Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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An ad hominem attack is when you criticize the person making the argument instead of criticizing the argument.

The comment above is criticizing the argument: the argument is "My ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," and a valid counterargument is "No, your ideas are being fairly dismissed by the scientific community."

Yes, an obvious implication of that counterargument is "The person making the argument is the sort of person who publishes ideas that are regularly dismissed by the scientific community," but the strength of the counterargument does not rest on discrediting the speaker as a person - it rests on directly refuting the claim being made.

Or, in other words, if I were making the argument "Prof. Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," the exact same counterargument could be made against my argument. The fundamental reason an ad hominem is fallacious is that an argument's validity doesn't depend on who's making it. In this case, the argument is equally prone to refutation regardless of who's making it.

> I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas.

This person has bad ideas (going further, this person is synonymous with bad ideas and therefore only has bad ideas).

> I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count

Some of his ideas have been proven to be bad although he has an expert understanding of the subject.

> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo ... against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.

This person is making a spurious analogy because Galileo's idea was a good idea and his ideas are bad ideas (some of which have been proven to be bad ideas).

It is ad-hominem in nature because GP is disposing of the content of the article by claiming the above analogy is spurious by pre-supposing that Loeb only has bad ideas.

There is nothing to be read here about the reaction of the scientific community to unconventional ideas which is the content of the article, especially if you pre-suppose that Avi Leob only has bad ideas and therefore was rightfully dismissed by the scientific community (which is what the GP is doing).

If the argument was in fact about whether or not Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed (or in the weaker case, rightfully receiving pushback), that would directly be talking about the content of the article and generate a good discussion. (In fact I disagree with what Loeb is saying in the article and have posted a comment as such below)

The content of the article is specifically using the alleged unfair dismissal of Loeb's ideas to argue the broader point that the scientific community unfairly dismisses unconventional ideas in general. I agree with you that the counterargument above is not validly refuting the article as a whole, but it is definitely making a non-fallacious refutation of that specific sub-argument.

Put another way: the sense of the counterargument is not that this opinion piece itself is a fringe/crackpot idea, which is what you'd expect if the counterargument was simply "This is from a crackpot." In fact, it's not dismissing the content of the article at all. The counterargument is admitting the logical coherence of this opinion piece - that if, among other things, Prof. Loeb's works are unfairly dismissed, then it demonstrates a closed-mindedness in the scientific community - and attacking the premise by saying that the works in question were in fact fairly dismissed.

We are in agreement that the article is broader than that specific point. I disagree that GP was making the argument you are making in your second paragraph (or if he was, it was needlessly circuitous and somewhat mean).

To demonstrate that, supposing that the author of the article was Einstein and he had written the exact same content but instead substituting relativity for Oumamama and reaction to such by Abraham etc. the GP's comment would have no substance, but the content and argument of the article at hand would be little changed.

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