When to argue ad hominem

1 Level 0: Base rates

What rate do people mis-report at, given who they are?

2 Level 1: Recursive ad hominem

3 Level 2: higher order recursion

4 Incoming

• Poison-Depilling Problems

  To use a term that has become coded with a particular politics (tankie and alt-light in these two cases) and become associated with a group that claims it and underwrites the least-common denominator understanding of it, is to implicitly endorse those politics. It does not even matter if the original usage occurred in a thoughtful, nuanced text with political positions you could live with. A term weaponized for culture war means whatever it comes to mean on the culture-war streets. Enshittified sits next to a popular guillotine the billionaires sentiment in the discourse that I do not share. Luxury belief goes with cry more, lib like peanut butter with jelly.

  As usual, I enjoy Venkat’s insight, and disagree with his conclusions. He seems too much of sophist to me.

• Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference

• Caution On Bias Arguments

• A Rational Argument relates rational and rationalization, a.k.a. motivated reasoning

• The Motivated Reasoning Critique of Effective Altruism includes some selection bias stuff

• The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy

• lived experience

• Maarten Boudry, Why the Genetic Fallacy is Not a Fallacy argues for the distinction between explaining and explaining away in argumentation

Al Prescott-Couch, in The differences between analytic and continental philosophy:

…the genetic fallacy is the purported mistaken inference from the historical origin of a thing to its value. And there are different versions of this supposed mistake, depending on what thing we’re evaluating. So let me give some examples and let’s take the example of belief. Let’s say when someone says, “Well, you should dismiss worries about inflation because they’re made by economists who are just shills for the rich.” Here, what we’re doing is we’re starting from a premise about where inflation comes from; they come from pro-business economists and we’re concluding that for that reason, these worries should be dismissed or not believed. So that’s one variant, but there are other variants as well. So let’s say we’re talking about an artifact. When someone says something like, “This painting is bad, because it was made by a racist.” Or when it comes to social policies, let’s say when someone says, “Well, we should be suspicious of big infrastructure bills because they come from Democrats, — or let’s say we’re looking for the baggage of the past—or because Hitler was also a fan of infrastructure.” So in these cases, what we’re doing is we’re using history to cast doubt on the value of something.

5 On white, het, neurotypical males arguing for free speech norms

I acknowledge that as a white guy I come from a group that might on average be expected to advocate for broader free speech norms than some people, because I am less likely to get myself threatened for holding my views than someone who visibly belongs to a disadvantaged group. Indeed, I think that it is plausible that I will never experience the full range of precarity and threat from uncomfortable discussions that a traumatised and/or marginalised person would. That is, I am less affected by certain negative consequences of this position than many people it affects. On the internet, ad hominem is an accepted argument, and so that requires a defence.

Here are some defences.

1. I hold other positions I endorse that would likely affect me more than average (progressive taxation, interventions for equity for the disadvantaged,…) which I present as evidence that I do not argue purely for things that happen to suit my tastes and direct personal convenience
2. I think that speech restrictions applied ham-fistedly right now could lead to more trauma and stigmatisation overall even if they prevent it right now. i.e. by letting those in the room choose that which we may not discuss we run the risk of silencing those not in the room.