"this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself."
tripletao chose to attack the character of a journalist instead of engaging with the arguments.
To be clear, do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog? If so, why didn't he e.g. request deletion from the Internet Archive, to at least make the reporter's job noticeably harder? In any case, Alexander surely understands how the Streisand effect works, and that a big public gesture that makes information slightly less available (but still available with modest effort) tends to disseminate that information, not conceal it. So do you really think that was his goal?
And do you think the journalist really believed what he wrote? I don't, and I think he was disingenuously reaching for stuff to smear Alexander with. I think that's ugly.
Finally, I didn't intend to express anger in my last paragraph. I intend to express caution, that anyone dealing with a journalist should consider the possibility that the journalist is out to cause them serious personal harm. This is true regardless of whether that's deliberate and targeted based on their opinions (which I suspect, based on the inconsistent application of the NYT's policy on anonymity, but which I agree no one can prove), or just out of habit (which is fairer I suppose, but doesn't make the harm any less).
> I doubt the character of the journalist because of the disingenuous nature of his arguments, not the other way around.
I believe you experienced it that way. But I don't believe that was communicated well. IMO you intended to make a case against the article but ended up actually make a case against the journalist without addressing any of the article's substantive points. That was the context of my original comment. That is, to me, the comment reads as if the insults are themselves the case you're making against the article. Maybe other people didn't read it that way.
For example, the reporter obviously has access to several of SSC posts. If the reporter believed that deleting the blog caused it to be forever lost to history, then he couldn't possibly have written this piece. So obviously he's aware that at least some of the controversial content of SSC is still accessible. In fact, he believes that enough of the content is accessible to write an entire long-form New Yorker article about the controversial content. So surely he must believe that enough of the content is available to write an NYT article about the content.
So I'm not sure what the existence of the Internet Archive is supposed to say about his character. It doesn't seem to impact his argument in any way, because it's possible to simultaneously know about the Internet Archive and also believe Alexander deleted his blog to dodge/mitigate negative press.
> do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog?
I honestly have no idea. I don't follow the blog. I think it's possible he wanted less scrutiny if his name was going to be released. I believed Alexander's reasoning about the deletion when I read them when this first made the rounds on HN.
> And do you think the journalist really believed what he wrote?
Yes, absolutely. I also believe Alexander believed what he wrote in all his blog posts. I don't think there's a reason to assume bad faith on either party. Journalists have flaws like everybody else, but I think they generally believe in what they do.
> reaching for stuff to smear Alexander with
Again, I don't know anything really about Alexander or SSC, but personally I find this a bit hard to believe. I also don't think it can be inferred from the article. And more to the point for the (IMO extremely boring) ad-hominem debate is: even if he was deliberately looking for things to smear him with, it's still an ad hominem to make the case against the journalist for having an axe to grind. The journalist can both have an axe to grind and also be genuinely saying truthful things.
> I didn't intend to express anger
Fair enough, my apologies.
> that anyone dealing with a journalist should consider the possibility that the journalist is out to cause them serious personal harm
My natural tendency is to bristle at this. I get that journalists do sometimes cause harm. I also get that you want to be cautious about anything you say that might end up circulated in a major paper.
What troubles me is that this fits in with an overall anti-journalist narrative that I've seen a lot on HN recently and in tech in general.
For that reason, my preference is to focus on the content of this particular article and focus less on the angle that this piece might be part of a larger attempt of journalistic nefariousness.
> For example, the reporter obviously has access to several of SSC posts. If the reporter believed that deleting the blog caused it to be forever lost to history, then he couldn't possibly have written this piece. So obviously he's aware that at least some of the controversial content of SSC is still accessible. In fact, he believes that enough of the content is accessible to write an entire long-form New Yorker article about the controversial content. So surely he must believe that enough of the content is available to write an NYT article about the content.
So we agree that the content remains readily available, to journalists and others. So I think that means if Alexander "feared that a Times reporter wouldn’t have to poke around for very long to turn up a creditable reason for negative coverage", then we agree that deleting the blog wouldn't (and didn't) help.
> It doesn't seem to impact his argument in any way, because it's possible to simultaneously know about the Internet Archive and also believe Alexander deleted his blog to dodge/mitigate negative press.
So this is where I don't understand. Alexander surely knew about the Internet Archive (and his e-book, and whatever other countless copies of his popular content existed). So why do you think it's possible that he'd delete his blog in order to dodge/mitigate bad press due to content that a journalist might uncover there, when he knows that action would be ineffective (and indeed probably counterproductive, due to the Streisand effect)? That seems so implausible to me that I'm unable to believe the argument was presented in good faith.
In any case, I agree that journalists do important work, and I have great respect especially for those who reveal information of public importance, against the wishes of powerful governments, companies or other entities that seek to conceal it, sometimes at the cost of the journalists' lives. This (and most "tech" and "culture" journalism) seems pretty far from that, though.
This is a reasonable question. I don't honestly know enough about the topic to make even a hypothetical argument that such a thing is likely. But it does seem possible any time a high profile blogger shuts down in the face of a news story, that this is one of the reasons for the shut down.
For example, Alexander gives one reason it's possible on his blog: "If there’s no blog, there’s no story." The NYT doesn't really have an incentive to run a story about an ex-blog. So by shutting down, he puts pressure to shut the story down altogether.
Regarding the Streisand effect, I'm not sure. But I think, based on his blog post, that he thinks the story is less likely to run now.
Plus, accessing the blog is now at least an order of magnitude harder. Can you access some of the pages? Sure. Will NYT readers? No, probably not. Search doesn't work, it's painfully slow, only some URLs are snapshotted. It may even be that most readers probably don't even know about the Archive.
So yeah at least to me it seems possible. For example, he's come out as saying he likes eugenics. It's reasonable to fear that if a NYT story ran giving his surname and saying he supported eugenics, then he may have a hard time practicing as a psychiatrist.
As to the Streisand effect, we're talking about this now at least, and you're aware that he "likes" eugenics[1]--indeed, if anyone's still reading this thread then perhaps they learned that Alexander likes eugenics specifically because of this article, which appeared specifically because he deleted the blog. I can't imagine the NYT reporter doesn't know too. So as a tactic to conceal his writing, I think deleting the blog has empirically failed.
Though I agree that he probably did fear that an NYT story that said "[Scott Alexander's full name] likes eugenics" would harm his ability to practice as a psychiatrist, and reasonably so. Eugenics obviously has an abhorrent history in its purported application, and he treats the subject casually enough to creep me out too. I didn't read his blog extensively, but the creepier stuff always felt to me more like autistic-style disregard for social context than a desire to revive those horrors. I think the remedy to that should be for someone to point that out to him (as they have, of course), rather than for a journalist to quote his worst phrasing out of context and thus end his career.
1. Literally with the word "like", too, https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarc...
Bear in mind that tripletao's thesis is clearly that the NY article is a bad faith essay. That's his conclusion, not his premise.
TL;DR: google.com -> define ad hominem -> "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining" -> go back to the quote we're arguing about, it reads: "so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous" -> looks like those are words directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining
y'all are mistaking doing a technical word by word breakdown of an argument and picking which words are which logical fallacies with, well, the definition of ad hominem
Ad hominem means you're replacing a reasoning based argument with character attacks. Throwing in character attacks on top of a reasoning based argument -- especially when the insults are just used as a conclusion -- is not what an ad hominem is.
This is important, because the fact that this is what an ad hominem is, is why it's considered a logical fallacy. "Your argument is dumb because of X & Y, and also I think you suck" is not a logical fallacy. There is no fallacious thinking there.
"I think you suck, therefore I don't even have to bother refuting X & Y, they're automatically wrong because of how much you suck" clearly is a logical fallacy: just because someone sucks, doesn't mean any possible reasoning of theirs is automatically invalid.
Except that they're using a uselessly vague definition of ad hominem that amounts to "any insult", which is extra stupid because we already have a word for that: insult. So why even use the Latin, then, other than to make yourself sound fancy?
You may also note that having a "word for that already" is also called a "synonym", and we don't accuse people of bait and switch, misrepresentation, being uselessly vague, and making themselves sound fancy because they say "synonym"
I didn't do that. I accused someone of using a cheap -- though fairly common -- type of rhetorical trick. It's a form of motte and bailey, which is itself a logical fallacy.
Is accusing someone of using a logical fallacy against the rules of HN as well? Would be ironic in the current context.
I have a CS and law degree and IMHO the divide here is the CS people tend to believe "ad hominem" has a technical definition beyond, well, the definition
You seem to have missed the operative word there: rather.
Saying that someone's argument is bad so they must be real dumb means you're saying "A (the reasoning attack) implies B (character attack)", not "B (character attack) means I don't have to even bother with A". The latter is an ad hominem, the former is not.
An ad hominem here would be, "jesus I already know this author is so dumb/bad that I don't even have to bother addressing any of their arguments". "This author's reasoning is awful, so clearly they're dumb/bad" is simply not the same thing.
If you, in the midst of a counter-argument, point out that someone was lying in their original argument, calling them a liar is not an ad hominem. It's a conclusion.