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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:07PM (3 children)
Of course motives are important. Motives and intent are an important factors in the laws of many countries.
Some scientists have done "research" with bad motives, the results being bad dietary advice for millions or billions. How many extra deaths from that?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday February 16 2018, @05:54PM (2 children)
The solution to "bad dietary advice" is not to look more closely at the researchers' motives. The solution is to look at the data and try to independently reproduce their results.
Maybe the problem in this case isn't bad research, though, because there's no way the research could have prescribed giving the advice that was given at such a large scale. But then this thing called "evidence-based medicine" still hasn't really caught on with the medical community. It's no surprise that they'd end up giving us bad advice when they still develop their body of knowledge with a pre-scientific mindset.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @07:19PM (1 child)
Good solution if you have unlimited resources and time.
But how many can go around trying to reproduce every result from disreputable sources? The data, results etc could all look good and be falsified.
A large corporation could also in theory fund X number of independent studies and just publish the ones that have the results they want. Like rolling the dice till you get the roll you want.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @01:09AM
Then don’t pay any attention to unreproduced studies.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?