[twoodfin]

ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so.

That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard frames which no longer fit.

"Engineering validity"? This is just a dressed up ad hominem. If some technical argument ESR has made is inconsistent or doesn't match up with empirical evidence, criticize away, but his positions on what exactly the Second Amendment means or what the best role of government is can't possibly inform that criticism. It could, perhaps, explain why he's made an error, but it can't identify the error for us.

ESR's political views call much of his work into question.

Which questions about what work? If you're going to cast aspersions like this, you'd probably best be specific.

[peteretep]

    > This is just a dressed up ad hominem

No, it's explicitly and purposefully ad-hominem, suggesting that a person's lack of judgement in one area leads to questions about his judgement in a related one.

[dredmorbius]

Actually, it's not ad hominem at all.

Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".

This is calling into question ESR's general credibility, based on his record. That's a character judgement.

I'm also not saying ESR is wrong in all things -- a consistently wrong indicator is useful (read the opposite of what it says). An inconsistently wrong one is maddening: you've got to pay close attention to what its doing and determine the pattern to its errors. That's the taxing part.

[peteretep]

Ad hominem is where you discount an argument based on the person making it. I'm not sure where the name thing is meant to come in to it.

[dredmorbius]

I suppose the fallacy is where the attributes are irrelevant to the argument.

There's a somewhat related comment I'd seen recently which I've found useful:

Nota bene: a fallacious ad hominem only occurs when an accusation against the person serves as a premise to the conclusion. An attack upon that person as a further conclusion isn't fallacious and may, in fact, be morally mandatory.

https://plus.google.com/+StevenFlaeck/posts/EP88WvFohWr

That's not quite what I'm doing here: I'm leveraging the attack on credibility to discount further statements from ESR. But for numerous reasons of psychology and general reputation, if not a strict formal logic sense, there's a strong rationale to this.

Or: the narrator has been shown unreliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility

Traditionally, modern, credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise, which both have objective and subjective components. Trustworthiness is based more on subjective factors, but can include objective measurements such as established reliability.

[yeahdude]

> Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".

Since you actually wrote this sentence 9 hours ago, it is safe to infer that you really don't know anything about logical fallacies or what you're talking about in general, since you can't possibly have learned all you need to know about them in 9 hours. Given this level of confidence in something that is both wrong and easily checked, why should we trust any of your claims at all?

Or... should we trust you? But not ESR? Would that not be hypocrisy?

[dredmorbius]

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."

http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html

"Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of something about the person making the claim. The ad hominem fallacy is often confused with the legitimate provision of evidence that a person is not to be trusted. Calling into question the reliability of a witness is relevant when the issue is whether to trust the witness. It is irrelevant, however, to call into question the reliability or morality or anything else about a person when the issue is whether that person's reasons for making a claim are good enough reasons to support the claim."

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/ad-hominem/

"It is important to note that the label “ad hominem” is ambiguous, and that not every kind of ad hominem argument is fallacious. In one sense, an ad hominem argument is an argument in which you offer premises that you the arguer don’t accept, but which you know the listener does accept, in order to show that his position is incoherent (as in, for example, the Euthyphro dilemma). There is nothing wrong with this type of argument ad hominem."

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

"An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:

"Of course he would say that. He's a senator.

"This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case."

[twoodfin]

Many (most) people, including many highly respected scientists and engineers, are fully capable of displaying incredible judgment in their discipline yet awful judgment in other aspects of their lives. Should we put an asterisk on papers published by researchers in the middle of messy divorces?

[dredmorbius]

There are some flagrant examples. Peter Duesberg, the UC Berkely molecular biologist prof who thinks that the HIV/AIDS link is bogus, comes to mind.

There are also those who tend to know their limits and note when they're out of their depth or area(s) of expertise. So no, that's not a universal guide either.

[peteretep]

In the unlikely case you feel most science and engineering is a "related area" to family life, yes.

[dredmorbius]

...but his positions...

His making up shit (or buying in to others' made-up shit) to justify them does, as does his ignoring contradictory evidence and record..

Which questions about what work?

The problem is one of an unreliable narrator. If you cannot trust someone's judgement, and they spew crap, repeatedly, then the odds that they're blowing smoke elsewhere increase.

It's the same reason that lawyers seek to impugn witnesses or call into question credibility. Or, to pick another hobby horse of mine, there are news and media organizations which spew crap. Fox News gets a lot of much-deserved scorn for this, but they're not the only one. Bullshit in media (in the most general meaning of the word: any information delivery system) is something I've been paying a lot of attention to, and I'm rather sensitive to it.

Case in point recently involves a 123 year old quote I'd seen attributed to J. P. Morgan, the Gilded Age banker. It struck me as curious, and I dug into it. My conclusion: it's a hoax.

The item in question is referred to as the Banker's Manifesto of 1892, or as the Wall Street Manifesto. Almost certainly the fabrication of one Thomas Westlake Gilruth, lawyer, real estate agent, community activist, and some-time speaker and writer for People's Party causes in the 1890s and 1900s. (Pardon the digression: there is a point, it happens to be both fresh in my mind and sufficiently detached from contemporary affairs to be a fair foil.)

Among the evidence I turned up, several contemporaneous newspapermen who'd drawn the same conclusion. Mind that this was a time of highly partisan press, but these were editors of People's Party papers in various locales.

From The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 7 & 14 Sept. 1892:

The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.

The following week's issue corected the typo with a emphasis on why naming and shaming mattered:

We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07...

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14...

From the Barbour County index., July 06, 1892, p. 1

If the genuineness of this dispatch cannot be established, it should be taken in at once. If reform writers put it alongside the Huscard and Buell circulars and various other documents of like character, the public faith in the genuineness of all may be shaken. We cannot afford to father any fakes.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015080/1892-07-06...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

(My own analysis turned up other internal inconsistencies within the documents as well, detailed at the reddit link above.)

Much as those late 19th century editors, a hueristic I've increasingly taken to applying is looking at what sources (publications, companies, politicians, authors, online commentators, monitoring systems) do and don't provide reliable information. There's also a distinction I draw between occasionally being wrong (errors happen), and systematic bias. As the Tribune and Index called out, Gilruth was being systematically misleading. And apparently intentionally.

My issue with ESR isn't that I know he's bullshitting on any one point or antoher, it's that I don't know when he is, and, as with other unreliable data streams, sussing out the truth is a lot of work for low reward. He's like an unreliable gauage or monitoring system that sends off false alerts when it shouldn't ,stays silent when it should alert, and highlights the wrong areas of trouble when it does manage to go off at the right time. You simply start to lose your faith in it.

ESR's problem is he believes his own bullshit.

I've decided I don't need that problem.

[twoodfin]

I can't help but notice you managed to write something approximating the length of a short essay without once pointing out any "bullshit" in ESR's technical writing, let alone explaining how said "bullshit" must derive from his wrongthink.

[dredmorbius]

I'm afraid I must apologize for failing to make myself clear: it's that his practices call into question his statements in other areas.

I have to confess that I don't have specific instances at hand, for two reasons. One is that much of his more technical writing on programming is outside my own area of expertise. The other is that, given his tendencies, I largely ignore him.

My point, however, wasn't where he is specifically mistaken, but why the traits he exhibits in his rantings on other topics do have a bearing on his engineering judgement.

I do hope that's clear now.

[Frondo]

I pasted this link elsewhere in the comments; the rationalwiki page talks about ESR's objectionable ideas:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.

[davidgerard]

I wrote a bit of that page, and I still listen avidly to his technical expertise, which is qualitatively greater than most people's. But the rest ...