[fchollet]

The best kind of HN comments:

- are one line long

- provide categorical judgments of absolute negativity

- originate "from above", from an authority figure with a much higher intelligence and much better understanding of the topic

- provide no information or arguments whatsoever

Pretty nice example right there.

[fasteo]

Fully agree; more formally he is doing - at least - a couple of logical fallacies:

1. Ad Hominem, that is, a personal attack.

2. Appeal authority, although in this case he did not even mention a specific authority.

[mseebach]

It's not an ad hominem. "You're not an anthropologist, so what you said is wrong" would have been an ad hominem. The GP actually attacks the argument, although somewhat incompletely (to be polite).

EDIT: The authority is actually named, it's "anthropology".

[Dewie]

1. No. There was no personal attack, and no fallacious reasoning from any personal attack. 2) An intellectual field is a very abstract form of authority, in this context.

[jovrtn]

1. Saying someone said something is a personal attack? Let me rephrase: "The textual information that became visible to me once the reply button was pressed on your computer" — or is my use of 'your' still out-of-bounds?

2. I didn't include enough detail in my post to actually conclude whether my appeal to authority is fallacious, since that entirely depends on in what manner I'm citing the authority. On the other hand, the post I responded to contained implicit appeals to supposed authoritative information ("There is a universal correlation...", emphasis mine) and the subsequent conclusions based on that authority.

[jovrtn]

I thought it was pretty self-evident that torpedoed your entire comment by claiming 'universal correlation' across all cultures and organizations—was any further response to that really necessary? You're throwing around gigantic assumptions that don't bear up under even the most minor investigation into the nature of power and respect cross-culturally.

[seanflyon]

A counter example would be nice.