> So, judge the book by it's cover?

It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

bigstrat2003 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's the exact opposite of rational. It is, in fact, a formal logical fallacy (ad hominem). His argument can be correct even if he himself is not typically correct.

	▲	supern0va 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On the surface, that's quite fair. However, there's one problem: it is much easier to make statements than to verify them, and that asymmetry is part of why the internet has been slowly eroding society. It's useful/necessary to use past writing/arguments from an author to say whether they should actually receive any further critical evaluation, or be dismissed. We shouldn't say definitively "they're always wrong, so they're wrong now". However, it's reasonable to say: the author has a demonstrated lack of credibility, so we can probably assume they're wrong here, particularly if they have been wrong in this domain so many times before. Or if they happen to be correct, it's probably not strongly demonstrated by their work.

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themafia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is literally judging the book by it's author

How is that better?

> which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

So it's "rational" to take bias into reading? Why even read? If you know what you think and refuse to accept new information then what purpose is there in consuming anything?

You should just read the comments and get a warm fuzzy that the crowd, for the time being, agrees with your intentionally static ideology.

Comments like these obviously hope they can sway the crowd before they can take an unbiased reading of the article. If the author is that wrong then the crowd here should be able to discover that on their own. If the author convinces the crowd then I'd think you'd want to present a better argument than "well, he was wrong _before_." Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in action.