Secret Weapon Argument

An argument used in advertisements or advocacy for products/technologies which are obscure, less well known, or outside the mainstream. Goes like this:

Our technology Y is demonstrably better in some way than <mainstream technology X>. The reason that you've never heard of Y is that our users want us to keep it a secret, because it gives them an advantage over users of X.

Some examples:

A golf ball manufacturer (can't remember which one) once claimed that their balls were longer than the "big" vendors' balls; but had no endorsements from golf pros. This was justified with the claim that no self-respecting pro would admit to using their balls because that would be tantamount to cheating. (The ball was a regulation golf ball, so it certainly wouldn't be considered cheating for a golfer to use one). In reality, professional golfers will kill to get their hands on the best equipment (clubs, balls) that they can; the suggestion that they would forego a higher-quality ball because it gives them an unfair advantage is patently absurd.
PaulGraham's famous quote that CommonLisp is a "secret competitive advantage" or somesuch. More likely, PaulGraham himself (being an excellent programmer) is a competitive advantage...
- More likely PaulGraham was hinting at the fact that even if a competitor would know they where using Lisp they (1) would not understand the advantage, and (2) would not be able to get as good programmers (because he has had already hired the best he could get).

Almost always a flawed argument. First of all, it's made in the context of advocacy, so despite the purported requests for secrecy, the advocate is telling you about Y anyway. (But keep it under your hat, willya?). For another...absent NonDisclosureAgreements, it's impossible to keep such secrets. People change jobs all the time, and if Y really does the job at someone's shop, word will get out. Other people will try Y, and either Y will really show its worth (in which case it won't be a secret) or it won't (in which case the initial success is probably attributable to some factor other than Y).

Of course, none of this means that Y is bad... just that the SecretWeaponArgument is one of the FallaciousArguments.

May also be related to: GoldenHammer

Wow. Did the poster just go to the same ISA trade show I just did? The favored technique I saw was to accuse one's competitors of "proprietary lock-in" while touting one's own "complete framework"

No, but I've likely read the same brochures... when MarkTwain wrote about lies, damned lies, and statistics, he neglected to mention marketing.

"Your SecretWeapon? cannot harm me ..." - BatFink. Seriously though if you are a startup, don't have a lot of references yet of who the company has done work for, SecretWeaponArgument is a plausible way to bootstrap when potential customers asks for previous clients or implementations. Then when they agree to become customers on the merits of the product you don't need to use the argument anymore (they are a reference). Note even if you or certain staff personally have a lot of experience potential customers want to know who the company has implemented for, so it does not count as much as the perception that there are several deployments.

I don't see how this is a flawed argument. An unverifiable one, perhaps, and thus uninteresting unless you implicitly trust the source.

Flawed in the sense that it's fallacious; it doesn't in fact imply the conclusion that the listener/reader is intended to infer.

But it's not fallacious, which means roughly "incorrectly reasoned". It's merely unverifiable by the listener. It might or might not be a perfectly valid argument. "Flawed" is a weaker statement, and I'll concede that the unverifiability is a flaw in context.

"In reality, professional golfers will kill to get their hands on the best equipment (clubs, balls) that they can; the suggestion that they would forego a higher-quality ball because it gives them an unfair advantage is patently absurd." What's patently absurd is the end of this paragraph. The scenario described implies that some golfers are using these golf balls, and not foregoing their use. They just don't want their direct competitors to know. So the concluding sentence is logically unrelated to the rest of the paragraph.

If company A is using Y and doesn't want to talk about it, but company or individual B (perhaps the vendor or originator of the technology) wants to advocate Y, what's absurd about B talking about it? B has a motivation to, despite A's motivation towards secrecy. And B's talking about Y doesn't destroy all benefit to A's secrecy, either; keeping knowledge of enabling technologies from A's direct competitors may indeed still be valuable. There's always the chance that the A's direct competitors aren't part of B's usual audience and might not hear him; whereas the competitors are likely to be watching carefully what A says publicly.

Perhaps. More often than not, this is marketing fluff. Real secrets (which have value) are generally protected with stronger arrangements than "please keep it under your hat"; SecurityByObscurity is a known AntiPattern. Keep in mind; fallacious arguments can nonetheless be valid arguments. A fallacy means that the premise doesn't necessarily imply the conclusion, not that the conclusion is false.

SecurityByObscurity is common in business and has advantages and disadvantages compared to some other forms of protection; it doesn't rely on legal interpretations of copyrights or patterns, for instance, and doesn't expose the details to a competitor who might (secretly, or with legality-avoiding modifications) copy it. In the sort of case being discussed here, you'd be hard pressed as a buyer of technology Y to convince vendor B to contractually obligate himself to silence on the virtues of Y!!! So reticence, denying your competition confirmation of your techniques, might be the best you can do.

So, if you don't trust the source, a "SecretWeaponArgument" might be of no interest to you. But there's nothing inherently absurd or flawed about it.

Now that I think about it, I really wish it were the case that users, upon discovering a fantastic new tool, would rush to use it. Just recently a certain official golf standards committee (I cannot remember its name, because I do not follow sports, and I only heard this on the news recently (ie a couple of months before September 2013)) decided to ban the use of so-called "belly putters" because, by being able to put your belly on the putter, putting is more accurate. Leading the charge, apparently, was Tiger Woods himself!

Similarly, recumbent bicycles were banned from races in the early 20th century, because people were winning races with them, and racers were complaining that it was "unfair". To this day, I have speculated how much more comfortable biking would be for casual bikers, had the racers embraced this design, rather than complain about "fairness".

And never mind that both sports are products of their tools! If the tool is easily obtainable by everyone--there's nothing inherent in recumbent bikes or belly putters that make them more expensive--then there's no reason to ban it. (I could understand banning titanium-gold-carbon polymer bikes or clubs if they give a significant advantage, because then only rich people would be able to participate meaningfully in the sport, but that's another issue entirely.) If a tool is better, we should be using it! But we are a political species, and politics sometimes warps our tools of choice in weird ways. --Alpheus

Unfortunately, sometimes the SecretWeaponArgument is all you've got. According to TheBrainMakers?, one of the problems that ArtificialIntelligence companies had in the '80s was that many AI customers insisted on contracts swearing the vendor to secrecy.

There's a chapter called "The Customers Rave About AI". It's two pages, and claims that there were no positive comments made about AI technology by customers during part of the boom.

The satisfied customers didn't want to talk because they didn't want competitors to know about their SecretWeapon?. The unsatisfied customers were more than happy to talk! The result was that only the complaints ended up in public. It wasn't until years later that many of the successes became public.

I can only imagine how much it must suck to have your business die because none of your satisfied customers were willing to admit to using your technology.

Science has the exact opposite problem. suppose we have technique X used to address problem Y. If X is flawed, but there is no other technique to get at Y (i.e. X is a secret weapon), then papers start to appear touting the benefits of X. Of course, since X's result is unverifiable, you never hear dissenting views. Before you know it, everyone is using X to "study" Y (since they need to "keep up" with those already using X), but you only hear of the instances where X seems to be giving a plausible answer, since nonsensical data tends not to get published, so X keeps on appearing better and better.

Rather than speculate about what Paul Graham is "more likely hinting at", perhaps this page should quote what Graham actually said:

"It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something. In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was leaking news of their features to us. We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible. ... And so, I'm a little embarrassed to say, I never said anything publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb. ... This was no accident. A startup should give its competitors as little information as possible. ... Robert Morris says that I didn't need to be secretive, because even if our competitors had known we were using Lisp, they wouldn't have understood why: "If they were that smart they'd already be programming in Lisp." ..." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

See also JournalistsDilemma, WebStoresDiscussion (PaulGraham's company)