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You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.

by tedivm 4y ago

rahimnathwani 4y ago
I didn't mean to imply I didn't appreciate people telling me more about this guy. I apologise if that's how my comment came across.
nostrademons 4y ago
It's an ad-hominem (in the original sense of the word: an ad-hominem fallacy is one where the truth or falsity of an argument is determined by the trustworthiness of its proponent rather than by the content of the argument itself). Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  It's not a fallacy to attack someone's historical reliability in making arguments.
  - prottog 4y ago
    I mean, it's still precisely a fallacy. Just because someone made a stupid or wrong argument 20 times in a row doesn't make it logically follow that the 21st is also wrong, without examining that argument itself. Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
    - noobermin 4y ago
      Just a meta note, this is why fallacies are limited. Just because something is a logical fallacy, meaning it does not lead to a disproof in a deductive reasoning sense, doesn't mean people often use arguments that could be considered fallacious to disregard arguments all the time as instead they use good heuristics. Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
    - AstralStorm 4y ago
      Science, properly done, is about convincingly explaining how your propositions might be true, usually deferring to a branch of mathematics. Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions. There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error. Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway. The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition. So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake. The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It very much is a fallacy to attack anything outside the argument. That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Logical fallacies undermine the argument of the person using them. How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
      - Retric 4y ago
        You can use imperfect information. It’s the difference between heuristics and logical arguments. Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        I don't think it's a fallacy to use imperfect information. All information is imperfect.
        Retric 4y ago
        Using probabilistic logic is perfectly reasonable as long as you track the stacking likelihood it’s wrong. However, making a probabilistic argument without tracking the internal probabilities is a Fallacy. ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless. Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Are you saying that "You should know A is true 90% of the time." is a fallacy unless I add an explicit disclaimer about probabilistic weakening? Even if I'm not making any conclusions based on it, just suggesting people will want to use that information themselves? If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    It is literally a fallacy [1] in that it's invalid logical reasoning. There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.) Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies [2] https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/
    - rahimnathwani 4y ago
      Someone has now pointed to some data in the study that isn't stratified by education level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556 If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011. I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
    - 4y ago
  - t-3 4y ago
    It's not t necessarily fallacious, but it certainly can be. A known liar stating that 2+2=4 doesn't mean that 2+2!=4.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    Yes, it is. It absolutely is a fallacy to use that as your reason instead of something about the argument itself being wrong. To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time. But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > can't possibly Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
      - Natsu 4y ago
        I exaggerated to make the point, but taking any degree of information from it is fallacious, because it contains no information about the time. And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        But we didn't start from a neutral point. We started with someone linking the article as a source of information. If someone tries to use a broken clock to tell the time, you can't use the clock to say what time it is, but you can say something about whether they're right or not. They are >99% likely to be wrong. At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy. At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth. Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    It may not be, but that's not what's being attacked here. Unless I'm missing the place where tptacek discusses the reliability of this person's arguments?
  - cubefox 4y ago
    There wasn't even an argument about Kirkegaard's historical reliability, so it's worse than a fallacy.

You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.

by tedivm 4y ago

You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.

rahimnathwani 4y ago

I didn't mean to imply I didn't appreciate people telling me more about this guy. I apologise if that's how my comment came across.

nostrademons 4y ago

It's an ad-hominem (in the original sense of the word: an ad-hominem fallacy is one where the truth or falsity of an argument is determined by the trustworthiness of its proponent rather than by the content of the argument itself). Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.

Dylan16807 4y ago
It's not a fallacy to attack someone's historical reliability in making arguments.
- prottog 4y ago
  I mean, it's still precisely a fallacy. Just because someone made a stupid or wrong argument 20 times in a row doesn't make it logically follow that the 21st is also wrong, without examining that argument itself. Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Just a meta note, this is why fallacies are limited. Just because something is a logical fallacy, meaning it does not lead to a disproof in a deductive reasoning sense, doesn't mean people often use arguments that could be considered fallacious to disregard arguments all the time as instead they use good heuristics. Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Science, properly done, is about convincingly explaining how your propositions might be true, usually deferring to a branch of mathematics. Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions. There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error. Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway. The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition. So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake. The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
- Retric 4y ago
  It very much is a fallacy to attack anything outside the argument. That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Logical fallacies undermine the argument of the person using them. How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
    - Retric 4y ago
      You can use imperfect information. It’s the difference between heuristics and logical arguments. Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I don't think it's a fallacy to use imperfect information. All information is imperfect.
        Retric 4y ago
        Using probabilistic logic is perfectly reasonable as long as you track the stacking likelihood it’s wrong. However, making a probabilistic argument without tracking the internal probabilities is a Fallacy. ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless. Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Are you saying that "You should know A is true 90% of the time." is a fallacy unless I add an explicit disclaimer about probabilistic weakening? Even if I'm not making any conclusions based on it, just suggesting people will want to use that information themselves? If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  It is literally a fallacy [1] in that it's invalid logical reasoning. There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.) Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies [2] https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    Someone has now pointed to some data in the study that isn't stratified by education level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556 If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011. I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
  - 4y ago
- t-3 4y ago
  It's not t necessarily fallacious, but it certainly can be. A known liar stating that 2+2=4 doesn't mean that 2+2!=4.
- Natsu 4y ago
  Yes, it is. It absolutely is a fallacy to use that as your reason instead of something about the argument itself being wrong. To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time. But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > can't possibly Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
    - Natsu 4y ago
      I exaggerated to make the point, but taking any degree of information from it is fallacious, because it contains no information about the time. And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        But we didn't start from a neutral point. We started with someone linking the article as a source of information. If someone tries to use a broken clock to tell the time, you can't use the clock to say what time it is, but you can say something about whether they're right or not. They are >99% likely to be wrong. At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy. At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth. Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
- dnissley 4y ago
  It may not be, but that's not what's being attacked here. Unless I'm missing the place where tptacek discusses the reliability of this person's arguments?
- cubefox 4y ago
  There wasn't even an argument about Kirkegaard's historical reliability, so it's worse than a fallacy.