AD HOMINEM

Oh man, time for everyone’s favorite topic: logical fallacies!  Journey with me once again, dear reader, to the early 2000s, where I was dutifully attending a majority of my undergrad classes and had found myself taking a semester of Logic in pursuit of my philosophy minor.  We started the course with the good stuff: logical fallacies.  Within 2 days of the course, I suddenly felt as though I had become the conversational equivalent of Neo in the Matrix (remember, once again, that this was the early 2000s, so that reference wasn’t dated then).  There I was, able to call these all out the moment I saw them.  Strawman, boom!  Red Herring, KAPOW!  And of course, ad hominem ad hominem ad hominem!  Oh you suckers are screwed now…until I noticed that no one gave a damn about these fallacies.  Either they argued that they had not committed them, or they disregarded them entirely.  What gives?  Why was no one relenting to my skill?  Because in the real world, during a real conversation, an argument being logical is only PART of the equation.  The real world isn’t purely logical: it’s empirical, and, in turn, experience, expertise and observable qualities DO matter.  Knowing this, here is what I’ve come to say: ad hominem?  You’re goddamn right ad hominem: who are YOU to make this argument?

And never accuse a misanthrope of ad-hominem and expect it to matter

When you share your opinion on something, YOU come under the spotlight AS the opinion sharer.  That’s simply how a dialogue exists.  That this is somehow shocking to some folks is a reflection of the falsely perceived anonymity that social media and forums and the internet have granted to us as a population.  People want to trick themselves into believe that all voices are of equal weight, and it’s merely the content of the message that is of any concern, and this is patent absurdity.  Examples?  Why not combat absurdity WITH some absurdity.  Say you are presenting zero symptoms of any diseases, and then a random individual says “I think you are in the early stages of cancer.  Some cancer do not present until later.”  Would you take them equally at their word, compared to if these same words came from an oncologist?  No?  But it’s the same argument!  How ad hominem of you!  How dare you hold that person’s lacking credentials as reason to not give their words any weight.  Why…why you siding with the oncologist is merely an appeal to authority!  Not logical in the slightest, my friend.

Because logic isn’t the only thing that matters!  Not in an illogical world.  Not in a world where we AREN’T the experts.  And when you delude yourself into perceiving that you ARE one, logic can cripple you, because your “logical” arguments are based off of false pretenses in the first place.  If you sat in on my Logic course with me, you woulda heard the same thing: the pretenses MUST be true when constructing a logical argument.  Otherwise, you end up with arguments that are logically sound but factually untrue: of benefit to no one.  That’s why, when you skim the abstract of a few studies and then get into a 400 post long internet shouting match screaming “Ad hominem!” every time someone calls you stupid and unaccomplished, you end up setting yourself up for failure.  You HAVE to acknowledge your own shortcomings, limitations and misunderstandings, and many times this means applying the old “appeal to authority”.

This guy should have appealed to more authorities...

There’s a goddamn reason these people ARE the authority to appeal to!  We MADE them authorities because they tend to be right on the subjects FAR more often than they are wrong!  That’s what you do in a society: you make experts so that everyone doesn’t have to know everything.  Without having experts TO appeal to, society would crumble, because there simply isn’t enough time to learn everything about everything.  Think how long it takes to become a doctor.  “But doctors are wrong sometimes”, yeah, when you push them OUT of the realm of their expertise, but that’s the point: stay in your lane.  People would rather not vaccinate their kids because they heard from Jenny McCarthy that it causes autism rather than trust the collective medical knowledge of the entire Western hemisphere over the span of many decades?  What madness is this?!  The same madness that prompts people to roll the dice and trust random internet youtube sensations on how they should lift weights simply because they have an Instagram account versus listening to the collective wisdom of thousands of successful trainees and high level coaches that have accomplished things of note. 

And THAT is why you get challenged when you present an idea.   ARE you the expert?  No?  Have you accomplished anything?  No?  Have you TRAINED anyone to accomplish anything?  No.  So then why do I listen to you?  “BECAUSE IT’S ILLOGICAL NOT TO!”  Great: I guess I’m choosing to be illogical.  Because I’d rather be illogical and strong than logical and weak.  And I don’t care if you’re parroting the experts, because if you don’t have the requisite education to even be able to understand what they are saying, there’s a significant chance you’re misinterpreting or misapplying what they’ve written.  So then I get to ask: what are your credentials to read and APPLY what the experts say?  F**k me man, I’ll even take an undergrad degree in SOMETHING exercise related, as it’ll hopefully show that you have AN understanding of how to read and interpret the science in these studies.  But man, if you’re a poli-sci scrub like me, the jig is up, because I know EXACTLY what you don’t know.    

However, my philosophy background has helped quite a bit with my training

Put yourself in a position where you CAN’T be ad hominem’d.  BE credible, BE accomplish, BE worthwhile…or just be quiet.  And hey, there’s nothing wrong with sharing your opinion when asked, but remember our previous talks on the signal-to-noise ratio: ask yourself, what is the value of my contribution to this topic?  Does my opinion NEED to be heard?  Does it DESERVE to be heard?  Have I done enough, seen enough, learned enough, that I actually matter?  Or am I just talking just to hear myself talk?  Because, if it’s the latter, you could always just go write in a blog.