4 ms·

The internet has made it very easy to shield ourselves from the arguments of people with differing views. Disclaimers such as this are just another way for us t

The internet has made it very easy to shield ourselves from the arguments of people with differing views. Disclaimers such as this are just another way for us to filter what we read and further isolate ourselves ideologically. Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit? Conversely, a healthy skepticism is always valuable, regardless of the source.

existencebox 10y ago
Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings. And as a healthy skeptic, knowing the direction to look for potential bias _does_ help orient my skepticism and find potential ulterior motives within the infinite space of "all ulterior motives". I certainly was asking myself "I wonder who was backing this" while reading it. (Don't take me the wrong way, I absolutely agree with you with respect to not filtering our input, I go out of my way to find people biased against my topics to see how they look at things and for me at least the labeling _assists_ with gathering a more diverse viewpoint, and understanding the true motives at play)
- pjlegato 10y ago
  > Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings Not at all; this is the "ad hominem" logical fallacy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) The claims being made are objectively true or false entirely independently of any personal attributes of the person making them. In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
  - existencebox 10y ago
    That's a rather pedantic interpretation. To give one counterexample. Claims can have merit in terms of how the long term events that follow. I have certain ideas of what will follow from e.g. a given proposal; but that's often given many assumptions that went unstated in the original source. By knowing the direction of bias I can postulate what might come from the author's assumptions for those unknowns as well, and perhaps see an angle I hadn't or adjust my "internal bayesian function" of outcomes; which absolutely leads to a subjective judgement of merit. (but despite subjectivity is still to my eyes a best-we-can-do-in-absence-of-more-data question of merit; necessary due to the messiness of "real life") To bring this very hand wavy generalization back to the topic, look at many arguments posed in the anti-marijuana camp (as discussed in this very writeup) being based on extremely pessimistic to the point of unrealistic assumptions in order to derive the conclusions they prescribed; conclusions in isolation that could be seen as terrifying but if you consider author bias can be accounted for more reasonably.
    - hueving 10y ago
      It's not pedantic, it's the only interpretation. Who says something does not alter its logical validity.
      - existencebox 10y ago
        Do read the tail of my prior post. If only we were in a world where logical purism was possible you would be preaching to the choir, I promise you. But given a world with hilariously incomplete information, ESPECIALLY often when having to judge the merits of a decision, one must make a judgement that takes into account aspects outside of literal content. (If you're a CSer at all I would expect this is a very familiar concept from having to do anything from project estimation to architecture in the presence of unknowns) (Sister post Linkregister says it better than I did, frankly)
      - imron 10y ago
        Perhaps in a world where everyone always deals in facts and everyone only tells the truth that statement is true, but that is not our world. People lie and distort facts for their own personal gain all the time. See for example, the scientists paid by the cigarette companies that produced data showing that smoking was safe. Knowing who said something (and knowing who is paying someone to say something) allows you to better calibrate your skepticism to see if what they are saying might be biased by their financial or other interests.
        hueving 10y ago
        You should be equally skeptical of any scientists stating things like that. A scientist has all kinds of motivations to publish novel research. The first scientist publishing that smoking causes cancer had as many motivations to lie as the scientist that published research claiming it didn't. The latter was direct financial support, the former was prestige and fame that would go directly into a tenure package and be considered during grant approval. If ad hominems become acceptable then you quickly open the door to worthless discussions around things like climate change because everyone can point out that the scientists behind the research are motivated to advance anthropogenic climate change or risk being ostracized. Evaluate the content, not the messenger. Anything else is lazy. If you are concerned the content is a lie, ask for the backing data, don't dismiss it.
  - rybosome 10y ago
    > In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying. Entirely true. The value in pointing out potential biases by bringing up the background of the speaker, however, is in inviting others to consider aspects of the argument (or the argument as a whole) in a critical manner.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - linkregister 10y ago
    The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument. It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority! For non-expert HN commenters, we have to use authority, preexisting bias, and past actions of the speaker to give us more information without fully delving into the article. Unless you're willing to spend hours or days evaluating the accuracy of every data point mentioned in the article, it's expedient to use available information. In fact, even if you completely evaluated the accuracy of the study, it would absolutely be of interest who is making the article.
    - imron 10y ago
      > It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority! Also known as the fallacy fallacy: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
    - hueving 10y ago
      >The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument. Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it. How many times have you been swayed by someone that says, "Well I would disregard this study because it's been done by a liberal." If you find that you don't have the time to evaluate an argument based on its merits, don't evaluate it at all. Otherwise your 'gut reaction', which is all an ad hominem is, is just dead weight on the discussion.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
        I still find it useful to know about the person or organisation saying something. Some people and organisations have a history of being deceitful or irrational and it's pretty safe for a non-expert to just disregard their ideas with no consequence. Eg Ken Ham/AiG, Donald Trump, all conspiracy theorists.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    The claims may be objectively true. But I can easily make many objective statements which are true and which are either meaningless, or seem to point out things that need more context to understand. Depending on which side of the argument I prefer, I can choose only the true sentences that seem to support that side and ignore everything else. This is done by media all the time. That's why it's worth to know the bias of the author - even if they don't say anything false, they may ignore a lot of facts and larger context of the issue. For example: - Only criminals smoke weed in the US. (true by definition, federal law doesn't allow it) - Looking at prison population, black people commit more crimes than any other race in the US. (true, missing context of who gets to go to prison, and race ratios in population) - Obama introduced the best patient protection and affordable care act in the history of the US. (true, but also the only one) - In the US there are more people who brush their teeth who have cavities than those who have never brushed. (true, because only tiny fraction never brushed their teeth)
    - elgenie 10y ago
      All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. You can of course read the claims made by the article with a more critical eye, but identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
      - viraptor 10y ago
        > All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. I think you've got it the other way around. Claims like that would not exist in the first place if someone wasn't either ignorant or purposefully trying to mislead you. > identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation. I never said it does. But what it changes, is that once you figure out what their biases are, you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
        hueving 10y ago
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Which is why you shouldn't read just the conclusions, but get the actual source data they used. Easier said than done. It's easy to dismiss, but hard to verify. Science found hard! News at 11! ;) http://www.theonion.com/article/national-science-foundation-science-hard-1405 http://www.theonion.com/article/national-science-foundation-...
hackuser 10y ago
I strongly agree that we shouldn't shield ourselves from opinions that disagree with our own, and that the 'bubble' is dangerous ... ... > Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit? But how do we know how much merit it has? I don't believe anyone has the capability to answer that question on their own (unless they already possess the expert knowledge in the field), or the time to verify it. Therefore, to a great degree we must trust the authors, so it helps to know who is speaking. No author is without bias; it helps to know their biases. Some authors are more honest than others and some more accurate than others. If an author has tried to deceive me before, I won't trust them again. If I've seen an author be diligent about accuracy, I'll trust them more next time. ... ... and so I do want to filter dishonest and inaccurate arguments, for obvious reasons. And for a less obvious reason: I don't have time to read all the exceptionally well-informed, highly accurate, honest, brilliant arguments out there; I resent someone wasting my time with their bullsh*t.
eyelidlessness 10y ago
Understanding the ideological underpinnings of an organization can help to provide context for that organization's statements, especially when those underpinnings are not included in those statements. In order to fully understand politicized writing—its assumptions, its impacts, its expectations and its motivations—it can often be necessary to have that context. Writing that isn't even consciously propaganda can often be heavily influenced by jargon and premises that are not apparent to the reader, but being familiar with the ideological background can help clear up that cloud.
gcb0 10y ago
actually it have achieve that in the worst way possible: making it easier to be surround only by the little echo chamber you choose. see how most tailored "news" aggregators such as facebook or yahoo or reddit will mostly show you only what you want to read. its perfect for the fear mongering ways of the two party system.

existencebox 10y ago

Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings. And as a healthy skeptic, knowing the direction to look for potential bias _does_ help orient my skepticism and find potential ulterior motives within the infinite space of "all ulterior motives". I certainly was asking myself "I wonder who was backing this" while reading it. (Don't take me the wrong way, I absolutely agree with you with respect to not filtering our input, I go out of my way to find people biased against my topics to see how they look at things and for me at least the labeling _assists_ with gathering a more diverse viewpoint, and understanding the true motives at play)

pjlegato 10y ago
> Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings Not at all; this is the "ad hominem" logical fallacy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) The claims being made are objectively true or false entirely independently of any personal attributes of the person making them. In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
- existencebox 10y ago
  That's a rather pedantic interpretation. To give one counterexample. Claims can have merit in terms of how the long term events that follow. I have certain ideas of what will follow from e.g. a given proposal; but that's often given many assumptions that went unstated in the original source. By knowing the direction of bias I can postulate what might come from the author's assumptions for those unknowns as well, and perhaps see an angle I hadn't or adjust my "internal bayesian function" of outcomes; which absolutely leads to a subjective judgement of merit. (but despite subjectivity is still to my eyes a best-we-can-do-in-absence-of-more-data question of merit; necessary due to the messiness of "real life") To bring this very hand wavy generalization back to the topic, look at many arguments posed in the anti-marijuana camp (as discussed in this very writeup) being based on extremely pessimistic to the point of unrealistic assumptions in order to derive the conclusions they prescribed; conclusions in isolation that could be seen as terrifying but if you consider author bias can be accounted for more reasonably.
  - hueving 10y ago
    It's not pedantic, it's the only interpretation. Who says something does not alter its logical validity.
    - existencebox 10y ago
      Do read the tail of my prior post. If only we were in a world where logical purism was possible you would be preaching to the choir, I promise you. But given a world with hilariously incomplete information, ESPECIALLY often when having to judge the merits of a decision, one must make a judgement that takes into account aspects outside of literal content. (If you're a CSer at all I would expect this is a very familiar concept from having to do anything from project estimation to architecture in the presence of unknowns) (Sister post Linkregister says it better than I did, frankly)
    - imron 10y ago
      Perhaps in a world where everyone always deals in facts and everyone only tells the truth that statement is true, but that is not our world. People lie and distort facts for their own personal gain all the time. See for example, the scientists paid by the cigarette companies that produced data showing that smoking was safe. Knowing who said something (and knowing who is paying someone to say something) allows you to better calibrate your skepticism to see if what they are saying might be biased by their financial or other interests.
      - hueving 10y ago
        You should be equally skeptical of any scientists stating things like that. A scientist has all kinds of motivations to publish novel research. The first scientist publishing that smoking causes cancer had as many motivations to lie as the scientist that published research claiming it didn't. The latter was direct financial support, the former was prestige and fame that would go directly into a tenure package and be considered during grant approval. If ad hominems become acceptable then you quickly open the door to worthless discussions around things like climate change because everyone can point out that the scientists behind the research are motivated to advance anthropogenic climate change or risk being ostracized. Evaluate the content, not the messenger. Anything else is lazy. If you are concerned the content is a lie, ask for the backing data, don't dismiss it.
- rybosome 10y ago
  > In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying. Entirely true. The value in pointing out potential biases by bringing up the background of the speaker, however, is in inviting others to consider aspects of the argument (or the argument as a whole) in a critical manner.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- linkregister 10y ago
  The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument. It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority! For non-expert HN commenters, we have to use authority, preexisting bias, and past actions of the speaker to give us more information without fully delving into the article. Unless you're willing to spend hours or days evaluating the accuracy of every data point mentioned in the article, it's expedient to use available information. In fact, even if you completely evaluated the accuracy of the study, it would absolutely be of interest who is making the article.
  - imron 10y ago
    > It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority! Also known as the fallacy fallacy: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
  - hueving 10y ago
    >The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument. Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it. How many times have you been swayed by someone that says, "Well I would disregard this study because it's been done by a liberal." If you find that you don't have the time to evaluate an argument based on its merits, don't evaluate it at all. Otherwise your 'gut reaction', which is all an ad hominem is, is just dead weight on the discussion.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
      I still find it useful to know about the person or organisation saying something. Some people and organisations have a history of being deceitful or irrational and it's pretty safe for a non-expert to just disregard their ideas with no consequence. Eg Ken Ham/AiG, Donald Trump, all conspiracy theorists.
- viraptor 10y ago
  The claims may be objectively true. But I can easily make many objective statements which are true and which are either meaningless, or seem to point out things that need more context to understand. Depending on which side of the argument I prefer, I can choose only the true sentences that seem to support that side and ignore everything else. This is done by media all the time. That's why it's worth to know the bias of the author - even if they don't say anything false, they may ignore a lot of facts and larger context of the issue. For example: - Only criminals smoke weed in the US. (true by definition, federal law doesn't allow it) - Looking at prison population, black people commit more crimes than any other race in the US. (true, missing context of who gets to go to prison, and race ratios in population) - Obama introduced the best patient protection and affordable care act in the history of the US. (true, but also the only one) - In the US there are more people who brush their teeth who have cavities than those who have never brushed. (true, because only tiny fraction never brushed their teeth)
  - elgenie 10y ago
    All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. You can of course read the claims made by the article with a more critical eye, but identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      > All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. I think you've got it the other way around. Claims like that would not exist in the first place if someone wasn't either ignorant or purposefully trying to mislead you. > identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation. I never said it does. But what it changes, is that once you figure out what their biases are, you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
      - hueving 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
AstralStorm 10y ago
Which is why you shouldn't read just the conclusions, but get the actual source data they used. Easier said than done. It's easy to dismiss, but hard to verify. Science found hard! News at 11! ;) http://www.theonion.com/article/national-science-foundation-science-hard-1405 http://www.theonion.com/article/national-science-foundation-...

hackuser 10y ago

I strongly agree that we shouldn't shield ourselves from opinions that disagree with our own, and that the 'bubble' is dangerous ... ... > Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit? But how do we know how much merit it has? I don't believe anyone has the capability to answer that question on their own (unless they already possess the expert knowledge in the field), or the time to verify it. Therefore, to a great degree we must trust the authors, so it helps to know who is speaking. No author is without bias; it helps to know their biases. Some authors are more honest than others and some more accurate than others. If an author has tried to deceive me before, I won't trust them again. If I've seen an author be diligent about accuracy, I'll trust them more next time. ... ... and so I do want to filter dishonest and inaccurate arguments, for obvious reasons. And for a less obvious reason: I don't have time to read all the exceptionally well-informed, highly accurate, honest, brilliant arguments out there; I resent someone wasting my time with their bullsh*t.

eyelidlessness 10y ago

Understanding the ideological underpinnings of an organization can help to provide context for that organization's statements, especially when those underpinnings are not included in those statements. In order to fully understand politicized writing—its assumptions, its impacts, its expectations and its motivations—it can often be necessary to have that context. Writing that isn't even consciously propaganda can often be heavily influenced by jargon and premises that are not apparent to the reader, but being familiar with the ideological background can help clear up that cloud.

gcb0 10y ago

actually it have achieve that in the worst way possible: making it easier to be surround only by the little echo chamber you choose. see how most tailored "news" aggregators such as facebook or yahoo or reddit will mostly show you only what you want to read. its perfect for the fear mongering ways of the two party system.