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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Appeal to nature is a logical fallacy.

Also, from the things we surround ourselves with. It's probably the most natural.

"Appeal to nature" isn't a logical fallacy, it just assumes some things about how things should be. You might disagree with those assumptions, but you, too, have beliefs about how things should be.

In which case it would be much more honest to say "I think this is good or bad" or "these are my values and they are not subject to debate" rather to propose that thing you like is the natural state of affairs and offer that up as if it were a proposition that you were debating. Or worse, the null-hypothesis from which some nebulous burden of proof is assumed for the opponent.

In other words, it is a dishonest strategem which relies on the other party making the logical fallacy that the natural state of affairs must be good, or that a burden of proof lies with them, instead of recognizing this as the sleight-of-hand that it is.

So I think GP was just being polite by calling it a logical fallacy :)

I smoke, but this is dense. Smoking the natural substance is an unnatural use, by that use of the word.

“It grows from the earth”

Yeah so does hemlock.

So don't smoke. There are other ways of consuming with out inhaling the aftermath of burning. Yes, I know the effects are different in how one is affected. The smoking of anything has always been a curious "ritual" to me as it is so against everything the body is made to do.

I have developed this pet theory that humans have grown fond of fire and will feel secure in its presence. How do they know they're at a fire instead of just basking in the sun? When they are inhaling, I mean smelling, its fresh smoke of course!

I don't find it far-fetched to assume that an affinity to fire was selected for over the last millennia. Why, we even have a mutation that makes us less susceptible to carcinogens in smoke compared to other mammals. That would make smoking, and smoking indoors, an activity that replaces the open fires we're accustomed to.

Standard disclaimer for evolutionary theories: They are ill-suited to determine social policy.

That's some theory. Personally, I don't buy in to it. The concept of a burning end of a ciggy replacing an actual fire is just too far out there for me to accept in some far reaches of the human psyche is out there.

Smoking is an acquired taste. As is alcohol. We learn to like things that make us feel good, and learn to dislike things that make us feel bad (poisonous or spoiled).

Eating fish could be considered as natural as it gets, but there is a species which contains one of the most potent poisons ever found, so..

Nature made you inquisitive and able to use and create tools, but you think engaging in those behaviors is somehow un-natural.

Even if the appeal to nature weren't bogus, both alcohol and cannabis are as "natural" as things can be in that broken worldview.

Yes, it's almost as if society has developed firmly established norms about substance use which are so irrational as to be totally incoherent, and ITT you can find people reflexively confabulating justifications for those norms or trotting out the same tired old bromides to reassure themselves that the topic is being debated and that everything is fine.

Or maybe my drug-addled brain is just seeing pink elephants everywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Appeal to nature might be a logical fallacy in arguments, but in practice is a useful heuristic anyway.

Given the amount of alternative “medicines” building on that heuristic, I fail to see where it is useful other than for scam artists.

Sure, there are biological inventions we can copy and refine for possibly even better inventions - but those are useful not because they originated from nature but because evolution found a locally optimal solution to a problem.

Well, being able to identify potentially locally optimal solutions without having to go through an entire optimization process yourself is a pretty powerful heuristic in my book.

Out of curiosity: How does any argument become more or less logical depending on its context?

Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.

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