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by MiroF 1636 days ago
I agreed with GP sentiment (and wrote a similar comment myself), but absolutely disagree with your sentiment.

Being able, but unwilling, to get vaccinated substantially shifts my priors of where your comment is coming from. It is useful information, and I appreciate when people disclose it.

If you replace vaccination with an analogous, more politically one-sided limit case (say [not being a Nazi]:[supporting a policy of Hitler] - in typical Godwinian fashion), you can see why this sort of information would be useful.

1 comments

Your line of thinking is a typical ad hominem; you should evaluate an argumentation based on its merits, not what the meatball behind the online handle happens to do in his free time.
From a Bayesian perspective, the provenance of the information you are basing a decision on is of obvious relevance to how you shape your beliefs.

Ad hom is only fallacious if the information really is irrelevant to the argument [0][1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/e01b9z/is_ad...