Surely it’s t’other way around? There are genetic fallacies that don’t refer to individuals, but to traditions, or dictionaries, or encyclopedias, or religious works. But, as you say, all ad hominems refer to the individual who is the source of the argument.
So ad hominem is a branch of the more general category of genetic fallacy.
I didn’t imply an argument. You inferred one, because you insist on bad attempts at mindreading.
Which isn’t what I did…
I shouldn’t need to explain the difference between purchasing from a suspected charlatan to acquire the evidence they are one, and purchasing what you believe ‘[The author] to be interested in getting at the scientific truth and presenting the public with information without emotionally charged language, hyperbole, etc. He writes with clarity, and he presents definitions, maps, graphs, etc. in a way that should be helpful to lay people who are not trained scientists but want to learn about the issues.’
Imagine three scenarios (names made up, with no relation to anyone so far mentioned…):
Buck publishes a newsletter of his test results on various snake oils, and learns of a new one marketed as a cure all. He looks up the purveyor, and finds he has a history of marketing quackery. Suspicious, he checks if others have tested it already, and makes notes of their findings, but as an time-honored and trusted tester of tonics he buys some to test himself. He tests it, confirms it doesn’t work, and publishes his results, citing the others he is aware of who have already tested it as well so others can check for consensus.
Teddie has a backache, and sees some snake oil marketed as a cure-all. He believes what the purveyor says of himself, and either doesn’t see what he has said or done in the past or doesn’t care. He likewise either does not check to see if anyone has tested the new tonic, or knows that people have and found it doesn’t work and again doesn’t care. And so he buys some. He uses it and feels a bit better, but suspects it might be a placebo anyway and resolves to not buy that particular tonic again.
Krisper hears about a snake oil marketed as a cure-all. Curious, he looks up the purveyor. Finding the purveyor has a history of marketing quackery, he is suspicious of the claims. So he checks if it has been tested, and finds the work of Buck and others showing it is a placebo at best. As someone who doesn’t make a habit of personally testing snake oils, he is satisfied with the existing quality of scholarship and determines purchasing it would be a waste of money.
Do you see how only ‘Teddie’ has been conned, since only ‘Teddie’ has given the snake oil salesman his money believing that the purveyor is credible and the tonic has a reasonable potential to work? I hope you do.
My use of the word ‘significant’ was deliberate. I intentionally did not use a word implying relative proportions, because relative proportions are completely irrelevant to the point of the argument.
It is not a question of whether 1%, 10%, or 99.99999% of the science is ‘settled’, only the importance of what is ‘unsettled’. So the meaning of ‘significant portion’ is not uncertain in any way that matters, it means ‘a portion (of any size) that matters if wrong’.
Examples:
It could be that 99.99999% of the science is unsettled, but the settled 0.00001% controls for 99.999999% of the impacts. In this case, the unsettled portion is insignificant even though it is nearly the entire field.
On the other hand, if the reverse is true then the unsettled portion is significant even though is represents a vanishingly small fraction of the field.
Since we know the percentage of impacts resulting from settled science is sufficient to warrant massive global action, then even being wrong about the ‘unsettled’ portion can’t support a different course of action. As such, the ‘unsettled’ portion is known to be insignificant with respect to global action.
Did I merely ‘assume’ the categorical falsehoods I directly quoted from Koonin’s book in my previous post? Or are you ready to admit that, just maybe I’m right when I say that the book contains demonstrable evidence of Koonin’s dishonesty and/or incompetence?
“Eddie” is complaining about people expressing opinions, based on information they have about its author, regarding a book they have not read.
In a thread he started in which he expresses his opinion, based on information he has about its author, regarding a book he has not read.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Which you haven’t done.
You’re the poster boy for that!
Apparently the humanities are far worse, if we assume that you are representative.
You pointed out that the author
Why would you point that out, unless you wanted the reader to infer that those “strong ties” would inevitably or likely corrupt the author’s argument and invalidate his conclusions? What would be the point of mentioning it otherwise? I’ve never yet seen a writer on climate change who has mentioned that so-and-so has strong ties to the fossil fuel industry who wasn’t trying weaken the reader’s trust in that person’s evidence and argument. But if you had some other reason for mentioning the fossil fuel industry connection, you are welcome to tell us what it was.
Just calling things as I see them. Evidence suggests I was right.
I expressed no opinion regarding the validity or strength of the arguments presented by the author in the book.
Why, indeed? No need to flaunt your highly trained academic reading skills for us to admire. We already know exactly how, er, impressive those are.
How would you describe this? It certainly looks like you expressed an opinion:
No, and your opinion would have been of little value, anyway, since you knew little about the author beyond what was provided by the book’s promotional material.
Thankfully, more informed members, including some familiar with the author’s previous writing on the subject, have weighed and allowed us to form a more accurate appraisal of how valuable this book is likely to be.
Or does it rankle you that much that we have views other than yours expressed in this discussion?
If I might make an alternative suggestion, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a new book out, and a friend of mine has gotten her as an interviewee for his podcast. I will post more information when I have it.
Two things here:
If you think it is impossible to be associated with the fossil fuel industry without being irredeemably corrupted, as you must for this point to be honest, then your decision to not mention his affiliation was itself dishonest. So which is it? Are you being dishonest now in pushing this nonsense argument that affiliation this fossil fuels is an unforgivable sin, or were you being dishonest when you made the post in the first place? You must pick one.
As I am not a fool, I am fully capable of recognizing that a person’s history may color their presentation in ways that do not invalidate it, but are nonetheless worthy of acknowledging. So to answer why I’d point out his history: That’s why. Not to invalidate his claims, but to make others aware of a potential source of bias in your source. I assume those reading the statement are also reasonable adults capable of recognizing and interpreting an affiliation without completely losing the plot. You should try this some time.
At this juncture I will also note your steadfast refusal to deal with the blatant dishonesty in the book that I have documented, insisting instead on pantomiming a continued chase of this long-dead rabbit through a far too shallow hole. Almost as though, having recognized you recommended a book you hadn’t read from an author you didn’t know on a subject you didn’t understand without any form of basic due diligence, that maybe the whole thing is a pack of lies, I’ve been right this entire time, and the only way you can save face is to play this petulant little game crying about how I dared mention the guy worked for some fuel interests.
Almost, but then I wouldn’t want to mind read. That’s your thing.
Move on.
Read what I wrote again. I will try to compensate for your lack of comprehension by the use of italics. Here is what I said:
“I expressed no opinion regarding the validity or strength of the arguments presented by the author in the book.”
The passage you quoted from me expressed no opinion regarding the validity or strength of the arguments presented by the author in the book. It expressed an opinion regarding the motivation and style of discussion of the author. I said that he does not seem to be out to deliberately mislead people. That commits me to no opinion regarding whether or not his arguments or conclusions are any good.
In Medieval education, scholars learned to make distinctions of this kind, and they learned it during what we would call undergraduate education. In modern education, we have Ph.D.s with hundreds or articles published who still have trouble making or even grasping such distinctions. I don’t call that progress.
I have nothing at all against anyone here starting a new topic and introducing Hayhoe’s book.
As a rather conservative person myself, by the way, I have often wished for a conservative take on climate change. This take would, of course, not dispute the reality of climate science, but it might offer a different policy vision as to exactly how to solve the problem. In particular, I have long thought that a market-driven approach, relying heavily upon high taxation of carbon-based fuels, might allocate resources better than a more rule-driven approach. The person who has regard for classical economics would say that we mostly need to internalize the externalities, and then the market will do a good job of sorting out the details.
Alas, what’s happened instead is that actual conservatism has essentially disappeared from the American political scene and has been replaced by the toxic brew of science-denial and fundamentalism which, confusingly, calls itself “conservatism” these days. One cannot have a better policy approach to solving a problem if one cannot acknowledge the problem in the first place.
I did. It was an opinion about the validity of his presentation:
And what followed was another opinion using tone as a proxy for validity:
I, like @CrisprCAS9, use evidence to decide if writing is scholarly, not tone. You should try it sometime!
Alternatively, you could read a book before presenting it here instead of writing pages of desperate handwaving.
That makes two of us, among the predominantly leftist crowd here. (Of course, I’m speaking only of those who have indicated their political preferences by their statements here, not of those who have remained silent on such subjects.)
But such a person is hard to find among the intelligentsia of today – the academics, the media, etc.
They almost all believe that human happiness will only be achieved when the state runs or at least hyper-regulates everything. This is connected with things I said in earlier discussions about the capture of the universities by the left.
One of the great ironies is that the fundamentalists were such great boosters of Donald Trump – a man who, as far as I can tell from reports I’ve read, rarely darkens a church doorway. Personally I strongly disliked Trump and I blame the old guard of the Republicans for not being able to come up with an alternative. They left a vacuum which Trump filled. It propelled their Party temporarily to power, but at a high cost, since Trump achieved the rare feat of not winning a second term of office.
One of the great merits of the old-fashioned type of conservative you are talking about is that such people were given to pragmatic thinking, not apocalyptic thinking. But apocalyptic thinking is rife these days, on both sides of the political spectrum. On the Christian right there is the belief that we are in the end times; on the secular right there is the belief that we are headed for global destruction due to climate change. Both forms of apocalyptic thinking tend to generate demagogic politicians who call for extreme measures, rather than pragmatists who call for incremental solutions. You sound to me (during the times when you aren’t fulminating against ID) more like a pragmatist.
And yet who is preventing any sort of real carbon tax from being enacted? Is it those liberal intelligentsia folks, or is it perhaps the global-warming-denying Republicans. What’s your opinion on a carbon tax?
Ah, your typical attempt to put yourself into the sensible middle ground by caricaturing everyone else as extreme. I suppose, then, that you consider that carbon tax a pointless solution to a nonexistent problem. Yes?
As I wrote on this forum about 2 weeks ago: The geologist and journalist Peter Hatfield (potholer54) has a two-part video series on this problem, and the reality of possible conservative market solutions to climate change. Both are well worth watching for anyone interested in both the science, economics, and politics of climate change.
A CONSERVATIVE solution to global warming (Part 1)
Make sure to watch part2 also.
I can’t really agree with you here as such, but rather than argue about it what I would say along those lines is this: the disappearance of a credible conservative alternative viewpoint isn’t helping matters. Here we have a genuine crisis, and it is a nightmare in that we are all in it together, sink or swim, and humanity isn’t great at these “all in it together” things even at our best. But if everyone who WOULD be supporting classical economics viewpoints is instead saying that there’s no problem to solve, or has instead decided, contrary to those economic principles, that we should never tax anything in order to internalize externalities, it creates a vacancy in the discussion: there is nobody to argue for incentive-driven, market-based solutions, so more “regulatory” solutions will carry the day.
Personally, I do know people who are arguing for such solutions, and who led a campaign for a carbon tax here in Washington State, but this campaign drew very little support from what one would think would be its natural support base of right and center-right voters and opinion shapers, and so withered, getting most of its thin layer of support from what one might approximately call a “center-left” segment of the population. “All taxes are evil” is an easier sell, unfortunately.
I think I would say that we do have good cause to treat climate change as a threat on an apocalyptic scale. I wish I didn’t think that. But that doesn’t in itself mean authoritarian solutions because even extreme problems call for reasoned solutions. It only means authoritarian solutions (whether one regards the particular authoritarian solutions as “left” or “right”) if we allow the conversation on how to solve the problems to be turned into a kind of all-or-nothing game. And if we wait too long to solve these problems the superficial appeal of extreme and draconian measures will only increase. That’s what I’m worried about: we continue to neglect the problem and then we get simple-minded and severe answers to things we might have solved through better means.
I don’t know if I “fulminate” against ID. But what I do have is a constitutional lawyer’s serious regard for the fragility of the First Amendment’s elegant solutions to sectarian divides within our society, coupled with an intense personal feeling, drawn from my own experience, about people who bully children, especially when that bullying is designed to drive children into such things as conformity with popular religious views. In pragmatic terms, as “science,” ID will either continue to be found wanting, or it will come around to demonstrating something it has yet to demonstrate. And I am happy for it to do either, as science or as non-science. But when it became a civic, culture-war issue, my Burkean regard for the institutions, practices and understandings that have built the American constitutional system meant that there was only one side of that question that I could be on.
It depends very much on the details of the proposed carbon tax. But if you want to discuss carbon taxes, then start a new topic, and those who want to discuss it can discuss it there. I’m sure you will get lots of traffic for your post. After all, the most frequently posting people here, predominantly trained in the life sciences and rarely with education (beyond high school) in any other subject, will surely have loud and firm opinions on carbon taxes, as they have loud and firm opinions on global warming, on hiring policies in humanities departments in universities, on theology, and on all kinds of other matters on which they know little to nothing but fancy themselves experts.