Why not? It's a normal and reasonable thing for adults who respect each other to let each other know that they may not be making themselves understood how they intend, or that one has gone too far, or misspoken, or that their argument doesn't follow. These things occur constantly in everyday conversation without any offense being given or taken. At the same time, I never "corrected" your expression, just informed you of how it could possibly be interpreted in an unfavorable way. That's not the same thing. This is the first but not the last time that you say I did something that I legitimately did not do. I'm not saying that I hold myself above you as a D1 when you're a predent and I think I stated as much in my post that you're responding to here. My point was that we're all on equal ground, we're all smart, we're all capable. This is why the way you wrote ever bothered me the first place. Because it seemed dismissive of these other people on this site that you are now saying are on equal footing with you. If that's the case, it doesn't make sense for you to say "strawman much?" to any of them, instead of saying something like, "yeah I guess that does sound like anarchy, but there are elements of anarchy that I think I might agree with." Don't you see the difference in tone? One is subjectively dismissive and maybe even disrespectful of someone who you should consider no lower than you, and the other is open, honest discussion.
If you trust that I am being sincere, which I maintain that I am, why do you still take such issue with it? If you fully acknowledge that my intention is to potentially help/protect you or help you improve your communication with others (even if you don't agree it needs improving), I don't understand the rest of this paragraph where it's such a big deal that I did something that, as I said above, adults do in normal, everyday conversation with each other, all the time.
I never said you did, so what is this refuting? You did say:
all of which sound like you're shutting the poster down rather than wanting to listen to their opposing viewpoints that you tout the virtues of later, which sounds to me like you're the one being a little hypocritical.
In these statements you act like I'm the one trying to shut down back-and-forth between posters, when at this point I still haven't even stated my opinion on the actual discussion, just offered factual information on drug testing at VCU. Claiming that you've hurt my feelings when I've never said such a thing is another attempt at mischaracterizing me to make me sound like I just can't handle you disagreeing with me. Remember again, that up to this point, I haven't disagreed with you about anything, you've only pretended like I have. This is another logical fallacy, ignoratio elenchi.
I'm not angry and I'm not hurt, I just want you to also understand what I was actually trying to tell you and not take my meaning 3 steps further than what I actually wrote and then act I'm personally insulting you, because I'm not. I don't know anything about you and I have no reason to dislike you, but you have to admit that you're the one who took this from "we're having a discussion" to falsely accusing me of attacking your character. You're the first one who brought up logical fallacies and tried to use them to discount other people's statements. You can go back up the thread and see that you did it before I ever even used the word fallacy. I only integrated those into my own argument when I identified your admittedly incorrect usage of them against me.
Your video perfectly illustrates my own point. You ARE Jordan here and that's all I was trying to tell you from the very beginning. Knowing that people can be sensitive to subtleties in communication, I thought it appropriate to try to tell a colleague they might not be coming across in writing the way they intended. Beyond text being hard to interpret, the fact is certain words and expressions mean certain things, and if you use them incorrectly, which you just admitted you did, with both types of fallacies you've accused me of, it will inevitably lead to misunderstandings. Coming into a professional environment and accusing other people, under misunderstood definitions, that they're committing logical fallacies when they're not - in a non-existent argument - is, honestly, kinda weird and kinda rude, which is why I first took issue with your comment to GoDental101. Not even what was directed at me.
This assertion is factually untrue because I never attacked your character to refute your argument about anything. Only made subjective, qualitative note about your manner of communicating, unrelated to discussion of any other issue. This does nothing to dissolve my straw man accusation, because you still used two straw men to attack me, one being my non-existent ad hominem, and the other being when you discount my arguments on the basis that you don't like the way in which I presented them and you would never do such a thing.
"Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself."
an ad hominem attack by nature requires that one be arguing against another's position by attacking their character. Pointing out the perceived tone of a post is not attacking your established position in the discussion, and it is not attacking your character in attempt to undermine said position. As I said, I agree with your stance on drugs and I was never arguing you in the first place, ergo it is by definition impossible for me to have committed an ad hominem. I really don't believe that you are a rude person or anything like that because I have no evidence of that, and I never said that's what I believed. I was just trying to tell you that was how I thought your post sounded, and whether your appreciated it or not, I sincerely promise I had good intentions. I pointed out to you the possibility that if that's how you act in real life, you may want to examine that, because it's legitimately something that can cause problems between students and between them and faculty, and that would not be in your best interest. Again, this is not an examination of character, but one of one specific example of a behavior. It's like, an order of magnitude different than what you're saying I did. You have to parse the difference between "you seem to be acting like" and "you are", and "I think you might be" and "I know". You're conflating your own undeniable misinterpretation of what I actually wrote with me being disingenuous. If I'd wrote what you said I meant, I would be being disingenuous, but you're interpretation of my meaning isn't compatible with the words I actually wrote without some serious baseless extrapolation.
Nobody could ever possibly read "Have you heard of the strawman fallacy? You should look it up, it’s a good concept to know." and think, "he's not calling this other person out because he disagrees with the observation he made, he's just suggesting that people look at the world through reason arguments and honest contemplation as a better way to live one's life." What you write has to match what you mean or no one will correctly interpret what you actually mean. That's a completely different string of words with a completely different meaning than the comment you posted.
Factually untrue, as evidenced by the predication of your arguments on misinterpretations of the points you've attempted to refute, ie. your arguments themselves don't logically follow, and on misunderstandings of the principles of logic and debate that you've attempted to use incorrectly to support your own positions that were, in the first place, contrary to a position, that I never even held, that is, that I had a problem with your character, which I never did and never asserted.
Factually untrue. As already addressed I never participated in an ad hominem, and saying "talking like you have to me and others in this thread in real life might rub people the wrong way and potentially cause friction in professional environments" =/= consistently saying "nobody will like you". Changing the tone and intensity of a claim is not paraphrasing, it's twisting. You're again trying to establish that I said things that are different enough from what I actually said as to not have the same meaning, and then attacking those. That's a 3rd strawman.
Yes really! Students and faculty are people! People are cliquey and subjective. They can be good people like you say you've met all around the world and like I have too and still let their subjective judgments be colored by personal opinions. Good people have cognitive bias just like bad people, and even if you can try to account for it, you can never eliminate it. You can hope that they wouldn't be and that's fine to be optimistic, but sincerely believing that all or even most wouldn't is pure naiveté, and that was the origin of my initial concern for you. That you might, unaware and unintentionally, talk or act in the way you have in this thread to people in dental school and possibly accidentally cause problems for yourself. This entire forum is riddled with complaints about subjective grading and favoritism for certain students and such, because those things are part of the nature of how we're evaluated in dental school. People do get screwed over because they upset the wrong faculty and stuff like that, and it's in your own best interest as a dental student to know that and to try to avoid causing a situation like that for yourself. I've told you that I agree with your opinions on the topic of this post, but just imagine if you were to be talking about this kind of thing in the hall with another student you know well, never even knowing that you were overheard by a secretary or faculty or another student or something that didn't agree. What about when you get called in for a "random" drug test shortly after this conversation you thought was private and you smoked earlier in the week? Now imagine, completely hypothetically, two different people that might have overheard you. One has a similar personality and similar interests to you, maybe you've studied together a few times. They may not say anything. The other might never have actually talked to you much but has heard you around the halls in the first couple weeks of school and thought you seem a little loud, or a little obnoxious, or a little inconsiderate whether any of these are objectively true about you or not, and they go straight to the dean with your name. This is an extremely realistic, if unlikely, scenario and is all I've been trying to tell you from my initial comment. As dental students, the way we conduct ourselves can have unintended consequences. People fail labs or whole years or get dismissed because of stuff like this. If some people think that the way someone conducts themself is inappropriate, that can absolutely cause problems between that person and other students or faculty. They're not going to think, with all the other stuff going on in our country, our planet, am I really going to be upset about this? They're going to think, man, I don't really enjoy hanging around that guy, or worse. And again, I'm not even saying that I think this will ever happen to you, just that stuff you've said has already made at least one dental student at your future school, me, think that maybe the way you talk to your peers is not my favorite. Believing you should be yourself is one thing, saying that you don't care what people think, and asserting you mean it, can legitimately be contrary to your own self preservation as a student in a doctoral program, because your performance will be subjectively evaluated by people who all have differing opinions about how certain things should and shouldn't be done.
I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. In fact, we're not even really arguing any more, because you've admitted to my main point: That the way your posts read may come across the wrong way, with your video reference and these quotes,
I don't want to just keep arguing with you because that was never my intention, and apparently we actually agree, but I certainly felt like I had to defend myself when you mounted an actual attack against me the was entirely based on things I never actually said or did, and I feel like I've addressed each of those points. I'm sorry it turned into an argument and honestly, there are no hard feelings on my side. There's no need for you to apologize if your posts were perceived the wrong way, because I legitimately was never offended by them, just thought they sounded different/more negative than you might have meant them. If you recognize that maybe, just maybe, you didn't express yourself perfectly, that's all I ever even wanted. If you do reply to me again, I only ask that you reply to what I've explicitly stated, because I'm sincerely not using any subtext or implications or anything here, I'm trying really hard to only write exactly what I actually mean in language that's unambiguous as possible.
