American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

Yes, it is. It absolutely is a fallacy to use that as your reason instead of something about the argument itself being wrong.

To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time.

But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.

> can't possibly

Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.

I exaggerated to make the point, but taking any degree of information from it is fallacious, because it contains no information about the time.

And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.

But we didn't start from a neutral point. We started with someone linking the article as a source of information. If someone tries to use a broken clock to tell the time, you can't use the clock to say what time it is, but you can say something about whether they're right or not. They are >99% likely to be wrong.

At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy.

At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth.

Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.

Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person" which does nothing to refute the argument because it never engages with it. I truly don't know if he's right or wrong, I just know that nobody has bothered to state an actual case about why other than telling me that he believes a lot of horrible things. Sure, I'm not going to invite him over for dinner or anything, but it does nothing to inform anyone about why he is wrong about this.

> it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.

The best way to do that will always be to point to the lie, instead of calling them a liar, because that strategy can't be copied by other liars.

> Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person"

No we didn't. We started with "It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis."

And then "Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to."

And other people cited sources right up top.

Nobody made a fallacy of saying it must be wrong because he said it.

The source cited for "it's worth looking up whose blog this is" is almost entirely dedicated to the proposition that he's a bad person with nothing whatsoever about his argument about the Flynn effect.

You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.

> The source cited for "it's worth looking up whose blog this is" is almost entirely dedicated to the proposition that he's a bad person with nothing whatsoever about his argument about the Flynn effect.

Because it's useful to know if someone is wrong a lot, just like it's useful to know a clock is broken, and you don't need any fallacies for that.

For example, if someone misuses citations a lot, it's good to tell people that, even if you don't say anything about the particular subject.

I get it that you don't like this attack on the person rather than the post.

But it's not committing the fallacy of saying "it's him therefore it's wrong". The fallacy you describe about broken clocks is not happening. Saying either "it's him therefore it's weaker" or "it's him therefore it's useless" would not commit that fallacy. If a clock is sometimes broken then "weaker" is correct, and if a clock is always broken then "useless" is correct. And the impression I got was very much "it's him therefore it's weaker".

And it's not an irrelevant attack. Attacks on the way he constructs arguments are relevant to all arguments he makes.

You can't just claim it's a specific fallacy and then talk about how it's bad rhetoric in general as support of that claim.

> You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.

Don't be an asshole, and I never said I was here to save time. I'm here to say that a couple accusations of specific fallacies are wrong.

See also this very nice comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35520629

The whole point of the fallacy is that this other stuff isn't relevant to the truth of the argument, and it does nothing to inform us about the argument.

You can't figure out the time by arguing over broken clocks. And you're only interested in staying on message here, not about whether these things are even true or not.

If someone is trying to use a broken clock as a source, it's valuable to tell them it's broken.

The clock doesn't tell you if they're right or not. I agree here, see me agreeing! That's the part that would be a fallacy!

But knowing that the clock is broken means you know that any conclusions based on the clock contain zero information. They might be right, but only by accident. So you should completely reject the argument, without completely rejecting the result.

To make that even more explicit: An argument and the conclusion of that argument are different things. The bar for rejecting an argument is lower than the bar for rejecting its conclusion. And the bar for being extra skeptical is even lower.

The fallacy you're describing happens when you reject the conclusion. It does not happen when you reject the argument.

If someone tells you that someone is wrong and yet they can't explain how, they're a broken clock.