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TWO_LIARS

                                            September 17, 2021

                                            From material originally published
                                            at the dailykos in 2015.

                                                                TWO_GATES
Don't Trust Known Liars

Daniel Davies (aka D-Squared), as quoted by Brad Delong:

      http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/five-nomination.html

   "The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with
   bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved
   their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much
   made by people who long for the days of their fourth form
   debating society about the fallacy of 'argumentum ad     
   hominem'. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no
   fancy Latin term for the fallacy of 'giving known liars
   the benefit of the doubt', but it is in my view a much
   greater source of avoidable error in the world."

Track records really do matter. "But that guy is always
wrong!" really does qualify as an "ad hominem" argument
(it's logically possible for someone who's been wrong in the
past to be right this time); however spending a lot of time
carefully considering the opinions of people who've been
wrong an awful lot would not seem to be advisable. Once
again: there are two phases of engagement, and heuristics
involving backgrounds and track records really do count, at
least in the first phase.

The entire Very Serious Person problem that Krugman
discusses so often arises because many people having broken
first-stage filters that grant credibility to anyone who
looks Serious, rather than, for example, seeking out people
with a history of getting things right.








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