute is 'hate speech' - arguments between whether it's an exception that's dangerous and damaging enough to be worth an exception or whether it's a dangerously low point on that slippery slope.

Economist Jeff Ely recently blogged an interesting example of a slippery slope. http://cheaptalk.org/2012/03/27/the-slippery-slope/

Is "demonstrably optimal policy" a shelling point or not?

I never thought I would hear a plausible defence of slippery slope arguments.

An interesting analogy is with the Sorites or 'heap' paradox, and mathematical induction. In the paradox you show that one grain of sand is not a heap, and that two grains are not a heap, and three.... so you generalise that for if N grains of sand is not a heap then N+1 grains is also not a heap. Therefore 10^1000 grains of sand cannot be a heap, and there are no heaps!

Obviously the problem is that the premise isn't true for any arbitrary N, (unlike cases of mathematical induction where you prove them to work for an arbitrary number).

Similarly with slippery slope arguments, proving that you can move between two points does not mean you can equally easily move to any other point. For example it is plausible that if abortion term limits were changed from say 16 weeks to 17 they might be more likely to move t0 18 in the future. But That doesn't logically imply we will therefore kill born babies.

Edit: Not sure why this has been downvoted so much, did I misunderstand something about the post?

Great post Yvain!

By the way, seems to be small typo:

One evening, I start playing Sid Meier's Civilization (IV, if you're wondering - V is terrible). I have work tomorrow, so I want to go to stop and go to sleep by midnight.

Upvoted; enjoyable anecdotes.

You don't really need to figure out who the Right Thinking People are. You just need to figure out who the Horrendously Completely Almost-Unassailably Wrong Thinking People are.