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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

[citation needed] - This isn't Wikipedia, so skip the passive-aggressive comments. If you think something's wrong, explain why.

The reason to post this is not so much thinking the comment is necessarily wrong as that it makes an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence, which if accepted as fact is going to change the shape of the whole discussion...perhaps appropriately, but the onus is on the person making the claim to support it.

A link to a logical fallacy, such as ad hominem or more pretentiously tu quoque - this isn't a debate team and you don't score points for this.

Considering the requests that if one thinks something is wrong, one should explain why, I'd say that identifying errors in reasoning is quite appropriate; though some of them are so frequent that I just downvote rather than pointing them out yet again. Fallacies of composition are astonishingly frequent, for example.

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The "citation needed" thing is pulled out any time people disagree, however, even when the comment is something where a source could be found rapidly using Google. It is not the onus of someone in a friendly discussion to have to anally cite every comment they make that involves some random fact: instead, it should be the onus of every person involved in the discussion to keep an open mind and do some due diligence. If you disagree with the other person's fact, then you bring up your own fact and cite the hell out of it to make it clear how wrong the other person is, you don't just demand citations. The real reason people do this is just because they want to undermine trust in the other person's position without having to do any actual work, and it is a great strategy as no matter how well cited something is, there will always be something, potentially in the citation itself (going one or even two levels out), you can take issue with and scream "citation needed" about.

Shrug. Most of the "citation needed" posts I've seen are in response to comments like "almost all recipients of welfare spend it on smokes and alcohol." There probably doesn't exist any studies that disproves that vague claim. Yet whoever posts it shouldn't be allowed to get away with it, hence "citation needed."

"Shrug. Most of the "citation needed" posts I've seen are in response to comments like "almost all recipients of welfare spend it on smokes and alcohol."

[citation needed]

Personally, I don't feel that you need to back your assertion up with facts. If I wish to take issue with it, the onus is on me to go and scrape HN to produce the definitive validation or refutation of your claim. Which was Saurik's point, I think.

That doesn't make sense.

Sure, when you leave a comment asserting something, you don't need to provide a full bibliography of references, but if someone asks for it (ie, someone follows up with [citation needed]) then the onus is on you to show that your facts have a basis in reality. I don't see anything wrong with that.

You can't really disprove something which doesn't have any factual basis.

Surely if someone asks for a citation then they need to provide at a minimum some countering anecdotes. Otherwise their "[citation needed]" is even weaker than my anecdote-supported assertion... And if they're going to present countering evidence, why not just do so without the superfluous "[citation needed]"?

> Surely if someone asks for a citation then they need to provide at a minimum some countering anecdotes.

The burden of proof lies with the initial claim AKA Russell's teapot. In a strict academic forum, the person making the claim should provide evidence at the time of making the claim or at least be prepared to defend it with facts.

I find your position to be hilarious.

No facts required! One man's half-baked opinion versus another's! See the surprise ending tonight at 9!

[citation needed] is shorthand for "Bold claim. I disagree & very much doubt you can back your claim up.". Which I think is ok. Problems arise if it is used for "I disagree & I like to look smart". That is why I would prefer people use the long form, not cryptic shorthand.

anigbrowl is talking about "[making] an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence", and you're talking about "even when the comment is something where a source could be found rapidly using Google". These are not comparable cases, and so, I guess I don't see how your comment really addresses anigbrowl's. This is what I see. anigbrowl: there are cases where it's appropriate. You: it shouldn't be used everywhere.

There is this (subjective) notion of relevance. When it's relevant, a simple [citation needed] communicates a lot more than merely these words.

To be fair, the article is ALSO not talking about the case anigbrowl is talking about.

I've seen "[citation needed]" abused more often as I've seen it used when somebody is "[making] an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence"

And the main claim still holds: provide a link that disproves, descredits or calls into question the extraordinary claim. Or at least explain why you think it's extraordinary.

I guess you and the author are sensitive to different kinds of abuse than I am. What annoys me more are wild claims, and I often go away feeling it's not easy to counter this much reliance on misinformation. I am not very active on HN, and read only about 1% of the threads that make it to the front page. Whenever I saw [citation needed], I felt it was apt. Also, I did not get the impression that it was passive-aggressive behaviour.

Yes, but on the other hand, fallacious reasoning is rarely the source of disagreement or controversy in a debate. At least in my experience. All you're doing by saying "ad hominem" is shifting the focus to technical delivery of the argument rather than focusing on the real matter of the discussion.

And most people forget that calling something an ad hominem attack does not mean that it's wrong. Most things which get called ad hominem are usually not, in fact -- saying "you are dumb and your arguments is wrong because of X, Y, Z" is different than saying "your argument is wrong because you are dumb" (the latter would be ad hominem, the former is merely an irrelevant statement)

> All you're doing by saying "ad hominem" is shifting the focus to technical delivery of the argument rather than focusing on the real matter of the discussion.

I agree, that looking for logical fallacies in the argument often is a straw man in itself, which is ironic and which is the reason many are skeptical about pointing them out altogether. But in the end you can't abandon logic and talk relying only on intuition and emotions and discarding all reasoning, which would happen if people "rather focus on the matter of discussion than shift focus to technical delivery".

I think you may be confusing HN with some other place. I have literally never seen someone being called dumb or anyone being "proven" wrong for being stupid. Honestly, I think most fallacies pointed out here are fair and especially "ad hominem" which is probably the easiest to grasp. Can you find any counter-examples?

All you're doing by saying "ad hominem" is shifting the focus to technical delivery of the argument rather than focusing on the real matter of the discussion.

I'm not sure I agree. The use of ad hominem is the shift away from the discussion proper. Calling ad hominem (or any logical fallacy) out is merely a recognition of that shift, and could be considered a (weak?) attempt at getting back on topic. When used correctly, that is.

Identifying errors in reasoning isn't the same as explaining why someone is wrong, though. Given the basic definition of an argument as a structure linking premises to a conclusion, a fallacy is simply a flaw in the structure. It doesn't invalidate the premises or the conclusion, only how they relate to one another. So while you're certainly free to attack the structure behind a conclusion, really you're better off attacking the conclusion itself with an argument of your own.

> Given the basic definition of an argument as a structure linking premises to a conclusion, a fallacy is simply a flaw in the structure. It doesn't invalidate the premises or the conclusion, only how they relate to one another.

True, and there's a name for that logical error -- it's the "fallacy fallacy" or "argument from fallacy", the error of assuming that, because there's a fallacy in one's argument, therefore the conclusion must be wrong.

> So while you're certainly free to attack the structure behind a conclusion, really you're better off attacking the conclusion itself with an argument of your own.

Yes. On the other hand, such a reply may serve to strengthen or clarify an argument, and is therefore sometimes appropriate.

What bothers me is the link. If you say it's ad hominem and I don't know what that is, I can google it. Adding a link just feels pretentious.

I consider linking helpful; that's just being a good citizen. Ad hominem is recognizable, but e.g. "Begging the question" is more often misunderstood and linking helps clarify.

> Adding a link just feels pretentious.

I sometimes find myself debating with people who never do any research, who expect to get by with flowery rhetoric. For such people, links can serve as a reality check.

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