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Comment by richardw | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Pointing out or calling out people posting BS, that is clearly BS, does not fall into any category of logical fallacy - those arguing the case that it does on the other hand ...

I've heard people in that field talk about the possibility of loops in the time dimension, but infinitesimally short period of time is involved and local. Not enough to call it the past though.

It isn't an error to distinguish between credibility or competence attacks and logical refutation.

PP is technically - which is to say logically - correct.

It’s playing the man and not the ball. Argue the point not the publisher. You’re arguing the point here, which is correct. Thinking that you can reject the point by diminishing the publisher is definitely a logical fallacy.

I do not know Vice's track record as per the credibility of their science write ups, nor if the General Editor is more concerned with filling white space while ensuring even if fluffy explanations make muster, fluffy fluff does not. Still the blame for fluffy fluff falls at the feet of the author and or their research team. I don't see the General Editor rejecting a story submission because it's true or has good grounds to arrive at given conclusions.

As far as rejecting the point outright, well for myself, I'm not in the string field or quantum physics, but I used to read some pretty reliable sources, and bleed back was put to bed a while ago (years) ... non event now as far as I know apart from a few people who missed that memo - but would consider the possibility there's been new discoveries the last few years and with new theories, the possibility is tangible once more.

the comment may be superficial and dismissive without pointing out factual issues, but ad hominem attacks are still a very different thing than dismissing the credibility of a publication that has a track record of misleading pop science sensationalism

> dismissing the credibility of a publication that has a track record of misleading pop science sensationalism

Attacking the publication's track record, rather than the article's content, is clearly covered by PP's cited definition:

"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"

Hacker news has the best passive-aggressive link commenting anywhere on the internet.

This reminds me of an old joke my grandfather told me:

two hacker news commenters are climbing up a mountain

one of them loses his footing and falls on his butt, and asks the other to help pull him up

the other responds that this looks like a textbook case of slippery slope fall-assy and that it is beneath his intellectual dignity to even consider responding on the merits and further...

while he continues on the first commenter falls into an ice crevice and dies

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... is applicable here.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

ad hominem? "add Vice and 'em", I say, to your list of unreliable sources, for exaggeration, arguments of convenience, burying any counter-evidence...

Are you asserting that any topic brought up by any publication deserves equal consideration, even if one said publication has a track record of intentionally misrepresenting facts?

I ask this question without ascribing credibility or lack thereof for Vice, but just in general.

Technically, Vice isn't a human.

Feel free to use “ad entitatem” instead. I don’t think it diminishes the point in any way.

hmm... Vice might be incorporated.

Corporations are people too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Ugh this point is so old. Corporations have “legal personhood”, which shares almost nothing in common with actually being a person in the understood sense. It’s just a legal term, in the same way a state of matter and a state in the US have nothing in common except the same letters make up the term.

Since the only sense that “person” matters to ad hominem really is as an entity making an argument, a corporation (or any other collective entity, with or without juridical personhood) is a person in the sense required for the fallacy to apply.

(Also, juridical persons and natural persons are a lot more similar than US states and states of matter; it is not just a distantly related etymology; the former literally refers to having legal attributes of the latter.)

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