Today's fallacy: ad hominem. Latin for "to the person." In plain English, it means "I can't argue with your point, so I'm going to insult you instead."

Rather than dealing with someone's actual argument, this fallacy goes straight for the person making it. Their looks, their job, their past, their voice, their background... anything that can be used to distract from the issue. It's the rhetorical equivalent of flipping the table when you're losing the chess game.

In everyday life, this fallacy shows up in arguments between friends or family. You make a valid point, like saying someone is late all the time, and they fire back with, "Oh please, like you're so perfect." That doesn't address the issue. It's just turning the conversation into a character attack. Instead of dealing with the point, they shift the spotlight to you, hoping to deflect the criticism. It's not resolution. It's deflection dressed up as defense.

In politics, ad hominem is practically a campaign strategy. Instead of addressing the other person's policies or voting record, you get personal. "You can't trust her tax plan, she lied about her college transcript." Or "Don't listen to his healthcare proposal, he's a millionaire who flies private." Whether or not those things are true, they have nothing to do with the actual argument. It's not about the merits of the idea. It's about taking a shortcut to discredit the person offering it. And unfortunately, it works far too often.

In business, this happens all the time. You bring up a legitimate concern in a meeting, and someone waves it off with, "Well, you've only been here six months." Translation: your point might be valid, but I don't want to deal with it, so I'm going to question your status instead. Classic deflection.

Back when I started in the computer business in 1994, I was 21 years old. I had been working with computers since I was 8, and by that point I had over a decade of hands-on experience setting up systems, installing software, wiring networks, and writing code. I knew personal computers inside and out. But that didn't matter to a lot of the clients I met with. Especially the older folks who took one look at me and decided I was just some kid who probably fixed printers at the mall*.

I remember one vice president in particular. After reviewing my recommendations, he told me, flat out, "We just can't go with someone so inexperienced." Inexperienced? I was building my own computers since before most of his staff even knew what a mouse was. But none of that mattered. My logic wasn't wrong. My age just didn't match his idea of what an expert looked like**.

I ran into this same thing when I started teaching in the classroom. I was a little older by then. I opened my first actual training center in 1999, not counting the one in the dining room of my house, so I was about 27. I'd be up there teaching Access to people twice my age, and I could tell some of them were thinking, "Does this guy really know what he's talking about?" To be fair, a lot of them were accountants or financial planners. They already understood the business side of things. They just wanted to learn how to build a database to do what they'd been doing in Excel. I knew the computer side, but I didn't have their real-world financial background***.

Star Trek has one of the best examples of an ad hominem attack in the very first episode of Deep Space Nine. When Captain Sisko meets Picard for the first time, he can barely look him in the eye. It doesn't matter what Picard has done to save the Federation or that he was assimilated against his will. All Sisko sees is Locutus of Borg, the face of the enemy at Wolf 359, and the one he holds responsible for his wife's death. He doesn't attack Picard's logic. He never even engages with what Picard is saying. He just shuts down, because in his mind, Picard isn't a captain. He's the reason his life fell apart. It's personal, not rational. And Picard knows it. He doesn't argue. He just lets it hang there. That's ad hominem in its rawest form. Ignore the argument. Target the man.

On a personal note, I've got a friend who I've known for years, who jumps on almost anything I post online if it touches on anything he disagrees with. I'm not going into specifics here, but the pattern is always the same. He doesn't come back with facts. He doesn't try to refute what I said. He just responds with, "you're an idiot," or something to that extent (usually with a lot of ALL CAPS SHOUTING at me). I'm like, no... If you want to have a debate, show me something. Bring facts. Link to articles written by actual journalists, not some anonymous blog buried three layers deep in conspiracy-world. Then we can talk. But if your entire argument is that I'm dumb for having a different view, you're not debating. You're just attacking the person. And that's the definition of an ad hominem.

Lesson: Attacking a person is not the same as refuting their argument. If someone tells you 2 + 2 = 4, and your response is "Well you're just a jerk," you're not winning the debate. You're just making noise.

LLAP
RR

* In all fairness, my first "real" job was at Radio Shack, and I did fix more than a couple printers. Back then, dot matrix printers were actually fixable. You could replace the ribbon, swap out the print head, clean the rollers, and that was usually enough to keep them running. Paper jams weren't a crisis. You just cleared the path and moved on with your life. Compare that to today's inkjet printers. If the feed mechanism goes bad or the carriage starts sticking, you're basically done. It's often cheaper to replace the whole printer than to fix it, assuming you can even find the parts. And half the time it's not even a hardware issue. It's firmware refusing to recognize a non-OEM cartridge. They're disposable now. Back then, they were machines you could actually work on. Kind of like cars. But that's a whole nuther story...

** Now that I'm in my 50s myself, I get the instinct to be skeptical when someone young walks in with big ideas. But that doesn't make it any less of an ad hominem move. Ignore the argument, judge the person.

*** That's still true to some extent. I've learned a lot since then, but I know databases, not all these other business types. And if you're thinking about becoming a consultant, you're going to find out pretty quickly that this is where the real challenge is. You're going to get called by all kinds of businesses: manufacturing companies, service industries, doctors, lawyers, insurance agencies, you name it. You'll walk in knowing Access, but you're not going to know anything about their world. You'll be sitting across the table from someone who needs you to build something to solve a specific problem, and you'll have to start from scratch just to understand what that problem even is. I've had to learn how to track crash-test dummies, which meant figuring out how to read from accelerometers. I've built systems for mixing chemicals, for insurance form processing, for auction bidding, for tracking warranty claims, for rental equipment, and about a hundred things I never even knew were jobs before someone called me. None of that was in any Access manual. Nothing really prepares you for that moment when you walk into a new company and have to learn an entire industry on the fly. That's the hardest part. Building the database is the easy part. Understanding how it fits into their business is where the real work begins.