You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.
Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions.
There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error.
Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway.
The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition.
So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake.
The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.
How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
All information is imperfect.
ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless.
Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.)
Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556
If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011.
I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time.
But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy.
At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth.
Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
> it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
The best way to do that will always be to point to the lie, instead of calling them a liar, because that strategy can't be copied by other liars.
No we didn't. We started with "It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis."
And then "Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to."
And other people cited sources right up top.
Nobody made a fallacy of saying it must be wrong because he said it.
You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.
Because it's useful to know if someone is wrong a lot, just like it's useful to know a clock is broken, and you don't need any fallacies for that.
For example, if someone misuses citations a lot, it's good to tell people that, even if you don't say anything about the particular subject.
I get it that you don't like this attack on the person rather than the post.
But it's not committing the fallacy of saying "it's him therefore it's wrong". The fallacy you describe about broken clocks is not happening. Saying either "it's him therefore it's weaker" or "it's him therefore it's useless" would not commit that fallacy. If a clock is sometimes broken then "weaker" is correct, and if a clock is always broken then "useless" is correct. And the impression I got was very much "it's him therefore it's weaker".
And it's not an irrelevant attack. Attacks on the way he constructs arguments are relevant to all arguments he makes.
You can't just claim it's a specific fallacy and then talk about how it's bad rhetoric in general as support of that claim.
> You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.
Don't be an asshole, and I never said I was here to save time. I'm here to say that a couple accusations of specific fallacies are wrong.
See also this very nice comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35520629
You can't figure out the time by arguing over broken clocks. And you're only interested in staying on message here, not about whether these things are even true or not.
The clock doesn't tell you if they're right or not. I agree here, see me agreeing! That's the part that would be a fallacy!
But knowing that the clock is broken means you know that any conclusions based on the clock contain zero information. They might be right, but only by accident. So you should completely reject the argument, without completely rejecting the result.
To make that even more explicit: An argument and the conclusion of that argument are different things. The bar for rejecting an argument is lower than the bar for rejecting its conclusion. And the bar for being extra skeptical is even lower.
The fallacy you're describing happens when you reject the conclusion. It does not happen when you reject the argument.