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Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the pos

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

barfbagginus 2y ago
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument. In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy. In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits. Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies. Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument. The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds. However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!
- polyphaser 2y ago
  this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.
  - ddfs123 2y ago
    it sounds like they used gpt to wrote that
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      I didn't, that was my own analysis. I just sound like I am GPT, because I am a pedantic autist that simply MUST split hairs about EVERYTHING I honestly take it as a compliment
      - rrrix1 2y ago
        Please continue being yourself. Your commentary is delightfully refreshing!
    - niek_pas 2y ago
      If they had, there would be more talk about "exciting new pathways" and the like.
- trogdor 2y ago
  > In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits. Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    I argue that insults are only fallacious reasoning if you don't have good reasons to back up the insults. If someone screws you over, you lay out the reasoning for why you're angry at them and then you insult them. The insults are not the argument. They are the conclusion of the argument. Once again if you see an insult, conclude someone is being histrionic, and refuse to see their actual sound arguments, then you are making the fallacy fallacy, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You are also making an ad hominem against the author - arguing against the personal credibility rather than the credibility of the actual argument. That specific kind of ad hominem is called tone policing.
etempleton 2y ago
I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?
- mbesto 2y ago
  I've used DDG and wanted to like it. I used another paid one and it wasn't great (forgot name). I've been on Kagi for the last 6 months and love it.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Duck Duck Go is for example terrible for me when it comes to looking up things in my native language. Bing is.. fine I think nowadays
- ad404b8a372f2b9 2y ago
  Yandex is great although it's degrading daily from AI spam (linked-in being the worst culprit).
- DanielHB 2y ago
  Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.
- alvah 2y ago
  I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.
juped 2y ago
Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".
- sailfast 2y ago
  Good point. Replacing with pejorative would likely have been better wording potentially to get my point across but simply having held a role in the past as a person does not automatically associate you with all the sins of anyone ever in that role, so I see it as a personal attack unrelated to the point of the article.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  Yeah, the pejoratives were not the argument. They were clearly put there to make the reading /freaking hilarious/ for anyone on board with "Google Bad". But I wonder if there was a deeper strategy: were the attacks put there so that Google gatekeepers would ignore the article's insights? It could have a similar effect to Cory Doctor's concept of enshittification. I don't know if it's intentional, but the vulgarity of the term seems to prevent committed enshittifiers from reflecting critically about enshittification and how to stop in time to avoid a collapse. After feeling the insult, enshittware supporters seem to conclude enshittification is a non-existent category. It would be fun to learn these are intentional choices, designed to sabotage the criticized party on an epistemological level!

barfbagginus 2y ago

Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument. In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy. In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits. Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies. Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument. The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds. However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!

polyphaser 2y ago
this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.
- ddfs123 2y ago
  it sounds like they used gpt to wrote that
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    I didn't, that was my own analysis. I just sound like I am GPT, because I am a pedantic autist that simply MUST split hairs about EVERYTHING I honestly take it as a compliment
    - rrrix1 2y ago
      Please continue being yourself. Your commentary is delightfully refreshing!
  - niek_pas 2y ago
    If they had, there would be more talk about "exciting new pathways" and the like.
trogdor 2y ago
> In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits. Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  I argue that insults are only fallacious reasoning if you don't have good reasons to back up the insults. If someone screws you over, you lay out the reasoning for why you're angry at them and then you insult them. The insults are not the argument. They are the conclusion of the argument. Once again if you see an insult, conclude someone is being histrionic, and refuse to see their actual sound arguments, then you are making the fallacy fallacy, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You are also making an ad hominem against the author - arguing against the personal credibility rather than the credibility of the actual argument. That specific kind of ad hominem is called tone policing.

etempleton 2y ago

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

mbesto 2y ago
I've used DDG and wanted to like it. I used another paid one and it wasn't great (forgot name). I've been on Kagi for the last 6 months and love it.
StefanBatory 2y ago
Duck Duck Go is for example terrible for me when it comes to looking up things in my native language. Bing is.. fine I think nowadays
ad404b8a372f2b9 2y ago
Yandex is great although it's degrading daily from AI spam (linked-in being the worst culprit).
DanielHB 2y ago
Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.
alvah 2y ago
I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.

juped 2y ago

Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".

sailfast 2y ago
Good point. Replacing with pejorative would likely have been better wording potentially to get my point across but simply having held a role in the past as a person does not automatically associate you with all the sins of anyone ever in that role, so I see it as a personal attack unrelated to the point of the article.
barfbagginus 2y ago
Yeah, the pejoratives were not the argument. They were clearly put there to make the reading /freaking hilarious/ for anyone on board with "Google Bad". But I wonder if there was a deeper strategy: were the attacks put there so that Google gatekeepers would ignore the article's insights? It could have a similar effect to Cory Doctor's concept of enshittification. I don't know if it's intentional, but the vulgarity of the term seems to prevent committed enshittifiers from reflecting critically about enshittification and how to stop in time to avoid a collapse. After feeling the insult, enshittware supporters seem to conclude enshittification is a non-existent category. It would be fun to learn these are intentional choices, designed to sabotage the criticized party on an epistemological level!