4 ms·

argumentum ad logicam. And around and around we go.

• chriswarbo 6y ago
  Nope. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy > Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. Nobody here is claiming that the parent's statement is false. We're saying it's true! However, we're also saying it's useless (i.e. "vacuously true" or "tautologically true"). The parent is saying that many Web sites contain JS; the slow ones are due to "bad JS" (and implicitly, that the non-slow ones have non-bad JS). How can we tell whether some JS is "bad"? By checking if it's slow. Let's say we do that, and find that the site is slow, and hence our JS is "bad". How can we improve it, to get non-bad JS? No idea; maybe getting a bunch of developers to make random refactorings, measuring the speed of each, using that to tell whether the JS is still "bad", and stopping once it's no longer slow and hence no longer "bad"? In which case, the whole notion of "bad JS" is irrelevant; it's conceptually indistinguishable from "slow page", and hence adds nothing to the discussion (i.e. if we followed the above steps, we would get exactly the same result if we ignore all the stuff about "bad JS" and just use the timing measurements directly). Note that the concepts of "slow page" and "page with JS" are not vacuous, since we can measure them (with a clock, and by parsing the page source, respectively) and hence make falsifiable predictions about correlations and causal relationships between them.