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Comment by jonstewart | Hacker News Reader

HNers need get a grip on what’s ad hominem and what isn’t. I didn’t say their mothers were hamsters. There are oodles of think tanks and institutes, many have a particular policy agenda, and it’s useful to consider that before deciding whether to spend precious attention on an article from one.

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Then show the flaw in the argument. For all we know, your reasoning might be as motivated as theirs.

Ad hominems, even when not fallacious, don't tend to contribute to the discourse. If you don't have a good rebuttal to the argument, saying that the person who wrote it did so because they have an agenda is inane. Of course they had an agenda: they wrote an essay!

I mean, I’m not an expert on this topic, I’m in my 40s and decades away from my own university experience, and I don’t particularly feel like arguing with strangers on HN. One thing I did learn in college was Wittgenstein’s TLP maxim that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should not speak.

I’ve certainly had friends with soul-crushing experiences in academia and I’m well aware there are cost disease concerns about academia. At the same time, state universities allocations from state government have been greatly reduced over the past few decades. I think attacking university administration is an easy target, but is it, perhaps, a target in support of a larger goal of defunding public education?

I don’t think this article’s really worth much intellectual engagement, and I think it’s generally helpful for readers to understand authors’ policy agenda — I’m old enough that this was called “critical thinking” when I was in school.

So you aren't an expert on the topic, you note the bias of the think tank, and therefore you choose not to read it, regardless of the expertise of the author. Despite not reading it, and not wanting to argue with internet strangers, you feel the need to warn other people of its supposed flaws. Got it.

It sounds like you are trying to make a bad-faith argument here and this absolutely is an ad hominem fallacy (regardless of how well you cloak it in Wittgenstein).

We all should be aware of the biases of our sources.

Some of these organisations have a long history of producing misinformation, pay-to-play commentary (oil companies, tobacco companies) and outright lies in defence of their ideology. There is no way to read anything from thie cluster of bullshit factories like heritage.org (for example) without questioning their motives, because they are obviously compromised and will go to extremes to push an agenda.

We all know information sources like this and it saves a lot of time to simply dismiss everything they have to say about anything, because if you can't trust them to be truthful on one subject, why would they be truthful about anything?

The right love to call this kind of wholesale dismissal "cancel culture" but really, it's just the natural filtering of bullshit that everybody should do.

I don’t see how this is a solid defense against GP comment. You’re criticism of a source your unfamiliar with follows very tribal / ideological lines, which you admit to, but don’t seem to think that this is itself way more biased than the bias you’re warning of in the source.

At the very least, you’re comfortable with knee jerk judgements based on personal ideology, and I don’t think that’s good for any discussion.

On the contrary. It serves me very well to ignore a swathe of organisations if they get caught fabricating information. If your friends caught you lying in a social interaction, they would ostracise you (and rightly so). It's no different for the industry of bullshit.

But this organization hasn't been caught fabricating information, unless I'm misreading the thread. You're saying that organizations with similar political ideologies (that you disagree with) have fabricated information, so I can dismiss this source due to their ideological association with distrusted organizations.

How is that a reasonable way of thinking? Unless you're one of those people that assume "All Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/Communists are lying thieves, except members of $MYPARTY."

I mostly stick to a "3 strikes you're out" philosophy. I can't deny a bias against avowedly right wing bullshit factories, but I'm not watching the noisefest of MSNBC or CNN either. Being reasonable is not hard.

I will say I block everything Murdoch. At this stage, the chaotic evil of Murdoch news sources is not just noise any more, it's deliberately disruptive.

I for one appreciated this warning. The first thing I thought when I saw the header was "I wonder if this is a right wing think tank". So I am happy to have that question answered.

I feel that today's discussion is a perfect example of why the term "sealioning" was coined.

Not all comments need to be about contributing to the discourse. Jonstewart is not trying to rebut an argument or to make a different argument. All they are doing is giving some background on the organization that might be relevant to their motivations for writing the article. If you have a position on academic admin reform that you would like to discuss, this is not the comment thread for you. Instead, this is the comment thread for me, who read the title and was vaguely interested in the implied subject matter, but decided not to read because I expect the source to be pushing an agenda that I wouldn't agree with. It is just not that important to me to be informed about this, so I am not going to choose a source that I expect to be biased as my only source of information.

Now, I could picture a different situation, one where, say, I have thought a lot about academic administration, what purpose it serves, how it could be better. Where I have studied the available data on the topic and formed opinions. Then, I would read the argument despite the expectation of bias, because I want to use all the information I can find, and engage with all the arguments that other people are making, even the ones that are pushing an agenda I disagree with. Maybe I would even read it and find I agree with the argument, and update my beliefs. Maybe I would come to the comments to post how my experience and knowledge fits the argument, or conflicts with it. But that is not me, so I'm trusting the expectation of bias and moving on.

Conservatives don't care about saving money, or efficiency, or even freedom.

They care about power.

So here's the flaw: They label things "bloat" without explaining WHY it is bloat. They just wave their hands and say "BLOAT! BE OUTRAGED!"

What is a proper level of administration?

Where are other systems with more or less and how do they perform compared to UNC?

They claim "At NC State, in 2020-21, no less than $131 million more was spent on administrative (i.e., non-teaching) positions than on teaching ones."

Where? How? Why? Who?

They can show, but don't. That's suspicious. Especially with the adjectives they use elsewhere in the article.

For all we know the entire budget of the library ($43 million) counts as "administrative".

There is a grand total of ONE (1) hyperlink in that article: TO A WEBSITE WHERE THEY'RE SELLING A BOOK.

It's bullshit.

Anyone who falls for it is fucking stupid.

Here is access to more actual data in one hyperlink than they presented in their screed:

https://budget.ncsu.edu/budgetcentral/

This is 0% about money or bloat or whatever as they frame it, and 100% about being angry that they're not allowed to ridicule transsexuals in public anymore without being "cAnCeLlEd".

By his own logic, he probably can't, he said he used the heuristic to decide whether the article was worth spending attention on, which would result in a no, and thus the conclusion that he hadn't read it. Not having done so, he can't address the argument.

So it is ad hominem, but maybe by accident if you want to be very generous.

I don't think you get to decide what ad hominem means.

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