I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible: could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack?
I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone.
I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and statements, not attacking anyone individually.
I'd consider personal attacks to be ad hominem, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my comment — I am trying to point out what is and what isn't a logically valid and argument.
Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.
On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.
Even this:
> what you have written is intellectually dishonest
is likely to land as a personal attack.
Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,
(2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.
No it's not. It's a technical term which means that the person is knowingly making an argument that is not valid.
See the definition of validity [0] in logic.
When I say they are "intellectually dishonest" I mean they are attempting to persuade others with an appeal to emotion in a subtly-crafted paragraph that looks like a rational argument, but technically is not a rational argument --- because it is invalid --- and they know it is invalid.
They are attempting to win by emotional persuasion rather than a series of rigorous rational conclusions.
How my statement that someone is intellectually dishonest is a personal attack, I do not know. Perhaps people skip over the "intellectually" qualifier and jump straight to the "dishonest" part?
"Knowingly making". You don't know. And, in fact, I wrote the comment that you were replying to, and I was absolutely not knowingly making an argument that is not valid, and I still disagree with your argument where you claim that it is invalid.
You're not psychic; you're not omniscient. You're wrong sometimes. And you're wrong here in your judging of my honesty.
And when you act like you can judge what you can't, and you judge negatively, and you say so publicly, that is at least indistinguishable from a personal attack.
So: Calling someone dishonest is almost always going to be considered a personal attack, whether you intended it that way or not. And if you do it here, it will eventually get you banned. Attack the logic or the data, not the person's intentions.
I'm sorry, I'm still not trying to personally attack anyone. I didn't even realize my comment would be interpreted as offensive rather than a statement of fact.
This is the definition of intellectual dishonesty according to Wikipedia:
"Intentionally committed fallacies in debates and reasoning are called intellectual dishonesty."
I read your argument as "this man emotionally affected me via a personal connection I have, therefore his argument is invalid" and interpreted it as a logical fallacy. I assumed you made this knowingly because that is like a super basic logic 101 fallacy. I wasn't trying to personally attack you or say anything about your character or intellect. I was just trying to point out that you had committed a logical fallacy and that I assumed you already knew this.
I've replied to you more fully at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277721, but want to mention something here too. The problem with what you're saying here is that word "intentionally". You can't know someone else's intent from internet comments. Overwhelmingly, when person A says something negative about B's intent, B will react with hurt feelings, anger, or outrage, because they don't think that was their intent at all. (This is exactly what happened in this case, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277408.)
It will get you a very long way indeed if you simply remind yourself that you can't know someone else's intent and edit your comments until they no longer include any assumptions about intent. If, in addition to that, you make your comments without pejoratives (and especially without pejoratives that have anything to do with other commenters), you should be in good shape.
I believe that you're sincerely asking for clarity here, so I hope this helps!
It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality.
The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?
And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
See, Kaczynski's theory is also about morality. He's complaining about the damage that technology does. Well, why do we care that it does damage? That's a moral question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making a moral argument.
So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people, that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we would be better off without technology. I can't trust his whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.
I never intended to make an argument against Kaczynski's ideas, I'm just pointing out that people could have reasonable moral objections against distributing his work. It's "negotiating with terrorists" kind of stuff. Whether his ideas are good or bad is an entirely separate matter.
> We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed. And I never said you're wrong, either, or that Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.
Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology.
I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
