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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Adding a data point:I bought a combo meal at Burger King today. The receipt had the combo meal discount printed on it ($0.85). I submit that normal market forces can bring information to consumers who have difficulty remembering to add three numbers.

(The combo meal discount was static, no matter what size of combo you order. That is, you could increase the fries and soda by one size for $0.50 or two for $1.00. The non-combo cost of a large fry+large soda is $0.50 more than the medium, and the king-sized (or whatever they call it) is another $0.50. I did not test whether I could increase the size of the fries without increasing the size of the soda and still get the combo discount. Based on the receipt, that seems possible.)

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

@ConstantThanks for the clean reply! I pointed out your analogy as flawed given that fast food items and newspapers are simply not similar in any but the most superficial way. Especially as you had exploited that small similarity to build an argument around the clear irrationality of dismantling newspapers or of selling food by ingredient, insinuating that doing so would be nonsensical and that one must follow from the other: that the suggestion regarding oversight of product bundling was silly because you wouldn't do that to a newspaper/where would it stop, and that it would end badly.

Unfortunately, this is simply a logical slippery slope and thus fallacious rationality.

As mentioned before, there is an understood and clear difference between passing yourself off as someone you aren't in order to spy on and emotionally manipulate/injure someone by exploiting the foibles of human nature to alter their judgement and response (for example, the Megan Meiers case), and your wife using the same to make you feel like an ass for giving weird Uncle Henry the cold shoulder at the family get together. I bring up this seemingly unconnected idea because the type of counterargument you chose in making the above counter would be akin to arguing that "you can't legislate manipulation because then either all cons are just fine or all social manipulation is wrong".

Your argument itself is a fallacy, as your argument is "either X or Y" -- a black and white claim -- when there is clearly a significant gray area involving acceptable and unacceptable manipulation, and rational and irrational ways to deal with such, including legislation that makes some forms of the behavior illegal while not creating a ridiculous police-state situation.

Similarly, arguing that newspapers need to be dismantled into sections or stories because fast food bundles utilize some well-understood presentation tricks to get you to purchase without consideration and that behavior might be corrected, as an argument, is missing both this sort of perspective and scale.

So newspapers and fast food is apples and oranges: one obvious difference being that newspapers aren't trying to get you to "buy more" instead, or relying on presentational grouping or social-linguistic cues to influence your perception of what it is you are buying and the value of such (ie: suggesting the items are a "meal" and presenting them as such to increase profit via suggestion of the nature of what is being purchased, when a burger alone could be a "meal", and given the detrimental nature of both the consumerism the "meal" inspires and the impact on the physical health of a society caused by such).

Paul goes into most of this and more in his own response, so I won't reiterate.

The point was: the analogy upon which your argument rests was false, which did not necessarily invalidate your points as such, but the false dilemma you proposed in the argument stemming from that analogy did.

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