Ad hominem much?

I have no problem calling out a guy whose pattern of behavior includes twisting data to come to false conclusions, losing data related to controversial studies and pretending to be other people to make his studies look better.

If that's ad hominem I'm 100% ok with that.

Yes, it is ad hominem, in the same way it's ad hominem when you are positively prejudiced towards the medical opinions of doctors, or how may be bigoted and discriminatory towards the medical opinions on Yahoo answers.

One-line arguments about ad hominem, bandwagon, or appeal to authority, are all lazy arguments.

Most people are positively prejudiced towards their doctors because they're trained for 8 years to deal with medical issues. I'm positively prejudiced to the advice of my tax lawyer because he has spent 30 years working with tax forms. Doctors and lawyers make mistakes and give ignorant advice. Just because sometimes I find better information on google than through a doctor doesn't mean the entire professional system is bullshit.

edit: In fact this exact conversation is an interesting example. John Lott is a highly decorated academic and has received praise from notable academics. In this case I used google to discover his history of deception. So in a way I'm using "yahoo answers" to argue against the phd. With John Lott the criticism is coming from enough sources I feel confident trusting they're true.

Black Mirror did an episode on the consequences of voting for truth. Or was that The Orville? In any case, Lott is using data to support the unpopular side of the gun control debate. It is not surprising to find a gazillion hit pieces undermining his character and credentials. None of which erodes his data.

His research was one of the reasons I moved my family to the suburbs where violent crimes are excessively rare and committed predominantly by visitors from the urban centers.

The gun control debate and politics in general don't really mean much to me. What I'm concerned about is Lott's deceptive use of statistics to come to questionable conclusions.

If you read his entire wiki there are just a stunning number of red flags (the whole thing even, not just the controversies section). In this HN thread alone people have casually pointed out some obvious flaws. At the very least he's putting a lot of effort into spreading FUD about violent crime.

I really don't see how you can take him as a useful and objective source on these issues unless you're already coming to the conversation with some kind of anti-urban prejudice.

In some ways it reminds me of the conversation about child rapists and pedophiles. People lose their mind over the safety of their children when exposed to the community while ignoring that most of these crimes happen within their own families. It all just smells of a general fear of the vague and dangerous "other."

Do you live in a high crime area? Your argument stinks of many degrees of separation between what you speak of and what you know.

No, I'm telling people to stop using one-line arguments from the "logical fallacy" bag.

Well I guess that means I'm just gonna keep committing logical fallacies then if that means pointing out when the author of a study has a pattern of lying and deception.

Hacker news will have to suffer for it.

Besides being lazy, it's also a fallacy of it's own to dismiss an argument just because it contains a fallacy.

But it didn't just contain a fallacy. It only had one premise which was a fallacy.