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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: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 16 2018, @07:28PM (2 children)
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.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @01:21AM (1 child)
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.
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
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".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.