Carrol Cox wrote:
> But there is not one iota of excuse for the gross stupidity that one
> can
> judge the validity of a propositon by a characterization of the person
> who prnounces it. It is either gross ignorance to do so or a serious
> psychological problem if one is unable to consider a proposition in
> abstractin fromt personality.
You can, though, do what you're doing here, i.e. explain, having shown on rational grounds that an ad hominem argument is mistaken, persistence in ad hominem as an expression of a "psychological problem".
This you will be required to do if you want to explain the most recent financial crisis.
You will need to explain, for instance, the particular individual David Li's misidentification of a rational method for measuring the risk of correlated default with a mathematical formula based on the premise that existing market prices already embodied such a method. Then you will have to explain why the "quant" mentality dominant in financial derivative markets unreasonably embraced the formula as a measure of the actual risk.
This had the result that the risk of correlated default on mortgage backed securities on which correlated default was practically certain was judged to be close to non-existent which led, in turn, to the explosive growth both of these securities and of "insurance" against their default.
So a "serious psychological problem" of "particular people" played a key role in generating the conditions from which the crisis emerged when the practically certain correlated default actually occurred.
Ted