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Comment by analog | Hacker News Reader

It's not ad hominem because it's not using the dislike of the author to disagree with the argument.

Ad hominem isn't that complex. You attack the arguer not the argument.

"Denninger ran an ISP in Chicago in the mid-90s and is an infamous curmudgeon. He sold the ISP in the late '90s and, as I understand it, retired to Florida to curmudge professionally." Author attack

"I have no idea why his thoughts on Bitcoin would be worth spreading on HN. He has no particular authority regarding economics" Author attack.

"I really dislike Bitcoin, but can think of much better devil's advocates than Denninger." Author attack

Notice the pattern? not a single rebuttal of the content provided in this article All comments directed at the author. That's an Ad hominem attack.

The point of my comment was the author.

This is another example of the ad hominem fallacy fallacy, wherein any assessment of a person making an argument is judged out-of-bounds because of the existence of the ad hominem fallacy. Here is an example of an actual ad hominem fallacy:

Arguer: "Bitcoin is doomed to fail because it lacks a central banking authority."

Opponent: "That's bullcrap because you're not a trained economist."

Here is an example of the ad hominem fallacy fallacy:

Arguer: "I looked up Karl Denninger and it says he's the founder of the Tea Party."

Opponent: "Also he's a professional curmudgeon who sold an ISP once and has no economics training."

Arguer: Ad hominem!

I am not too invested in this particular thread, but the ad hominem fallacy fallacy drives me up a wall a little bit.

It's not out of bounds tptacek. It just does nothing to advance the discussion around the points made. That's why Ad hominem arguments are not a valuable contribution. If the goal of the discussion is to support or rebut the merits of the argument being put forth. I'm really interested in whether or not these are valuable points. Whether the author is gay, outgoing and wears flamingo shirts or is a grumpy old man in a shack in the mountains isn't material.

Thank you. Ad hominem has nothing to do with talking about the credibility of the author. Rather, the fallacy occurs when you rely on that information to challenge the position.

What is this if not challenging the arguments the author is making? tptacek claims this article shouldn't be on HN because the author is somehow unqualified to share his opinion and therefore it shouldn't be of interest to anyone.

'Well, I don't agree or disagree with what you're saying, I just think YOU shouldn't be able to say it' doesn't seem to be different from an ad hominem attack in practice in this case. It's refusing to engage with the actual content on quality or validity grounds and instead engaging with some unrelated point.

The original post is not arguing 'you should agree with what I'm saying because I'M saying it' and it's also not saying 'these are facts because I say they are'.

I did not "claim this article shouldn't be on HN".

It's a subtle difference, but one probably based on opinion. tptacek doesn't make any claims on the arguments themselves, but rather the placement on HN. So it's not ad hominem, but it is censorship. His claim is more along the lines that only "pre-approved" sources should be worthy of attention, not people with low credibility. But he's not challenging the arguments themselves. So, no logical fallacy, but maybe elitism or something.

I would further argue that the HN voting system can be relied on to determine what is interesting instead of credibility. Certainly, I believe just because 37Signals or Dustin Caldwell posts something doesn't make it interesting, but the voting seems to disagree with me. At any rate, we have an existing system to determine what should be relevant comment, so there's no need to invoke credibility here.

Expressing an opinion on the legitimacy of an article is not "censorship".

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