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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: 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.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]