Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Prof. Jay Bhattacharya of the Stanford medical school, Prof. It’s important to note, however, that no AIER personnel – no board member, columnist, intern, accountant, receptionist, or groundskeeper – played any role in writing this document. Politicians, government officials, and pundits who are committed to lockdowns and to opposing us anti-lockdowners are angry at AIER’s unrelenting exposure of the countless exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies about lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and Covid’s dangers.īut of course the single most significant of AIER’s efforts is the Great Barrington Declaration.ĪIER arranged for the October 2020 meeting that led to this document’s drafting, and the Declaration is hosted on a website maintained by AIER. I say “not surprisingly” because no organization has been as visibly out in front as has AIER in challenging lockdowns in particular, and the hysteria over Covid-19 more generally. Not surprisingly, although no less unfortunately, AIER has been bombarded of late by ad hominem attacks. While always widely used, ad hominem argumentation has seemingly become not only acceptable, but de rigueur, in arguments used by pro-lockdowners and anti-anti-lockdowners. (The other five are the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy the naturalistic fallacy what Matt Ridley calls the “reverse naturalistic fallacy ” the fallacy of confusing the mean or median of a group with any individual in the group and the fallacy of composition.) I perform this exercise in order to warn students both to avoid committing these fallacies themselves, and to avoid being misled by these fallacies when these are committed by others. The ad hominem fallacy is among these six. Loosely, the Latin phrase ad hominem translates as “to the man.” And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “ ad hominem” – as in “That’s an ad hominem argument” – is an argument or reaction “directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.”Įvery semester near the start of my Principles of Microeconomics course I identify six logical fallacies that occur with great frequency in discussions of economics and economic policy. The cause is the fight against ad hominem argumentation, and specifically, the use of such argumentation to disparage AIER generally and, specifically, the Great Barrington Declaration. Alas, I’m breaking that promise in order to promote a different cause, one whose urgency was raised, at least from my vantage point, in the past week. In my previous column I promised that today’s column would continue a discussion of vaccine passports.
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