Small hands...you know what that means.

The primary race for the 2016 Republican nomination is one of the most bizarre and surreal events American politics has ever seen. The event has gotten so ridiculous that Republicans have started to debate who has the biggest penis. The idea that penis size has any bearing on who should be president is mind-bogglingly stupid, but here we are. Here is a video of Marco Rubio insinuating that Trump has a small penis:

This is an excellent example of an Ad hominem, which is a fallacy in which one substitutes a personal attack for reasoned argument.

Interestingly enough, this claim that Trump has small hands has been around for decades. In fact, it appears that this claim can be traced back to Spy Magazine, a satirical weekly that started publication in the late 1980's.

If you don't like what he says, it must be because he's gay.

Dean Chambers of Unskewedpolls.com (a website I looked at in an earlier post) is very mad at the respect that Nate Silver of  FiveThiryEight.com gets for his predictive models about national elections. In a recent article he lays out his case against Silver. Unfortunately, Chambers doesn't have anything intelligent to say about Silver's methodology or record so he he is forced to resort to an Ad Hominem attack, writing:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Because Chambers has no argument against Silver he is forced to resort to personal attacks as an attempt to change the subject. This is a clear example of an ad hominem in which a personal attack takes the place of a reasoned argument. However, as several commentators to the article note, when you look like this:

it is probably not a good idea to attack someone's personal appearance. Glass houses and all that.

Why aromatherapists are not (and shouldn't be) doctors.

In a guest editorial in the MansfieldNewsJournal, George Cox, an aromatherapist, attacks the status of current health legislation in the US. In particular, he objects to those provisions of US law that prohibit unaccredited individuals (people who aren't MD's) from making unverified health claims (making claims about products when there is insufficient evidence of efficacy). In laying out his argument Cox commits several fallacies: a version of the Ad Hominem and several Hasty Generalizations.

I will begin by looking at the ad hominem. In his article Cox uses a particular version of the ad hominem known as poisoning the well. This is when one introduces negative claims about a person or group as a way to discredit anything that this individual or group might claim in the future. In a sense it is a sort of preemptive ad hominem. We can see this at work when Cox writes:

Traditional doctors and the AMA are not infallible, despite what TV shows have shown us over the years. All you have to do is think of a couple of instances to prove that. Remember, butter is the worst thing you can eat, eat only margarine. Then a few years later, margarine is bad for you, eat only butter. Huh?
Eggs were the worst thing you could eat for a while, or so they told us. Your cholesterol would go sky high and you would die. After a bunch of poor chicken farmers lost everything, they came back and said eggs aren't so bad after all.

Basically, Cox is arguing that because the medical community has made mistakes in the past, we can't trust anything they say in the future. This is a classic rhetorical technique of turning an opponent's greatest strength against hm and treating it as a problem.  One of the greatest benefits of medical science (and science generally) is that it is evidence based. When a doctor makes a medical recommendation, that recommendation is generally based on the best evidence available at the time. However, because the recommendation is evidence based, when new evidence comes in this sometimes forces a revision in the current understanding, leading to new recommendations. If science thinks something is going to work and then it doesn't, the scientist doesn't stick his head in the sand, he bites the bullet and revises his opinion. This is exactly what we would hope for from any medical practitioner: a recommendation based on the best evidence currently available. This is in sharp contrast to many alternative medical modalities in which the recommendation stays the same regardless of evidence. To try to suggest that this responsiveness to evidence is a defect rather than an advantage is simply poisoning the well.

Cox then goes on to commit a hasty generalization when he writes:

To the people who say that aromatherapy -- my business -- is just a bunch of hooey, I would point out that dentists still use clove bud essential oil for dry socket and root canal pain. They have access to all of the narcotics that MDs do, but they still use clove bud oil because it works. It stops the pain.
So if it stops the pain in a tooth, wouldn't it, shouldn't it be helpful for arthritis pain? Both are technically bone pain.

First, it is worth noting that Cox has greatly over-simplified the dental uses of clove oil. Orac has a great deal more to say on this topic, but suffice to say that the picture is significantly more complex than Cox makes it out to be.  Furthermore, dentists use clove oil because there is strong evidence that it serves the purposes for which the dentist uses it. Despite what many alternative medicine practitioners claim, doctor are not opposed to natural or nature derived-remedies so long as there is adequate evidence of efficacy. Regarding the hasty generalization, Cox's argument seems to run like this:

1. Clove bud oil treats dry socket and root canal pain.
2. Dry socket and root canal pain are forms of tooth pain.
3. Teeth are bones.
4. Therefore, clove bud oil can treat bone pain.
5. Arthritis is a form of bone pain.
6. Therefore, clove bud oil can treat arthritis.

Again, ignoring the factual errors discussed by Orac in the above link, this is clearly a hasty generalization. Assuming that clove oil does work as an analgesic, it is being applied directly to the bone (or in the case of a root canal, directly to the nerve). This is very different from a topical application to the skin. To assume that because it works in one very specific situation involving teeth that it will apply to all situations involving bone is a clear hasty generalization.

Cox, however, does not stop there and goes one further, writing:

I need to watch my language and say things like, "it's been shown to" or "historically, it has been used to." Even though there are small clinical studies that prove it and we have tons of anecdotal evidence, it doesn't matter.

In effect, Cox is arguing that because there are small, preliminary clinical studies and anecdotal evidence, he should be able to make the same claims of efficacy for his products that doctors are only allowed to make for products for which there have been large-scale, double-blind, placebo controlled studies. This is a very common hasty generalization that alternative medicine practitioners make when they assume that anecdotes have value. The simple truth is that, for a variety of reasons that I can't go into here, anecdotes are worthless. To draw any conclusion about efficacy for a product based on anecdotes is as clear cut an example of a hasty generalization as one can possibly find.

h/t to Orac

The Ad Hominem

An Ad Hominem is a fallacy in which one tries to win an argument by attacking the character of one's opponent. There are many sub-varieties of Ad Hominem depending on the nature of the personal attack. In a recent back and forth between Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and Felix Salmon from Reuters concerning a proposal to privatize street parking in New York City, we can see a nice example of an Abusive Ad Hominem, which is a direct attack on the character of one's opponent.

In Taibbi's initial piece he objects to the idea of politicians leasing a public asset for decades into the future in order to secure a short-term revenue gain today. As Taibbi puts it,

These deals involve a sitting executive selling off a valuable piece of city property at a steep discount to private financial interests (often, to friends or campaign contributors), in order to solve a current cash flow problem that, surprise, surprise, will still be there the year after you finish spending the proceeds of your sale.

Salmon then responds by misrepresenting Taibbi's position as being a concern about rising parking rates (an example of both the straw man and red herring),

Which brings me to Matt Taibbi’s latest tirade, complaining about the idea that New York could raise as much as $11 billion by selling off its parking-meter rights. Anybody who wins this contract will have a contractual obligation to implement smart variable-pricing technologies, which will have to include apps showing where the spots are, the ability to pay by phone, and other ways of making everybody’s life easier. How is this not a good thing? Well, Taibbi’s upset that prices will rise:

Meter rates in some New York neighborhoods are already at $5 an hour. A Chicago-style price hike for fat-cat investors might leave us paying thirty bucks an hour to oil barons in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to park for dinner in the West Village.

Though I suggests that Salmon is committing a fallacy in this misrepresentation, it may also be the case that Salmon is simply guilty of not employing the principle of charity and giving the strongest possible interpretation of Taibbi's article. Alternatively, he may just not be reading carefully. In any case Salmon concludes his response by committing an abusive Ad Hominem,

But even if Matt were somehow deserving of such a subsidy, which he isn’t, it’s a false economy: it might feel good to be able park for cheap, but it feels much worse to be stuck in traffic all the time. And the overwhelming majority of West Village diners manage to find a way of eating there which doesn’t involve a parking spot. Why should they subsidize Matt’s parasitical suburban lifestyle?  [emphasis mine]

 Aside from the misrepresentation of Taibbi's position, the Ad Hominem should be clear. Why does it matter where Taibbi lives? If he has a good argument, the location of his home or the kind of life he chooses to live is completely irrelevant to the points he makes. For Salmon to raise this issue and go even further by calling Taibbi a parasite is a classic example of the Ad Hominem. It is also worth noting how Salmon switches from using Matt Taibbi's last name when he is discussing the argument to using his first name when he levels the Ad Hominem. The use of an opponent's first name is a subtle though effective attempt to infantilize one's opponent in an attempt to make their arguments look child-like and immature, further strengthening the general tone of the Ad Hominem attack.

As a final note, Taibbi responds to Salmon here.