Re: budget living in NYC. The fun free stuff to do in NYC takes effort to get out to. Whenever I visit my friends there, we spend an hour and a half each way on the subway, and a ton of walking around, to get to a couple of free events. It's fun, and definitely feels like the active center of the country, but damn is it tiring!
(Compare a town I once lived in, where you could drive an hour in three directions to find medium cities with free stuff to do. We very rarely did that; driving two hours wasn't something we would do most nights of the week. My NYC friends spend three hours on the subway to get to a free show several nights a week, and see it as completely normal.)
My theory: Living in NYC is super expensive, and to make it worth your while to live there, you have to put in extra effort. I'm always struck by how intense it is all around. (Of course, for me it would still beat the pants off commuting in a car-and-mall-only suburb. But I'm glad to live in a walkable much smaller city.)
Actually -- along these same lines -- I wonder if this same intensity explains why the earlier commenter regards eating out (for $150) twice a week without the kids as very normal. In most families I know with small kids, the parents do not have this level of "date" time. But the two families I do know where the parents have weekly out-of-house, kidless date nights a week both live in NYC. They regard the childcare expenses for those nights, and the "date" expenses, as a non-negotiable, necesary part of their week.
I wonder if it's something about NYC culture that makes this seem like a baseline expected thing... "there's so much to do in the city, so many great restaurants, etc that we're wasting it -- living here for nothing -- if we don't take advantage of it."
(No slam on earlier commenter or the city intended here.)
And, I meant to say, all of Chris Clarke's examples of ad-hominem-that's-okay are examples of that latter use of ad hominem. They're all examples intended to show that we should not take a given person/organization's word for something.
They're okay because that's their purpose, and because they offer highly relevant reasons why that person's word is unlikely to lead us to the truth on a given subject.
What's relevance?
This is okay:
Person X works for big pharma, so she is likely to mislead us about certain public policy issues in a way that benefits big pharma.
This is not okay:
Person Y reads dirty magazines and is ugly, so she is likely to mislead us about public policy issues.
But the reason the second example is not okay is just because the claim about Person Y is not relevant to assessing the trustworthiness of Y's statements about medical issues.
(Ok, taking my "critical thinking 101" hat off.)
Elaborating on what I take to be roughly Chris Clarke's point:
Arguing ad hominem is fallacious when you're intending to attack a deductive argument. A deductive argument is sound or unsound, and which it is does not depend at all on who's making it... so arguing ad hominem is beside the point. It is a version of the fallacy of irrelevance.
Consider:
Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
This argument is sound, and it remains sound whether it's made by me or Hitler or Tom Cruise. No information about the character, judgment, etc of the arguer affects its soundness.
Similarly, ad hominem attacks cannot show, by themselves, the truth or falsity of a statement of fact. Suppose Hitler says "All Jews are greedy." That's a false statement, and Hitler is a bad guy, but the fact that he says it does not by itself show that the statement is false.
BUT it's a different story when we're assessing the credibility of a statement of fact -- in particular, when we're trying to decide whose statements of fact we should trust. (Independent assessment of evidence is the best way to decide when to believe a statement of fact. But in most cases we're unable to independently assess the evidence -- we may not have access to it all, its assessment may require specialized knowledge, etc. We have to trust experts. So we have to have a good way to decide which experts to trust.)
It's highly relevant and prudent to consider whether we should believe the person who is the source of the statement of fact. For this purpose, it is a good idea to consider that person's track record of lying, spinning, having an interest in misleading you, allowing ideology to cloud their own factual judgment, getting their info from the wrong people, being dense, etc.
Now, just for clarity, suppose we discovered that the person has a bad track record -- they've lied a lot in the past, for example. What would this show? It would not show whether the current statement is TRUE. (As I said above, the ad hominem arguments cannot establish the truth or falsity of the factual claim under discussion.) But it would show that we shouldn't believe the statement just on the strength of this person's word.
Your comments are very shrill.
Would you prefer that we go back to the good old days of thalidomide? I wonder how the people who developed liver problems as a result of the medication would feel about your rant?
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