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Comment by Thorrez | Hacker News Reader

I don't really think is an ad hominem fallacy. An ad homihem fallacy is when you attack the person making an argument rather than the argument. But no one here is attacking the people making the argument.

The argument is "Trust DDG". That argument is being attacked as "DDG's founder has done bad stuff in the past, it's likely DDG will do bad stuff, so I won't trust it". That seems to be attacking the argument to me, thus not an ad hominem.

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I'm fairly sure that "[you are] a bit silly" is the ad hominem attack, not that calling out the founder is an ad hominem attack.

That’s not an ad hominem attack. The comment didn’t say that the person’s argument is wrong because that person is silly. Clearly the comment is saying that the argument itself is silly.

The intent of the comment was probably not ad hominem, as if it were rephrased like "trusting ddg is silly" because then silly is modifying the act of trusting. But as-written, silly is modifying anyone (a person) without distinguishing whether silliness is the cause or the effect; if silliness is the cause of the trust then it's an ad hominem attack. It would be more clear-cut if instead of "silly" they said "low intelligence."

I meant my comment to read like this:

[My opinion on trusting DDG] - [Reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the reason]

In this case, because I don't use the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, I don't think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.

But if someone read it like this:

[One reason for my opinion on trusting DDG] - [Another reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the second reason]

Then I am using the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, so I think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.

My comment wasn't written very well, and I'll try to write better comments in the future. Not that adding an ad hominem to a valid argument makes it invalid, I guess?. But it's still good to avoid fallacies, and to write one's comments so they're likely to be understood the way one meant them.

Ok, but that's pretty irrelevant to the core of dabbernaught420's argument. Focusing on that is kind of pointless.

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