Here’s something I wrote on a forum today not long after an ad hominem attack based on my “experience”:
Experience probably fools a lot of people. It won’t give anyone that much more insight as to “how and why” certain artists become successful. (Often successful artists don’t believe this and write books on how they do what they do so well. (Though I’m of course not arguing that experience means nothing when it comes to actual craft, just when it comes to trying to spout off reasons for something’s success or failure when such things are more dependent on the decisions of others. Such artists will often actually be just as clueless as everyone else. (Does that make sense? Actually I am just writing this sentence so I can have another set of parentheses. (And here’s some more.)))) Age doesn’t automatically increase knowledge; it more often fools people into thinking they know more than they do. “How and why things are in the state that they are in” is not such a simple subject that can just be learned with experience. There are too many emergent properties, too many “black swans”, too many unknown variables.
Do you agree?
And, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan on pages 279-280:
An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.
Hmmm… is that itself an ad hominem attack?
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