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It's disingenuous, he knows the blog posts are compiled into an ebook and says as much.
He also quotes extensively from SSC, so he clearly has an archived version of it open.
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Uh, no. " You made a bad argument and therefore you are stupid " is not an ad-hominem argument " You are stupid and therefore your argument is bad " _is_ an ad-hominem argument. The OP's comment clearly follows the pattern of the former, not the later, so it is not an ad-hominem. Bear in mind that tripletao's thesis is clearly that the NY article is a bad faith essay. That's his conclusion , not his premise.
This is one of the most intense HN nerdsnipes I've seen in a while, reminds me of code reviews :P TL;DR: google.com -> define ad hominem -> "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining" -> go back to the quote we're arguing about, it reads: "so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous" -> looks like those are words directed against a person rather than the…
Ad hominem means you're replacing a reasoning based argument with character attacks. Throwing in character attacks on top of a reasoning based argument -- especially when the insults are just used as a conclusion -- is not what an ad hominem is.
This is important, because the fact that this is what an ad hominem is, is why it's considered a logical fallacy. "Your argument is dumb because of X & Y, and also I think you suck" is not a logical fallacy. There is no fallacious thinking there.
"I think you suck, therefore I don't even have to bother refuting X & Y, they're automatically wrong because of how much you suck" clearly is a logical fallacy: just because someone sucks, doesn't mean any possible reasoning of theirs is automatically invalid.
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I like emotion, thanks. The church of rationality is not my bag.
I thank you for your honesty. At least your being open about your position. Too many times people argue against rationality in disguise, acting like they like it but secretly hating it.
As soon as an argument becomes "you're not sticking to the of X" it's become fruitless.
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The term I'm looking for is ad hominem. "this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself." tripletao chose to attack the character of a journalist instead of engaging with the arguments.
I doubt the character of the journalist because of the disingenuous nature of his arguments, not the other way around. To be clear, do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog? If so, why didn't he e.g. request deletion from the Internet Archive, to at least make the reporter's job noticeably harder? In any case, Alexander surely understands how…
> I doubt the character of the journalist because of the disingenuous nature of his arguments, not the other way around.
I believe you experienced it that way. But I don't believe that was communicated well. IMO you intended to make a case against the article but ended up actually make a case against the journalist without addressing any of the article's substantive points. That was the context of my original comment. That is, to me, the comment reads as if the insults are themselves the case you're making against the article. Maybe other people didn't read it that way.
For example, the reporter obviously has access to several of SSC posts. If the reporter believed that deleting the blog caused it to be forever lost to history, then he couldn't possibly have written this piece. So obviously he's aware that at least some of the controversial content of SSC is still accessible. In fact, he believes that enough of the content is accessible to write an entire long-form New Yorker article about the controversial content. So surely he must believe that enough of the content is available to write an NYT article about the content.
So I'm not sure what the existence of the Internet Archive is supposed to say about his character. It doesn't seem to impact his argument in any way, because it's possible to simultaneously know about the Internet Archive and also believe Alexander deleted his blog to dodge/mitigate negative press.
> do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog?
I honestly have no idea. I don't follow the blog. I think it's possible he wanted less scrutiny if his name was going to be released. I believed Alexander's reasoning about the deletion when I read them when this first made the rounds on HN.
> And do you think the journalist really believed what he wrote?
Yes, absolutely. I also believe Alexander believed what he wrote in all his blog posts. I don't think there's a reason to assume bad faith on either party. Journalists have flaws like everybody else, but I think they generally believe in what they do.
> reaching for stuff to smear Alexander with
Again, I don't know anything really about Alexander or SSC, but personally I find this a bit hard to believe. I also don't think it can be inferred from the article. And more to the point for the (IMO extremely boring) ad-hominem debate is: even if he was deliberately looking for things to smear him with, it's still an ad hominem to make the case against the journalist for having an axe to grind. The journalist can both have an axe to grind and also be genuinely saying truthful things.
> I didn't intend to express anger
Fair enough, my apologies.
> that anyone dealing with a journalist should consider the possibility that the journalist is out to cause them serious personal harm
My natural tendency is to bristle at this. I get that journalists do sometimes cause harm. I also get that you want to be cautious about anything you say that might end up circulated in a major paper.
What troubles me is that this fits in with an overall anti-journalist narrative that I've seen a lot on HN recently and in tech in general.
For that reason, my preference is to focus on the content of this particular article and focus less on the angle that this piece might be part of a larger attempt of journalistic nefariousness.
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It could have been much worse, but it's certainly not charitable.
I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_. I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it…
> This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement.
I just can't see that being written in good faith.
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Parts of this read as a smoothed-over hit piece. An honest and comprehensive effort to rip apart and debunk neo-reactionary ideology is painted guilt-by-association style as "possibly legitimizing" or "describing" it. "[Exploring] and [upholding] research into innate biological differences between men and women" is "[giving] safe harbor to some genuinely egregious ideas". Asking people to politely contact the editor…
EDIT: I'm wrong, Scott Alexander is just his pen name. The article also calls the author "Scott _____" instead of just "the author of S.S.C.". Wasn't this exactly what he was trying to prevent with the NYT in the first place? So now other journalists feel like they have to step in and "doxx" him instead? And this New Yorker article ultimately got published in spite of all the controversy surrounding his identity. Wha…
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Parts of this read as a smoothed-over hit piece. An honest and comprehensive effort to rip apart and debunk neo-reactionary ideology is painted guilt-by-association style as "possibly legitimizing" or "describing" it. "[Exploring] and [upholding] research into innate biological differences between men and women" is "[giving] safe harbor to some genuinely egregious ideas". Asking people to politely contact the editor…
EDIT: I'm wrong, Scott Alexander is just his pen name. The article also calls the author "Scott _____" instead of just "the author of S.S.C.". Wasn't this exactly what he was trying to prevent with the NYT in the first place? So now other journalists feel like they have to step in and "doxx" him instead? And this New Yorker article ultimately got published in spite of all the controversy surrounding his identity. Wha…
What an ugly article. A couple quotes: > It remains possible that Alexander vaporized his blog not because he thought it would force Metz’s hand but because he feared that a Times reporter wouldn’t have to poke around for very long to turn up a creditable reason for negative coverage. The reporter is unaware that the Internet Archive exists? The content is obviously still readily available, so the reporter is either…
I think the article both directly addresses this and also succinctly summarizes its tone: "[...] the stridency and hyperbole of the reactions of Alexander’s cohort to his cause bear the classic markers of grandiosity: the conviction that they are at once potent and beleaguered."
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Psychiatrists want perfect isolation, so that they can treat everyone from far right nuts to far left nuts to plain unsalted nuts. The only way to do that would be to publish nothing, and surely you must agree that at least some psychiatrists must be cursed with good writing skills and something to say.
> Psychiatrists want perfect isolation Publishing under your real first names, and letting people know where you work, is pretty far from "perfect isolation", isn't it? He's not stupid. Why did he chose such a terrible pseudonym?