It's a bit of a hobby of mine to circumscribe the Fallacy fallacy -- where pointing out fallacies of the referent argument doesn't have significant impact on the argument. I've lobbed some prolly incompetent analyses at ad hominem, petitio principii, hume's guillotine, and appeal to authority. An enduring one is tu quqque. Here's the latest entry in my notes on it, logged here to welcome your leisurely criticism.
https://youtu.be/UWMh9SXjsNE?si=Hk_oFAcJRpqz-yGq&t=450 The stance is two-pronged: 1. aspirational - a limiting process, horizon point to shoot for and 2. some kind of accountability, checking what you said versus what you did. Here's the expression of the stance in that video, by [Peter Beinart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Beinart): "Before Donald Trump, the United States was profoundly hypocritical. Presidents said one thing and then they often did something else. It was only a few, you know within a decade after Nuremberg right we also we overturned it. We overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran, and laid the groundwork for exactly where we are here. We also were the only country that used atomic weapons during World War II. But there was something about the hypocrisy right, at least stating you believed in certain principles, that created a space for Americans to actually try to hold you to account. To say, you know what you claim to believe in this and we're gonna try to push you. This has always been the story of America that we haven't lived up to our ideals. But the ideals have given something to aim for. What's different about Donald Trump is the trashing of any notion that there's any moral standard for the United States whatsoever. You know the Pope actually part of his message in the lead-up to and on Easter morning was sort of not very subtly about that. Sort of the way in which people are being like a inured and lulled into thinking that this is normal, and reminding people that you actually can call them back to a higher standard of some kind. And one thing I mean it's not like I'm saying the International Criminal Court's gonna charge Donald Trump or our generals. There's not jurisdiction over them. So I don't see that happening. But Donald Trump's not even held accountable for his domestic crimes let alone international crimes." Along similar lines (but maybe more in line with Bad Faith -- playing a role but not really knowing you're merely playing a role) is this suspicious entry: The Gradient and What It Means https://deeptimelab.substack.com/p/the-gradient-and-what-it-means https://deeptime-research.org/observability-gradient [preprint here](https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/faj5g_v1) [data here](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19342595) "Elliot Allan" is a bit of a mystery. He [exists on GitHub](https://github.com/thegreatcircledata/yd-demographic-analysis) for the data/code associated with his papers. Regardless, I enjoy the attempt to map knowledge from-to belief using a fairly well-described variable of "observability". Claude tells me this is not AI Slop and maybe not even total crackpottery (with 5 emphatic weak points: 1. suspiciously tidy stats, 2. over simplified cleanliness/harmonizability of notoriously messy data sets/types, 3. tacked on genetics, 4. false precision for the sigmoid, and 5. the Banda Aceh death toll ascription). ... Sorry, that bent quite hard into ad hominem as opposed to tu quoque. My main reason for including this ... speculation ... here is the relationship between knowledge and belief (I think the difference is one of degree, not kind, which is why this possible crackpottery appeals to me.) Hypocrisy matters most when one's counterfactual ideas are *about* one's self. E.g. everyone knows "Do what I say, not what I do" is reliable wisdom, because the speaker isn't really making claims about their self. It's clearly aspirational. But when an "every accusation is a confession" subject like evangelicals who commit adultery or get arrested for CSAM, the hypocrisy does matter. I am still trawling The Corpus for scholarly informal treatments of tu quoque. So this is just a note along the way. FWIW -- ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
