"Christopher J. Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Central Florida and also trained at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He has been active in publishing research papers on violent and aggressive behavior in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books and has done clinical work with adults and juveniles in correctional settings. Currently he is an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University. His research interests include violent criminal behavior, positive and negative influences of video games and other violent media and refinements in meta-analytic techniques."
The author of the submitted article doesn't even have high-quality training or high-quality publications on the issue he is writing about in the submitted article. The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling, rather than any reference to newly discovered data or fresh analysis of familiar data. I'd usually expect better of an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling
About 95 percent of your comment is ad hominem.
The article is stating a fairly bland truism, ie, that children vary to some degree based upon native intelligence. It's hardly worth saying except in the context of the educational world, whose occupants seem to share a near-religious professional belief in the unlimited malleability of the human mind.
Thank you for your reply. I actually fully agree with the principle that it shouldn't matter much at all who says something, as long as there are facts to back up what the person says. I have said so before here on HN.
But on two recent occasions, I have seen submissions that were so flat wrong (this is the second occasion) that it would take serious work to reply to the wrong factual statements in detail, and meanwhile I felt it important to buy time by registering immediate factual disagreement with the author by the general statement that the author is not an acknowledged expert on the issue discussed in the submitted article. In both cases, I kind of half expected that someone who agreed with the author would refer to verifiable facts that might support the author's conclusion, but in neither case did that happen.
The kind of reply that takes time and effort to make to a factually mistaken submission I have made in another place in this thread. Yes, in principle anyone or no one might have a correct statement about a matter of fact to add to one of our interesting discussions here. I hope that if people have statements of fact to make about controversial issues such as how much human genetic limitations constrain the improvement of education, then they will take care to cite verifiable sources for the crucial factual statements and join issue with those who disagree with the factual statements.
Search for ad verecundiam for a discussion on the matter. Really, what he's doing is an opposite of argument from authority, and I think the author suggests that is 1) Sometimes appropriate, and 2) Sometimes ad hominem.
In my eyes, the PhD-holding article-writer is sufficiently credentialed to write mild articles on mild subjects. To say he's wrong because he didn't go to a sufficiently good school is a rather obvious personal attack.
For what it's worth, I initially typed in "your comment is 95 percent name-calling" to parrot him, but then changed it. I mean, it was just so laughable that he went on and on about the guy's fricking school. and then made the insane charge that the author was mostly name-calling. Geez.
While pointing out someone's credentials is not an ad hominem attack, it isn't a refutation of their position either.
In fact, it's rather lame. (It is perfectly appropriate to point out "he's arguing from authority and has none", but the second part is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.)
Either he's got a good argument or he doesn't, and that's true even if he's Hitler. (I like to skip to the end.)
http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=628346
The author of the submitted article doesn't even have high-quality training or high-quality publications on the issue he is writing about in the submitted article. The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling, rather than any reference to newly discovered data or fresh analysis of familiar data. I'd usually expect better of an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.