> smoking is not an appropriate analogy at least insofar

Missing the forest for the trees.

The point isn’t that neglecting to mask is exactly the same as smoking. Obviously these are different. The point is that in both cases the person in question is advising one thing and doing another. The fact that a doctor smokes or doesn’t mask up in a pandemic does not mean that their advice to not smoke or to wear a mask is not good advice.

If a person regularly snacks on lead paint but tells you not to eat paint, the advice is still good even if it’s coming from an idiot.

> it is not ad-hominem to try to understand a person's motivations

Sure, but claims of hypocrisy are still not a rebuttal.

No doubt it was hypocritical for Dr Mike to tell others to social distance and then hop on a boat with a dozen people unmasked, just as it was hypocritical for Gavin Newsom to attend a dinner at The French Laundry while telling others to stay home.

This isn’t actually relevant to whether the advice to socially distance was sound, though.

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kafkaesque 6 days ago | parent [-]

The idiom is, "Do as I say, not as I do."

Yet here you are trying to convince folks why this doesn't lead to poor morals, low self-awareness, and a lack of trust in doctors. We are talking about a doctor, of course, not just an average nobody. And we are talking about a doctor with 6 million subscribers. His influence is wide.

Last I checked, a doctor is not the same as a politician.

	▲	dpark 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Do you have a point except to cast this guy as untrustworthy because he did one stupid thing that got photographed half a decade ago? I feel like the pedantry about what ad hominem means and arguments about analogies and now references to morality and politicians is distracting from whatever your core point is. > lack of trust in doctors I don’t think demanding perfection from doctors helps with trust either.