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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 16 2018, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the character-assassination-for-dummies dept.

Argumentum ad hominem, a well-known fallacy that involves attacking the character or motive of the person making the argument rather than arguing their claims on their merits, is frequently encountered, and despite being fallacious, it is disturbingly effective. A new study in PLOS One (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025) sheds some further light on just how effective the various types of ad hominem attacks are in the context of scientific claims. An article from Psypost reports on the findings:

Ad hominem arguments — attacking a person to disprove his or her claims — is considered a logical fallacy. But a new study published in PLOS One suggests that some ad hominem attacks can effectively erode people's trust in scientific claims.

The research found that attacking the motives of scientists undermines the belief in a scientific claim just as much as attacking the science itself.

[...] "One key finding is that if members of the general public are aware of a conflict of interest connected to a scientific finding, then this will seriously undermine their faith in that finding," Barnes told PsyPost. "What the study does is allow us to quantitatively compare the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of conflict of interest to the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of outright research fraud and misconduct (such as faking the data)."

"What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud."

Further commentary on the study by Orac at Respectful Insolence.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @02:33PM (43 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @02:33PM (#638809)

    If the ad hominem fallacy assumes that a conflict of interest is not a motivation (and therefore increased probability of the presenter) to lie, deceive, omit, or otherwise bias a presentation to the presenter's own favor, the fallacy itself is fallacious.

    When a presenter's claims have been independently (and rigorously) verified by other investigators who are free from similar conflicts of interest, then I can believe that the conflict of interest in the original presenters claims can be ignored. Until such time as that has happened, we are all human - not logical and pure, and presentations will be biased, whether intentionally or not.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Friday February 16 2018, @02:45PM (4 children)

    by JNCF (4317) on Friday February 16 2018, @02:45PM (#638812) Journal

    I haven't followed any links, but from TFS:

    "What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud."

    While you're totally correct, probabilistic skepticism of unreplicated data from biased sources is not unreasonable, it obviously shouldn't have as much weight as skepticism of known frauds.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @03:02PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @03:02PM (#638822)

      That would seem to depend on the normalization. What are the units for conflict of interest versus fraudulent behavior? I think a little bit of fraud could be equivalent to a major conflict of interest.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:49PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:49PM (#638887)

        Perhaps the unit is prudence. The old "trust, but verify" saw. Science doesn't work if we never fund the "verify" stage, and it especially doesn't work if the "verify" stage is career suicide due to publish or perish.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @10:14PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:14PM (#639079)

          Were I appointed "Science Tsar" with a commensurate budget of $1B/yr to promote good scientific research, valuable to society, I believe I would devote 60% of that budget to award to "confirm or deny" activities. Identify the most socially valuable unconfirmed findings of the previous few years and reward based on a scale that increases with independence of the confirming group, and pays double to clearly demonstrate non-reproducability of findings - paying out 25% on initial demonstration of non-reproducability, and continuing to pay another 25% as each independent group confirms non-reproducability.

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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 16 2018, @06:54PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:54PM (#638939) Journal

      probabilistic skepticism of unreplicated data from biased sources is not unreasonable,

      Exactly.

      Skepticism is REQUIRED in these cases. The very nature of science is mandatory institutionalized Skepticism on a grand scale.

      Further, the Wiki Page [wikipedia.org] of Argumentum ad hominem includes reference to the validity of Skepticism, even though TFS seems to suggest that screaming "ad hominem" is sufficient condemnation all by itself.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by schad on Friday February 16 2018, @03:00PM (8 children)

    by schad (2398) on Friday February 16 2018, @03:00PM (#638821)

    It's true that some fallacies aren't always. An appeal to authority, for instance. If you don't know whether to use "who" or "whom" in a sentence, and you say "I'll ask Professor Bob and just do whatever he says," that's an appeal to authority. If Professor Bob is an English prof, it's a valid one. If he's a physics prof, it's not.

    However, ad hominem is always a fallacy. Consider these two statements:

    1. You can't trust Professor Bob's research, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.
    2. Professor Bob's research is bogus, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

    See the difference? The former is not an ad hominem, but the latter is. The difference is your subject. In #1, your subject is Bob. You're saying that Bob isn't trustworthy. That makes his financial connections extremely relevant. Basically, this is an attack on attempts to appeal to Bob's authority. In #2, your subject is Bob's research. But Bob's character does not necessarily have anything to do with his research. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; there is no information in the argument either way.

    Fundamentally, pretty much all logical fallacies are variations on the theme of non sequitur: "The things you are saying have nothing to do with each other." The specific name of a given fallacy usually just denotes which particular rhetorical trickery is being used to disguise the irrelevance.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 16 2018, @03:39PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 16 2018, @03:39PM (#638841) Journal

      because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

      That's Evil Corp.

      1. Nobody can trust you, because you try to protect Evil Corp from being named.
      2. Nobody can trust your post, because you try to protect Evil Corp from being named.

      And it depends on which episode that Bob got onto their payroll.

      --
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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 16 2018, @06:59PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:59PM (#638945) Journal

      However, ad hominem is always a fallacy.

      No.
      Its not!

      Here, let me appeal to authority for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy [wikipedia.org]

      You seem to have fallen victim the "bad analogy guy" [fallacyfiles.org] fallacy,

      --
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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @09:45PM (#639061)

      If you don't know whether to use "who" or "whom" in a sentence, and you say "I'll ask Professor Bob and just do whatever he says," that's an appeal to authority. If Professor Bob is an English prof, it's a valid one. If he's a physics prof, it's not.

      An "appeal to authority" fallacy also comes into play when you assert that X is true simply because authority figure Y says so, regardless of what kind of credentials they have. You can say that it's more likely to be right because a relevant authority figure said so, but absolute truth doesn't come into play here.

      • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday February 16 2018, @10:30PM

        by mhajicek (51) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:30PM (#639085)

        In some cases appeal to authority is correct by definition, for example when NIST sets a standard, it is the standard because they say it is.

        --
        The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:00AM (#639129)

      A physics prof. who is a native speaker would have enough brain cells to know the difference between who and whom.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:34AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:34AM (#639138)

      You are very correct, the direct attack on Bob's research is inappropriate, the more appropriate statement is to distrust Bob with respect to the topic in general - which would include discounting Bob's research unless it is corroborated extensively by non-biased investigators.

      However, most people are not nearly so pedantic and would draw little distinction between the two statements.

      Recently, our fearless orange leader tweeted about how the US SouthEast could "use a little more of that Global Warming that we just refused to pay to stop." Nevermind that the excessive winter cold is actually caused by global warming increasing the latitudinal oscillations of the jet stream, that's too much detail and too complicated for him to communicate to "his base" - they take the issue as presented "warming" and it's unseasonably cold, so we should get more warming, and saving money to get that warming is another simple bonus... and if you can't communicate it in 140 characters or less, you're likely exceeding the attention span of the majority.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:59PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:59PM (#639335) Homepage
      My view, as someone who's fairly Bayesian, is that Appeal to Authority gives you a posterior probability which you can use as your prior probability for the matter in question.

      With such a stance, automatically rejecting appeals to authority is the same mistake as giving no more weight to a second opinion on a medical condition.

      The reason that Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy is because there's no agreement on what the new prior should be. For some parties, P(truth) increases, but for others, who reject that "authority" as being biased or a loon, P(truth) decreases. If the reliability of the authority isn't known, then P(truth) should stay the same. In the latter two cases, there's no progress towards the conclusion, it is a pointless and unnecessary step in the argument.
      --
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    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @02:43AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @02:43AM (#639929) Journal

      However, ad hominem is always a fallacy. Consider these two statements:

      • You can't trust Professor Bob's research, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.
      • Professor Bob's research is bogus, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

      See the difference? The former is not an ad hominem, but the latter is. The difference is your subject. In #1, your subject is Bob. You're saying that Bob isn't trustworthy. That makes his financial connections extremely relevant. Basically, this is an attack on attempts to appeal to Bob's authority. In #2, your subject is Bob's research. But Bob's character does not necessarily have anything to do with his research. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; there is no information in the argument either way.

      No, the only difference is the level of distrust expressed. There is no difference in subject between the two. The sentences have a slightly different structure, but not enough to affect meaning. They both attack the research via a context of Bob, not of his research. The real difference is in the degree to which the research is being attacked. In the first case, it is merely being "distrusted" which is a rather weak assertion. That still allows for the research to be correct.

      The second claim is far more severe an attack. It outright rules out any research by parties funded by Evil Corp. Under normal conditions, that's an ad hominem because business research can and usually is valid research, even when biased by the funding source.

      But it is possible that Evil Corp has legitimately acquired a particularly bad reputation for falsification of research (for example, say it's a well-known and blatantly dishonest propaganda mouthpiece for some ideology or cult). in which case that can make even this strong an attack a valid non-fallacy.

      For example, if North Korean researchers have determined that Kim Jong-un's shit smells like cherry blossoms, I'm not going to give them any benefit of the doubt - because of the well-known and way over-the-top exaggerations concerning this leader of North Korea. Sure, it could still be true - perhaps they have come up with a variety of chemical additives to his diet that make it so. It's just not rational to devote brain power to those sorts of claims without independent verification in the works.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 16 2018, @03:14PM (13 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday February 16 2018, @03:14PM (#638829)

    I agree, up to a point.

    A lot of science denial comes from the following set of principles:
    1. Many scientists in the field of X are paid by evil entity Y.
    2. No matter how much data X scientists present in favor of conclusion Z, it's always just propaganda on behalf of Y.
    3. Any scientist who presents data in favor of conclusion Z is clearly part of the grand conspiracy to do whatever Y tells them. If there's no evidence to support that claim that Y is paying them off, that's simply because we haven't caught them yet.
    4. Ergo, conclusion Z is false, and anybody not in on the conspiracy who believes it has swallowed the Kool-Aid from Y.

    And the thing is, these kinds of conspiracies have in fact happened, such as:
    - Tobacco studies that were paid for by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to "prove" that smoking wasn't bad for you.
    - The attempt to discredit Clair Patterson's work on the dangers of environmental lead.
    The good news was in those cases, more and more evidence piled on that helped put the wrong ideas to rest.

    The problem is, though, that the form of argument presented above is immune to evidence, and the people making it don't bother with experiment to gather their own evidence and test their conclusions, and as a result it is deployed to push ideas like:
    - Evolution didn't happen and isn't happening.
    - Vaccination is a threat to you and your kids.
    - Global climate change isn't happening.
    - Herbs are better than modern pharmaceuticals.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @03:32PM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @03:32PM (#638834)

      Any scientist who presents data in favor of conclusion Z is clearly part of the grand conspiracy to do whatever Y tells them. If there's no evidence to support that claim that Y is paying them off, that's simply because we haven't caught them yet.

      This seems to be venturing into the "no true Scotsman" territory, and is definitely taking things too far.

      The challenge when researching a particular topic is unraveling the potential conflicts of interest and determining when a preponderance of unbiased evidence has demonstrated something.

      In the past, one could usually trust the academic community since they were living on tenure and more or less beholden to no-one. Unfortunately, that era has passed and now most academics (including my advisor in 1985) are grant hounds and simply follow the money to whatever conclusion brings more money.

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      • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday February 16 2018, @04:06PM (3 children)

        by fadrian (3194) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:06PM (#638861) Homepage

        If you believe money corrupts everything then you might as well give up - everything is alreasdy corrupted. One either needs to start making finer discriminations or give up like you, I guess.

        --
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        • (Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Friday February 16 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)

          by captain normal (2205) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:16PM (#638918)

          It's not money that corrupts, it's the love of money over anything else that corrupts.

          --
          When life isn't going right, go left.
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @02:46AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @02:46AM (#639930) Journal

            It's not money that corrupts, it's the love of money over anything else that corrupts.

            So how did "money" make Communist countries of the 20th Century go bad? Their money wasn't good enough to cause a lot of love prior to liberalization of their economies (mostly in the 1990s).

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @07:35PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @07:35PM (#638965)

          Money doesn't corrupt - money given contingent on results corrupts the results, whether the contingency is explicit or implicit.

          If you're doing an oil spill environmental impact study paid for by BP, or Greenpeace, there's implicit bias in the funding: do you want to do future studies for the company or not?

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:57PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:57PM (#638891)

      Herbs are better than modern pharmaceuticals.

      This seems like a dubious example to me, but I see where you're coming from. There is one herb in particular that seems particularly effective at managing depression. Another one is St. John's wort, which seems to be subjectively comparable to SSRI-class drugs in my experience. For addictions, big pharma doesn't even really have anything to offer, but there are two entheogens I'd recommend. I'm trying to say it's dubious because lack of objective research and courage to confront long-held superstitions has made this specific area dubious.

      But at the same time, I'm not going to pretend that yam or soy extract for example, which are precursors to one of my meds, or licorice, which has some effects of another one of my meds, is going to be anywhere near as effective as the actual med. Yet, I hear stories of people who go the herbal route with those and experience results. I just wouldn't recommend it, because for those applications, the med is objectively more reliable whereas the herbal approach is a crapshoot.

      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 16 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)

        by Thexalon (636) on Friday February 16 2018, @07:13PM (#638956)

        So, by your own admission, there's zero objective research backing up the claim that herbs are better than pharmaceuticals. The people originating those kinds of claims are almost universally doing so to sell herbal supplements that aren't even what they say they are [nbcnews.com]. And when you ask the herbal believers out there, they cite anecdotes like you just did, and tend to claim giant conspiracies by the pharmaceutical industry for why herbs aren't accepted by doctors as a substitute for prescription drugs.

        So now you might be saying "But what about my friends?" But there's a clear answer for that: If your friends are taking supplements they believe have St John's wort in them (even though they don't), and they also believe St John's wort is an effective treatment for their condition (even though it might not be), then when they feel better it's at least as likely to be the result of the placebo effect than a result of the supplements.

        --
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        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @10:47PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:47PM (#639089)

          I won't step up and be an "herb believer," the results of herbal treatment seem too spotty and un-reproducible to me - though I do attribute serious merit to pro-biotics like kefir and yogurt in some circumstances, and some of the more potent cultivated herbs (like MJ) do seem to deliver consistently reliable benefits/effects.

          I will relate a clear tendency I have observed in "science based medicine" to dismiss, belittle, deride, and otherwise demean some practical and effective treatments which have no beneficial aspect for the doctors or their institutions. Case in point: the ketogenic diet, known since the times of ancient Greece, just about as effective a treatment of epilepsy as anything else we have today, full of drawbacks and difficulties - but... for the millions of people around the world with intractable epilepsy, patients who have tried 4 or more "main line" medications and gotten no significant reduction of seizures, the ketogenic diet has about a 33% chance of controlling their seizures - and yet, many epileptologists will do their best to dissuade their patients from even trying the ketogenic diet before other, more radical treatments like brain surgery with known serious loss of function - not risk, but more like certainty in many cases. Now, this particular situation is turning a corner due to extremely new technology like MRI guided fiber optic delivered laser-thermal ablation, which dramatically reduces the occurrence of loss of function in both epileptic focus ablation and ablation of previously described "inoperable" brain cancers... but, the same kind of thing repeats throughout the field of medicine: simple things that can make a huge positive impact are dismissed in favor of lucrative procedures that can often be worse for the patient when considering the reward/risk of both approaches.

          Is it a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to say that because many M.D.s are greedy uncaring bastards, that all medical advice is driven by profit over patient welfare? Yes, I think that would be a fallacy, until you change the all to most.

          --
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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @09:14PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @09:14PM (#639042)

      So, at the risk of being forever branded "one of those kooks..." let me also say that results in the opposite direction also happen:

      the form of argument presented above is immune to evidence, and the people making it don't bother with experiment to gather their own evidence and test their conclusions, and as a result it is deployed to push ideas like:

      - All vaccination is good, you should vaccinate early, and often, against everything possibly applicable under any stretch of the imagination

      Many vaccinations are not only good, but possibly rank above penicillin as miracles of modern medicine - Polio, Tetanus, and a handful of others are hugely beneficial to society and the reductions in mortality are tremendous. Then we can move out into sketchier territory: HepC vaccination within moments of birth as a CYA for the hospital, no mom doesn't have HepC - but in some hospitals there's a significant chance that a nurse may cross-infect your infant with HepC from another who does have it, so instead of taking proper precautions against cross-infection we administer the vaccine in all hospitals, including those with no cases of HepC on-site, potential side effects be damned, because that covers the facility from negligence exposure and makes a nice uniform policy that doesn't give away anything about the people being served.

      Then we've got this kind of BS: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/17/health/sanofi-dengue-vaccine-philippines.html [nytimes.com]

      But, that doesn't stop a constant firehose of media saturation that the "best thing you can do this flu season is get vaccinated, even though the vaccine isn't effective let's assure everyone that your flu symptoms would have been even worse if you didn't get the vaccine." Then there's the laundry list of "mandatory" vaccines for public school attendance, including pushing the HPV vaccine into Texas schools before any clinical testing had been done on school age girls - back in the 2005 timeframe. Today, I'll grant that the data is in and HPV for school girls is, on balance, a good idea - though I'd take one step back from saying that making it mandatory is a good idea. That doesn't change the fact that the Texas governor signing a bill into law mandating his public school girls to be test subjects for a new and unproven vaccine was bad practice, unnecessarily risky to the children's health, and more that a little transparently motivated by money flowing to the governor's personal benefit.

      Just because something looks like good (or even magnificently wonderful) science from the past doesn't mean that it should be given a free pass to mass adoption without proper testing and proof of safety and efficacy.

      --
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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday February 16 2018, @10:48PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:48PM (#639090) Homepage

      In that case, the scientifically rigorous approach would be to disprove the data, not attack the scientist.

      Otherwise, what are you saying? I cannot demonstrate that the provided data is invalid because I can reproduce the results and data collection procedures, yet the research is obviously flawed because scientist is paid by evil entity?

      That is ad hominem, and that undermines science. Ad hominem is ALWAYS a fallacy, none of this bullshit "up to a point", "but sometimes", "not always", "what if".

      Now, you could say that "scientist is paid by evil entity, so I am using that as a heuristic to not trust the research, because I am not able to verify or disprove the research, and I don't really know for certain whether the research is actually right or wrong", and that's fine, not because ad hominem is "sometimes wrong", but because this isn't ad hominem. You are not using the person's motives to prove or disprove the validity of the research.

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    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 17 2018, @03:24PM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 17 2018, @03:24PM (#639352) Journal

      - Herbs are better than modern pharmaceuticals.

      A lot of herbal medicine doesn't really promise to cure anything. It generally promises to make you feel better, which is entirely subjective. And, herbal medicine is pretty cheap, really.

      Modern pharma? They hold out the hope for a cure. In the quest for that cure, you impoverish yourself, unless you have EXCELLENT insurance coverage. But, strangely, modern pharma cures very little. Instead. they hook you on that hope, and keep you coming back for more and more, and maybe better drugs.

      You are, of course, familiar with our current "opioid crisis", right?

      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:05PM (1 child)

        by Thexalon (636) on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:05PM (#639367)

        A lot of herbal medicine doesn't really promise to cure anything.

        I did a quick google search, and found on the front page 8 claims that herbal concoctions would cure everything from Hepatitis B to cancer. One of the other 2 results was a study on how many herbal concoctions make bogus claims about what it can cure.

        You are, of course, familiar with our current "opioid crisis", right?

        I've buried two friends so far as a result of this.

        Modern pharma? They hold out the hope for a cure. In the quest for that cure, you impoverish yourself, unless you have EXCELLENT insurance coverage.

        As far as modern pharma goes, I have a number of friends who would have died a long time ago without it. For example, one friend is a successful bank manager, and would be dead without AZT.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:19PM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:19PM (#639376) Journal

          And, many of us have family and friends who need drugs to stay alive.

          https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/martin-shkreli-who-raised-drug-prices-from-13-50-to-750-arrested-in-securities-fraud-probe/ [scientificamerican.com]

          Your freinds who died of opioids - that doesn't enrage you? The opioid crisis was pushed and created by big pharma. Based on an insanely ridiculous lie, made to congress, that less than 1% of morphine/opioid patients became addicted, big Pharma was "enabled" to market that shit almost directly to the end user. Doctor Feelgood, selling drugs on the street corner faced decades in prison, while big pharma was enjoying the protection of congress and the executive branch of government while pushing.

          I should find a link to that "restless leg syndrome" drug - gotta run for awhile though.

          Bottom line, IMO, is that Big Pharma is ultimately no more reliable than old wives medicine and herbal treatments.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 16 2018, @03:22PM (8 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 16 2018, @03:22PM (#638831) Journal

    If the ad hominem fallacy assumes that a conflict of interest is not a motivation (and therefore increased probability of the presenter) to lie, deceive, omit, or otherwise bias a presentation to the presenter's own favor, the fallacy itself is fallacious.

    Indeed. What makes ad hominem a fallacy is that it attacks an argument on the basis of a personal trait or issue, which is given undue weight, of the arguer. For example, there was a story [bbc.com] almost a month back about German automakers exposing humans and monkeys to diesel fumes for science. An independent scientist had this to say:

    "If the research is not independent then there would be doubt about its validity and it would therefore not be ethical," said Prof Frank Kelly of King's College London.

    The conflict of interest for non-independent researchers is an issue and indeed it would cause some degree of reasonable doubt to the validity of the experiment. But this scientist extended that to claim that solely on the basis of that doubt that the research was "unethical". That is where the ad hominem comes in.

    Merely casting doubt on research due to an existing conflict of interest is thus, not an ad hominem because it's a legitimate concern.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday February 16 2018, @04:17PM (7 children)

      by meustrus (4961) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:17PM (#638866)

      Ethics is a whole other can of worms. The problem here is that skepticism not based on the actual data is pre-empting actual analysis of the data. And sure, in the extreme case we have to take a really close look at the results of Nazi experiments trying to prove racial superiority, but then again we should be skeptical of the data anyway. It's quite possible to unethically produce interesting data, and whether its collection was ethical or unbiased should not affect our skeptical analysis of the data itself.

      Ad hominem is not just bad rhetoric when it's irrelevant. Ad hominem means attacking the credibility of the speaker, regardless of whether it's relevant to the words spoken. Ad hominem is always an argument we must ignore, because if we care more about the bias of the speaker than the words spoken, the actual data becomes irrelevant. Ad hominem leads to a world dominated by loyalty squabbles instead of objective analysis.

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 16 2018, @07:28PM (2 children)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 16 2018, @07:28PM (#638962) Journal

        But if the speaker is untrustworthy, why should you trust their assertions?

        This is even true when they offer explicit data if you can't verify the provenance of the data. They could just be making it up. And, unfortunately, there have been many published scientific papers recently where the data *has* been either made up, or duplicated as additional confirmation.

        So the trustworthiness of the speaker is a valid consideration...at least as valid as the deductions that they make from the data they present, because if you can't trust the data, then the deductions, even if totally valid given the premises, are not trustworthy.

        Unfortunately, even this isn't the entire story, because of noise in the setup, etc. If failed experiments are suppressed, then you can't trust the result either. And this is a real problem, because there's no place where failed results are published, and failed experiments that should have succeeded were the desired hypothesis correct have scant impetus to publish. The relevant xkcd is https://xkcd.com/882/ [xkcd.com]
        OTOH, this has always been a problem, but when experiments were cheaper, rivals would publish experiments that refuted shaky assertions. These days, nobody's paying to do the refutations. So the errors are detected at a much later date...if ever.

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        • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @01:21AM (1 child)

          by meustrus (4961) on Monday February 19 2018, @01:21AM (#639899)

          Your approach essentially results in a loyalty test. Are you loyal to science? Are you loyal to your field? Are you loyal to a particular group of researchers? And are they loyal to you?

          Such a question should never be asked of scientists. Unfortunately these questions of loyalty have become the norm. And because scientists find themselves under assault as a group, they have become loyal to each other.

          Because scientists are loyal to each other, they find each other trustworthy. Because other scientists are trustworthy, their results must be valid. Therefore, judging results based on the trustworthiness of the speaker is the very reason why people no longer pay attention to the refutations.

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          If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 19 2018, @05:34PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @05:34PM (#640162) Journal

            You mean not having been caught lying is a loyalty test? I'm sorry, I can't take that as a serious response.

            Perhaps we mean different things by trustworthy. If someone is taking money to produce particular results, then I am less likely to believe them, and if they are taking money from a source that has a definite interest in particular results, then they are likely to be under pressure to produce those results. Etc. Calling doubting them "a loyalty test" is foolish, given the recent known examples of suppressed and dubious results.

            To doubt someone is not to assert that they are lying, it's to assert that there is insufficient evidence. It can be a good reason to look for more evidence, if you're interested enough, but it's not a good reason to decide. There are multiple reasons why one of the basis of science if independent replication, and one of them is to solve this problem. Unfortunately expense, transparency, and publication bias often mean that replication doesn't happen, which results in the promulgation of bad science. (Expense includes professional status, when you can't get your work published because "it's been done".)

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:50AM (3 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:50AM (#639161) Journal

        Ad hominem is not just bad rhetoric when it's irrelevant. Ad hominem means attacking the credibility of the speaker, regardless of whether it's relevant to the words spoken.

        Which is worse? Attacking the credibility of a speaker with relevant concerns (which seems like to be the outcome of any criticism which involves considering those concerns) or ignoring those relevant concerns? There might be some middle ground here, but I don't have the nuance at present to see it.

        • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @01:27AM (2 children)

          by meustrus (4961) on Monday February 19 2018, @01:27AM (#639901)

          Those are not the only choices. The prerogative of science is that when the result is unclear, you find more data. You don’t decide whether or not to trust the opinion of the people that provided the incomplete data.

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          If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @01:44AM (1 child)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @01:44AM (#639907) Journal

            The prerogative of science is that when the result is unclear, you find more data.

            Such as data from parties that don't share the biases of the original group? That's the obvious way to get around conflicts of interest. Find groups with different interests to reproduce the results. But that takes years.

            This sort of independent data generation doesn't help the internet reader. They can't take a few minutes to generate their own data, independently confirming the research. Thus, consideration of heuristics like conflict of interest are a useful way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

            • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @02:27AM

              by meustrus (4961) on Monday February 19 2018, @02:27AM (#639926)

              I would never suggest that anybody trust anything on the internet at face value. But as a passive reader, yes, considering conflicts of interest is a pragmatic means of assessing bias. And while bias is not the same as invalid, most of the time the distinction is not important.

              When it is important, however, one cannot simply believe the author who is most likely to be correct. And if nobody seems to have the credibility to be correct, that doesn’t mean they aren’t.

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              If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday February 16 2018, @04:00PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:00PM (#638853)

    If the ad hominem fallacy assumes that a conflict of interest is not a motivation (and therefore increased probability of the presenter) to lie, deceive, omit, or otherwise bias a presentation to the presenter's own favor, the fallacy itself is fallacious.

    Such fallacies are only truly "fallacious" when they are used as a rebuttal of reproducible evidence or logical reasoning that could be independently validated - an option that isn't always practicable in real life.

  • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday February 16 2018, @04:03PM (3 children)

    by fadrian (3194) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:03PM (#638858) Homepage

    You're part of the problem. Figure that out why that is and get back to me. Look at replicability vs. reproduceability for starters. Tell me your definition of verification next. How many zeroes?

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    That is all.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @10:23PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:23PM (#639084)

      What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud.

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      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:56AM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:56AM (#639162) Journal
      We already know that conflict of interest is replicable and reproducible as are the stereotyped behavior symptoms popularly associated with it. Economics and nutrition science are great examples of this in action.
      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday February 17 2018, @09:53PM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday February 17 2018, @09:53PM (#639472) Journal

        We already know that conflict of interest is replicable and reproducible as are the stereotyped behavior symptoms popularly associated with it.

        But that is not ad hominem, we call that "The khallow Fallacy".

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Friday February 16 2018, @04:45PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:45PM (#638886) Journal

    Your point is valid, but as a bot I should point out that logical fallacies imply a logic error even if they get to the correct result because they assume instead of derive.

    - Scientist A says X.
    - Big deal, Scientist A gets money for firm B who profits from X being true.

    What you have done is finding a good reason why A could have cheated. Yet you haven't disproved it.

    OTOH you just prefix a "probably" and the fallacy goes away.

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    Account abandoned.