Matt McIrvin ([info]mmcirvin) wrote,
@ 2007-11-22 14:43:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Retract your ad homonyms
Everyone knows that ad hominem rebuttal--attacking the person making an argument, rather than the argument made--is a rhetorical fallacy.

Pests in many long-running discussions--I'd say online discussions, but it is also common in the greater world of controversy--find it very easy to game the recognition of this fallacy.

The first step is come up with a superficially appealing argument that you can express in a calm and measured prose style. Put forth this argument, and spend a little time in polite discussion as your opponents pick apart the holes in it.

Then abruptly drop out of sight for a while. When you return, repeat your original argument in the identical calm, measured tone, without acknowledging that the rest of the debate ever happened.

Do this four or five times in succession. It helps if your thesis is a little unnerving, so everyone is a bit taken aback from the start.

In the later iterations, the presumption against ad hominem argument is on your side. Anyone who was around for the previous rounds will go nuts, and the reason they're going nuts will largely be that it's you again. You just put forth the same calm, measured argument as if the previous rounds never happened. Anyone new to the discussion will see a sane-sounding guy being hounded by an enraged establishment for no apparent good reason. You may even pick up some followers who will repeat your act with the sincerity that comes from being genuinely naive.

Countering this is hard. It even makes me think that, while ad hominem is a fallacy in a purely logical sense, insisting on this too strongly in an extended debate stretching over several years can be counterproductive. I think that recognition of the ad hominem fallacy was the reason the sci.physics.research charter had no provision for permanently banning a poster--and we paid for that. Oh, how we paid.

(Post a new comment)


[info]indefatigable42
2007-11-22 05:33 pm UTC (link)
I think that recognition of the ad hominem fallacy was the reason the sci.physics.research charter had no provision for permanently banning a poster--and we paid for that. Oh, how we paid.

It's Cat Piss Man all over again. The community becomes so dogmatically afraid of using an often-abused tactic that they won't use it even when it's appropriate and can be used correctly.

It's not appropriate to attack a person for posing a flimsy argument; you should be countering their idea. It is okay to go after the person when the person is being a troll. It's not about their argument anymore, it's about their behaviour.

There are definitely a lot of people who don't know where to draw the line between a person and that person's position or opinion.

(Reply to this)


[info]dr_strych9
2007-11-22 08:27 pm UTC (link)
This is a well-known strategy of "tactical syntax" practitioners. It's one of the more basic ones. Advanced practitioners have complicated methods of collusion in teams and waves of teams.

The objective for putting forward the argument is not to persuade its audience of the proposition. The objective is to discredit the participants in the debate and leave the audience with . Like other, forms of terrorism— e.g. the physically violent forms— attempts to counter these tactics are fraught with peril. Just about the only method with any history of success is low-intensity counter-insurgency techniques, which have to be designed specifically for the population in which they'll be applied.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-23 02:15 am UTC (link)
I think that sometimes the proponent actually is trying to convince third parties of the proposition, or simply to self-aggrandize by playing the martyr.

What brought all this up is that, increasingly, I think that the pro-hereditarian side in the race/IQ debate is actually playing this game, not just on blogs and Usenet but in national media.

They've got a story that is in some ways superficially appealing, especially if one imagines oneself to be a sober-minded investigator of cruel facts that may violate the received pieties of nice people. Their basic thesis, that the less fortunate social status of black people stems to some degree from a genetic mental handicap, is sufficiently disturbing to put opponents emotionally off balance (while proponents continue to play the rationalist), get discussions mixed up in moral meta-issues and derail comment threads. And even though the major hereditarian arguments were all debunked in great detail long ago, the proponents still keep putting them forth with surprisingly little modification and claiming that the aforementioned visceral emotional response of anti-racists is the only reason they're not generally accepted.

And it works. Watson embarrasses himself with this same old stuff, there's a big tiff, and the upshot is that William Saletan gets sufficiently convinced to write a whole series on Slate that leans on Rushton's poorly-controlled studies of racial variations in head size. People then spend days fighting about this on Crooked Timber, get all het up, and yet other people conclude that it's just lefties being crazy because they can't face the horrible facts. And none of it is any different in substance from what happened when The Bell Curve came out; there are blogs now and Gould is dead, but the song remains the same. It was an old song then.

As Cosma Shalizi said after a couple of his long, mathematically detailed eviscerations of this stuff failed to change anyone's mind, it never ends--it's enough to remind him of Nietzsche on eternal recurrence. And even if you start out trying to treat this touchiest of subjects with Olympian detachment, you can't stay that way, which just feeds the problem.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]dr_strych9
2007-11-23 05:59 am UTC (link)
I have no real disagreement with you here.

I'll just add that I think a fair portion of the phenomenon you're observing is the result of deliberate efforts at tactical syntax for the express purpose of defending irrational prejudices— those which support the more authoritarian elements of our social establishment— against the destabilizing advances of science and technology, by discrediting the process by which these prejudices are worn down. It's rhetorical sabotage to defend the otherwise rationally indefensible.

I think I agree with Atrios and Bradrocket for how to respond appropriately to practitioners of this particular dark art. PZ Myers has adopted a similar pose when dealing with evolutionary biology denialists.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-30 05:29 am UTC (link)
Saletan belatedly admits he got punked.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-23 01:03 am UTC (link)
The first time I saw this play out from the beginning, it was a fellow on sci.physics who insisted that the speed of propagation of gravitational effects is infinite, rather than the speed of light as general relativity says. He had an interesting argument that turned out to be wrong, but in an instructive way that was not at all obvious. We all went back and forth on the group, and I hoped everyone had learned something and judged the guy to be less than a total crackpot on the subject.

When he returned peddling the initial version of the argument again without modification, that was when I started to think something was up. He's still pushing it to this day. He's convinced third parties of it. He's selling books about it.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]anton_p_nym
2007-11-23 02:31 am UTC (link)
The only suggestion I can offer from my somewhat limited experience is providing textual proof that this is going on; links to the poster's prior articles in archives like Google Groups for instance. This at least demonstrates the nature of the poster's behaviour, and shows that it's not original material being propagated but yet another rehash.

-- Steve's debating on getting tougher about this in a site he helps moderate, now that it's got (gulp) a million active accounts.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-23 02:40 pm UTC (link)
That's more or less what John Baez ended up doing--basically he put together a vast archive of rebuttals from previous iterations of the argument.

It's one of the things that the Usenet FAQ was invented to handle. In the case of talk.origins the FAQ became such a colossal undertaking that it overshadowed the newsgroup.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]smashingstars
2007-11-23 10:29 am UTC (link)
What I do in these situations is spend a little time, find links to previous posts of theirs with the same original argument, and ask the poster just why they're posting multiple times.

On Usenet, I'm almost always the only person to do this, and rarely does anyone acknowledge it. They'd rather flame and call names and they're just happy to have an excuse to do so. On LJ and other web forums, though, I've found my technique somewhat effective. (One spectacular failure was with this weirdo named [info]its_just_me on [info]note_to_cat, though. Yeesh.)

In real life I think the intelligent design people are doing similar things, the culmination of which is that new Ben Stein movie about intelligent design.

How did you pay for the problem on sprc? I mean, it's Usenet, so I can just imagine what happened, but I am curious about the details.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-23 02:54 pm UTC (link)
The moderators felt obligated to actually read every post by the long-running cranks and come up with a defensible rejection response for each one. Even if the cranks posted several a day.

For the typical illucid crackpot it wasn't that bad; read the first sentence and you could shoot it back with a boilerplate rejection that euphemistically said "this is crackpot stuff". They'd get mad, but we had done our bit. But there were a few borderline guys who were hell-bent on slipping stuff past us and learned to insinuate what they were trying to get at within what looked like an attempt at discussing real physics. We were charter-bound to spend most of our time dealing with these people.

Then, the String Theory War of 2001 broke out, and suddenly we realized that we couldn't ban somebody permanently for being an asshole flamer; we could just reject individual posts with personal attacks in them. Suddenly we had to police not just the crackpots but also the legit scientists, who started sneaking attacks on each other's competence in the middle of paragraphs of dense technical exposition, so they were hard to spot--and then once one slipped through, the person being attacked would get infuriated that nothing was happening to the attacker, and claim a moral right of reply.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]martin_wisse
2007-11-25 02:09 pm UTC (link)
That's the problem in a nutshell: attempting to be fair to assholes who could care less about extending the same courtesy to their victims, especially in environments which value reason and rationality too much. So you have to find non-personal reasons to reject somebody's post when the simple fact that they're an asshole should be enough, or you got the nice people at Crooked Timber trying to disprove racist pseudoscience when they should be calling out the racism instead.

Arguing with these people just gives them validation, the best way to deal with them is to deny them the oxygen of publicity and to expose them for what they are at the same time.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-25 02:32 pm UTC (link)
The problem with just calling out the racism (or whatever) is that it doesn't entirely address the problem of naive third parties who find the original argument somewhat compelling. The Crooked Timber racist-science business is a good example: on other blogs, people who were generally skeptical of the racist arguments also tended to say things like "...but Brett Bellmore seems a lot saner than the enraged mob opposing him, nevertheless."

You have to observe long-term patterns before you can see who's actually arguing in good faith. Which I why I think it helps to bring in some history, and, for instance, point out the pattern of Jensen and Rushton's behavior over decades. (Note, this is not the same thing as attacking the century-old founding arguments and figures of a discipline and imagine that that brings the whole thing down, as with the anti-abortion movement's attacks on Margaret Sanger. The key is to illustrate the lack of subsequent progress in arguments and methods.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2007-11-25 11:47 pm UTC (link)
When I read the NPR approach to the issue at hand, I was reminded of an example I often use to illustrate the fallacy of the current mainstream media's "objectivity": "Tonight, we will investigate topic X. No independent journalistic research was done. However, we have invited proponents of the 2 extreme views who will explain their positions. This will then speak for itself. On the right, Mr. Adolf Hitler; on the left, Mr. Mahatma Gandhi."

Francis Deblauwe

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]martin_wisse
2007-11-26 11:57 am UTC (link)
What I try to do in these situations is to observe how funny it is that these supposedly scientific findings always line up exactly with old prejudices. Nobody ever presents a study that shows white Europeans are just a bit thicker than Africans or men just are not so suited to work outside the home as women.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
other blogs
(Anonymous)
2007-12-02 01:26 pm UTC (link)
Oi - that was me, and I said "I thought on the last IQ post there, and to a lesser extent on this one, that Brett Bellmore, while he may in fact be a bit of right wing loon, appeared to understand the Shalizi posts better than those baiting him."

Which is true. And I'd rather not be characterised as a "naive third part[y]".


(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: other blogs
[info]mmcirvin
2007-12-04 02:59 am UTC (link)
I think the people baiting him had basically just had enough, after the previous n-1 iterations of this.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: other blogs
[info]mmcirvin
2007-12-04 03:03 am UTC (link)
...and, to be clear, I didn't mean "naive" in a general sense, more in the narrow psychology-experiment sense of "having not suffered through the previous n-1 iterations of this". If you have, well, I guess we just came to different conclusions about Bellmore's game.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: other blogs
(Anonymous)
2007-12-04 08:47 am UTC (link)
That wasn't how I read the exchanges - a significant subsection of those baiting Brett seemed to think that the post said something it didn't, and another significant subsection accused him of not having read/understood the post, which it seemed that he had.

Which is not to say that he is right on all the other crap he posted, just that I was interested that many people seemed to be reading their own prejudices into Shalizi's post. There was another thread on evolutionary psychology (http://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/08/and-a-wiggle-in-the-walk-and-a-giggle-in-the-talk/#comments) where the two sides fought it out without any reference to the original paper they were discussing (rather than the media coverage of it), and weren't that interested in what it actually said. It's a phenomenon I find rather interesting. I often find this on crookedtimber threads, commenters are less interested in the content of whatever is being discussed and more in what it symbolises in some overarching political narrative they have.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
"The String Theory War of 2001"
(Anonymous)
2007-11-28 01:54 pm UTC (link)
If I may ask, was L*b*s M*tl involved? The paragraph sounds kind of familiar...

Still, I'd think that the original problem described in the post, and earlier comment on the race/IQ debate, could be solved by a comprehensive FAQ a la talk.origins.

--
Jan Vaněk jr.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: "The String Theory War of 2001"
[info]mmcirvin
2007-11-29 02:29 am UTC (link)
How could you possibly have guessed?!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2007-11-26 08:39 pm UTC (link)
"In real life I think the intelligent design people are doing similar things"

too bloody true. "just teach the debate" is a brilliant cover for mischief of the very sort our host is describing.

(kid bitzer)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]flarenut
2007-12-02 10:25 pm UTC (link)
Isn't this essentially what Frankfurt's _On Bullshit_ is about?

(As one of the moderators of rather different newsgroup, I managed to observe almost the opposite surface effect, arising from essentially the same causes. Readers reacted completely differently to almost precisely the same text depending on whether it had been posted by a positive participant or one of the resident trolls. One reason for this was that some people really seemed to enjoy gaming the posting guidelines, and took any specific explanation of why a post had been bounced as data for fine-tuning the next attack.)

(Reply to this)

IOW,
[info]bellatrys
2007-12-04 02:54 am UTC (link)
everyone who is a regular is going "Ack, it's Crazy Screaming Guy again!" and the newbies are going "What are you talking about? He seems perfectly mild-mannered and clean-cut, what do you mean by shouting 'Oi, crikey, it's Crazy Screaming Guy! Call the cops!'--?"


...until they've been there long enough to hear him start screaming for More Tinfoil and the Need To Stop The Lizards, at which point they too will join in the, ahem, "ad hom" chorus of desperation, "Oh noes, it's CSG! Get the hook!"

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…