I'm not suggesting you "answer back" anything -- I'm suggesting that you should check if the person praising something has hidden motives.
In fact, I'm saying something even more obvious: if a person praises something, and they don't seem particularly fond of having it or practicing it, then be suspicious.
As for selling something, it is already a great motive to make people lie and present the facts in a distorted way, withhold precious information, etc about a product. It happens EVERY single day in millions of stores, showrooms, ads, etc.
If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
>It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
Arguments in real life do not live in some platonic ideal sphere, isolated from everything else.
They intermingle with all kinds of "completely orthogonal" things.
Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
I never advised that, but nice strawman. I advised to evaluate the arguments on their own ground. This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
> Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
That's fine... If your goal is to gain insight into a person and their motives. If your goal is to judge their argument, then it's absolute and complete fallacy.
Another AC might be just as efficient. Or maybe I just don't even need an AC and while the numbers are all true, they're overselling the benefits. Merely finding out whether a particular model they're trying to sell me is as efficient as they say doesn't help me evaluate their suggestion in the broader context.
>That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
I'm not sure how we got to the salesmen example.
The example I initially gave was about distrusting people that say "X is good for you", but do not follow X themselves -- and about distrusting X for that.
Whereas distrusting doesn't mean "X is thus bad, period", means "you should better investigate X, something seems fishy".
This is why ad hominem is a fallacy. It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.