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RFK Jr. wants a wearable on every American — that future’s not as healthy as he thinks
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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The argument made is anecdotal and subject to self-selection bias. In general basic wearables for everyone sounds like a very good idea, even if it’s coming from the worst people possible.
My neurotic friend with body dysmorphia and anorexia should absolutely not be wearing anything that monitors her health, weight, activity levels, or food intake.
That’s an anecdote again though. Nobody is talking about forcing people to use them either, or at least I hope so because you never know what Yanks come up with these days.
They would be most foolish to talk about enforcement or penalties for refusal now. Since time immemorial, the pipeline has been to boil the frog slowly, to first gain acceptance or disinterest from a relative majority by habituation through gradually increasing ubiquitousness and by framing opponents as alarmists – "can't you see, we're not forcing anyone" – and then strike.
Here in Germany, one of the most recent and prominent examples is that of now-chancellor Merz saying during the election campaign, and clearly with data-mining in mind, that people should be penalized if they won't have their medical data digitized – after this very digital patient file had been rolled out with the emphatic promise that it would would always be voluntary: German / English
Slippery slope is a type of logical fallacy. You’re jumping from something that could be „let’s subsidise MiBand straps” to a full blown surveillance state.
Except I'm not. I'm talking about a process that, unlike a slippery slope, is driven (one might say externally) by bad-faith actors with enormous capabilities, strategic planning, and a big fat track-record of desiring and actually implementing heavily extended surveillance capabilities (maybe still not a full-blown surveillance state, but this was never part of my argument).
By the way, slippery slope in itself is only a figure of argument and is not automatically a logical fallacy, no more than any other empirical argument is. It all comes down to the plausibility of the concrete empirical points being made.
Using ~~empirical~~ anecdotal evidence is a type of logical fallacy too.
Oh my.