I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal.
Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
These sadly arent the exclusive purvey of the journal. plenty of other dog-trainers and nightly consumer-news shows often feature what amounts to a thinly-veiled quarantine tantrum masquerading as insightful critique.
>it's back to the drawing board for the media firms and their owners.
Enter social media. All of your "friends" believe in precepts x, y and z. It is popular. Don't be skeptical. That's fringe. Do you need a fact check headline?
It isn't difficult to imagine how the WMD story would be sold today.
Another thing about "fear sells"... some fears are more comfortable than others. That's why it has taken so much work to get a tiny minority of Americans worked up about global warming, but they've easily stoked a series of stupid wars. It's comfortable to fear brown people, but it is less comfortable to fear things that seem fundamental to our own lives like the current form of our economy.
At this point the divisions have been potentially driven to a point where each individual is atomized. Of course that it is the extreme case, but you needn't look far if you are looking to personify the target of the fear campaign.
Otherwise respectable news outlets really need to get rid of their dead weight opinion sections, which only serve to damage the credibility of the news divisions. These pundits are a dime a dozen and their unfounded speculation (or at times outright misinformation) is no better than the typical junk floating around medium and substack.
When I am a non-expert in a complicated subject, I want the advice of experts. When I go to my general practitioner, I want to know they have a certificate that says they went to medical school. When I need open-heart surgery, I want to know the doctor is a cardiothoracic surgeon.
When I read a doctor's take on coronavirus in the WSJ, it would be a plus if they were an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology. It's kind of sad that the nation's 2nd highest circulation paper can't find someone with more expertise in this area.
Amplifying non-expert advice is dangerous, just like having an orthodontist try to do heart surgery is dangerous. C.f. Scott Atlas, of course.
If the purpose of such a note is to attack the validity of the author's position, this is what ad hominem means.
The appearance of this article on HN is effectively an argument from authority -- the newspaper's, not the author's. Without that, we wouldn't even be talking about it. Undercutting their arguments is time consuming, but pointing out that they don't have the background to be making their claims -- and that they're appearing on an editorial page famous for putting politics over facts -- is sufficient for many people to say, "Let's stop considering this and go talk about something else."
Those who want to continue the argument may, of course. But meeting an argument from authority with the exact opposite argument (truthful, but ad hominem) is a convenient shortcut for those who don't want to get sucked into that.
Because these lockdowns affect all of those things. Shouldn't "experts" in those fields have a voice in all this too?
Why is the only expert that is allowed to have an opinion worthy of being listened to the esteemed epidemiologist "expert"? Public health is more than the eradication of a specific form of disease, you know. Perhaps getting input from other experts might promote a more balanced take on how to deal with this pandemic.
And hell... plenty of the "expert" doomsday figures aren't epidemiologists at all and people have no problem reposting their announcements. For example if Andy Slavitt of Eric Feigl-Ding wrote an opinion piece on how we should have a ultra-hard lockdown for 6 months, nobody would call into question their expertise at all despite neither of them knowing anything about epidemiology or infectious disease.
By the way, I find it curios that absolutely none of the "experts" we are told to exclusively listen to have lost a single paycheck the entire 11 months this has been going on. Funny, that. Wonder what they would recommend if they stopped getting paid and had to spend two months on hold with unemployment trying to get a human to talk to.
"He trains parakeets, so I don't find him a credible source of dog behavior" is not.
No one would question a parakeet trainer now if he claimed dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning, because it is common knowledge that dogs respond to this type of conditioning.
However, if Pavlov had been a parakeet trainer and simply asserted dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning rather than discovering and researching it, it would not have been an ad hominem argument to state he doesn't know what he's talking about... because he didn't until he studied and researched it.
Assertion: "That apple will fall on your head"
Appeal to authority: "You're not a physicist! Show me your PHD."
"Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious." [Emphasis added]
In particular, pointing out that someone is speaking outside of their area of expertise is a logically valid ad hominem argument.
Even experts in adjacent or overlapping fields are suspect. I'm a flight instructor. I teach in airplanes. Would you believe what I have to say about helicopters? You shouldn't. I don't know jack about them.
If you picked up a member of an Amazonian tribe who had never seen a car before, are you going to worry about the tire if he claims the tire pressure is low? Well, sure, it’s easy enough to check. But what if it was $500 to check? No. I don’t think you would.
Here's what I wouldn't do: prejudicially dismiss the tribesman's opinion, citing his lack of authority on the topic.
Even if we accept the premises of an appeal to authority, it would follow that one would have to also be an authority on the topic before he could determine the authoritativeness of another speaker. How can you evaluate the authority of a speaker, if you yourself are not an 'authority' on the topic?
Even if you are an authority, does this status render you infallible?
No, I'm afraid the entire premise is ridiculous.
Even if you wouldn't in this particular case, you can't possibly function in the world if you eschew questions of trust completely. You'd basically have to prove everything yourself.
> Even if we accept the premises of an appeal to authority...
An appeal to authority is claiming something is true because an authority said it. The inverse of that would be that something is untrue because no authority said it. No one is claiming that to be the case and even if they were, that wouldn't make it an appeal to authority. In any case, this is a question of credibility (i.e., trust).
> ...it would follow that one would have to also be an authority on the topic before he could determine the authoritativeness of another speaker.
This doesn't follow at all. I am not an expert on tires, but I can understand that someone who has never even seen a tire is also not an expert on tires.
> Even if you are an authority, does this status render you infallible?
No. Of course not. But it does make you a more credible source of information in your field of expertise.
The former is absolute, the latter allows for other factors of consideration.
In actual human discussion, pointing out that someone is making claims about something they don't know anything about is the very basis of common sense. Trying to make this out to be a logical fallacy only shows how useless that label is.
How can you prove that they don't know what they are talking about without disputing the points they have made?
You must attack the argument, not the person.
Pointing out that a guy who is not an expert in a field is making claims that go against the actual experts in that field is a perfectly reasonable argument, and ignoring it is intentionally blinding yourself.