Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

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With apologies for Appeal to Authority: Paul Graham elucidates the low value of Ad Hominem in his post How To Disagree: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

It's not as though the author's biases or background are completely irrelevant; but discussing them is unhelpful without additional clarifications on the mistakes, ignorances, or dishonesties alleged.

Imagine a different context: maybe I have a strong opinion as a lay citizen on campaign finance issues. It's all well and good for someone to enter saying "I'm a political operative/lobbyist/etc, and you don't know what you're talking about"; but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't (which would be just as helpful and pertinent if I had turned out to be an expert anyway).

> but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't

I don't think it's a zero-information statement at all. If S. Weinberg tells me that my physical arguments are wrong but he doesn't have the time to say how/why, then it's certainly a non-zero information statement and I'll scrutinize my line of thoughts thoroughly after that. Dismissing this as a zero information statement would be pretentious from my part. The same goes for you against the expert in political finances.

It seems that there's an underlying assumption in your argument that we're all equal and equally capable of having opinions on anything unless someone comes to us, and spends time thoroughly showing us why we are wrong. Or that we are all correct until proven wrong. This is problematic because 1/ we're not all equal, and acknowledging that we dont know everything is important, 2/ it's unlikely that there's always an expert around willing to spend time educating us everytime we feel the need of commenting on things we dont know, and 3/ we may not comprehend why we are wrong by lack of proper education.

I’ve heard a lot of the terms from that post but never read it. it’s extremely awesome and thanks for sharing. Was particularly inspired by this line:

You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

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