[distcs]

> academics don't design for the real world

This is yet another ad hominem which I frankly find very distasteful. Plenty of real world software that you see around has been designed by academics and are hugely successful in the real world.

Academics come in all varieties just like your engineers. There are good engineers and there are engineers with years of experience who design terrible software. There are academics who do not design for real world and there are academics who do.

Just throwing around the term "academic" in a loose manner offers no insight on the quality of the work. If there is any valid criticism it should be made on the work, not about the person behind it. That you come to defend ad hominem in more elaborate words goes to reaffirm my original point about why these comments make these threads a terrible reading experience! They often seem to show a shallow understanding of both the academia and the professional IT industry.

[0xbadcafebee]

You realize the phrase ad hominem means a personal attack, right? None of us have made a personal attack. If anything, we are attacking the distinction between one institution and another.

We're pointing out that experience provides essential knowledge that a person who hasn't had experience lacks, a simple truth of life. Reading a book about performing surgery is much different than having actually performed the surgery. And someone who has worked in academia (aka "an academic") lacks experience in industry. An academic has not been actually applying the policies in a large organization for years, and thus cannot know or predict all the ways in which the practice of applying the policy can cause problems that do not present themselves in a non-industry setting.

Again, we are not attacking a person. We are specifically saying that any person who lacks experience is not going to make as good of a solution. This is not a controversial statement.

[kentm]

Ad hominem doesn’t mean personal attack actually. This is quite a frustrating misconception online.

Ad hominem applies to an argument wherein you try to discredit an argument by discrediting the person making the argument. I.E. “Person A is B therefore not C”. In this situation the argument that “This guy is an academic therefor his tool is unneeded” is absolutely an ad hominem.

[0xbadcafebee]

If I said "Hitler was a racist, therefore he is not the right person to hire to run an Inclusion & Diversity initiative", that would be an ad hominem, and therefore a fallacy? No, because "what he is" directly impacts the subject in question. Claiming it was a fallacy due to ad hominem would be argument from fallacy, which is a fallacy. (A fallacy fallacy)