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"No, I was judging him by his accomplishments" What made you think your LSAT instructor's accomplishments were limited to his job titles? What do you know abo
by gnosis 14y ago
"No, I was judging him by his accomplishments"
What made you think your LSAT instructor's accomplishments were limited to his job titles?
What do you know about this man apart from those two facts?
Kafka and Van Gogh were completely unknown and unappreciated during their lifetimes. Kafka even burned 90% of his work before he died.
There are countless other examples of people who were only discovered and appreciated after they died -- often long after they died.
Conversely, many (if not most) of those who achieved great fame and fortune during their lifetimes are largely forgotten now, or considered of minor importance.
"You were talking about [jobs as marks of genius], but nobody else was."
On the contrary, that seems to be exactly what you were doing. Your lack of knowledge or appreciation of someone's accomplishments and apparent eagerness to judge this person by the job they held is what I was responding to.
- jessedhillon 14y agoIf you want to debate the merits of inferring accomplishment from a person's job, that's fine. To call that my main argument, and countering it with your sample size of three, is trolling.
- gnosis 14y agoConsidering your sample size of one, calling me a troll for using a sample size of three is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Also, I never claimed that was your main argument. I just said that that's the part of your post I was replying to.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- slurgfest 14y agoHere is the point: if all you know about someone is that they run a cash register, that doesn't tell you that they are unable to do anything else. This argument does not rely on sample sizes.
- jessedhillon 14y agoNo, here's the point: if you run a cash register, don't scoff at someone who aims higher than what you've achieved, and don't throw your genius status in their face when you do it. If you want to argue that a person's job is not indicative of ther level of achievement in life, then you absolutely do have to argue inductively. But I personally do not care about that argument. It is a stupid premise, and gnosis is picking an argument when one is not being forwarded. And he is doing it in a completely fallacious manner (overgeneralization, tu quoque), against what I clearly stated was an anecdote and life lesson. Who does that? A person's own experiences, related as such, are anecdotes, not arguments.