User talk:Hob Gadling/Admit mistakes

Current case
Hope this works. I am not a pinger.

One contribution from the discussion that inspired this essay: Short summary:


 * Me: are you really here to improve the encyclopedia?
 * SFR: This editor [link to me applauding them for an edit] seems to think I make some improvements. Please try to make fewer personal attacks
 * ACS: accusing someone of not being here to build the encyclopedia is a personal attack
 * Me: It was not an accusation, it was a question. Its goal was to give the user a small shove to make them question their current focus and behaviour. Believe it or not, the same people can do right things and wrong things at different times, and telling them what they do wrong is not a personal attack and cannot be invalidated by the same person telling them what they did right in another case.
 * ACS: I didn't say telling someone what they do is wrong is a personal attack. I said that accusing someone of not being here to build the encyclopedia, which you did (making it a rhetorical question is not much of a defense in my opinion), is a personal attack.

Well, the shove failed. SFR donalded. The sentence starting with "Believe it or not" was not aimed at ACS, but at SFR. It clearly refers to their response, where they interpreted my NOTHERE question as referring to their person instead of their specific behaviour in this case. But I guess I should have made it even clearer, since ACS thought it referred to you them.

And what is the point of repeating the accusation of an accusation, ignoring the explanation of what it actually was intended for? And at the same time disrupting the discussion by this doubling down and complaining about disruption of the discussion?

The Arbcom comment was, also clearly, tongue in cheek. Of course, it is not an accurate description what happened recently, but what I feel like could happen any time, given what happened recently. We have a group of editors teaming up, and they suggest topic bans, try to downvote one of their sources with flimsy reasoning, and again and again the same people!

When you add the donalding, it feels like I am debating creationists. Or a wall, for that matter. Here, I noted that SFR made a strawman, without any response or retraction. Then ACS' entirely new definition of "professional", with subsequent doubling down, surrounding this.

Without all that donalding, I would not get such a strong impression that you people are out to get the skeptics no matter what. So, if you could just stop that and start admitting it when you made bloomers, that would help your credibility a lot. Your choice. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:29, 6 March 2022 (UTC)


 * If you want to have a discussion about why I'm wrong, I'm glad to have it at my userpage. I won't respond here. A. C. Santacruz &#8258; Please ping me! 10:40, 6 March 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't want to have a discussion about why you are wrong. I generally want people to admit mistakes. You don't want to do that, ok. Duly noted. --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:48, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Over-generalization fallacy
As the title says, you have made an over generalization fallacy. Be specific when you mean “creationist”. One of my many pet peeves is when somebody refers to a YEC as a “creationist” instead of a “young earth creationist”. Creationism is a broad spectrum, and it doesn’t just mean “Judeo/Christian creationism”. Dr Vigilante (talk) 20:08, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
 * So you are claiming that one of the statements I made about creationists is not generally true but only for YEC or only for Judeo/Christian ones. Which one is it? I cannot find a false one. --Hob Gadling (talk) 21:16, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
 * @Hob Gadling I’ll admit I was vague. I was mostly referring to the fact you were blatantly saying “creationism” instead of saying “young earth creationism”. Not all “creationisms” (if you’d call it that) are based on falsehoods. An example is theistic evolution, which over simplified is basically the view that over the course of 4 billion, a god/gods “used” evolution, and that the “first” humans were merely just souls given to the homosapian, taking creation myths metaphorically. Not exactly incompatible with science. This isn’t related to ID, as that believes evolution is false, and that there is complexity. There’s also old earth creationism, which is a bit vague in all adherents beliefs, but its pretty similar to theistic evolutionists (though some adherents object to “macro” evolution). Dr Vigilante (talk) 21:45, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
 * As long as religious people say, "this is just my belief, it is religion, it is not science", then all is good. Those people are not called creationists, except by creationists who want to make their group look bigger than it is. But as soon as they claim to do science, their statements are based on falsehoods. Theistic evolution is not science. It is just unfalsifiable beliefs unnecessarily added to science. It may be "compatible to science" in the sense that there is no contradiction to it, but it is incompatible to science in its way of thinking: adding unneeded hypotheses.
 * And old-earth creationism uses the same bad reasoning as YEC, just without the dating-is-inaccurate, this-proves-the-earth-is-young stuff.
 * When I say "creationist", I mean the people who say that there is a scientific foundation to their religious beliefs. --Hob Gadling (talk)
 * @Hob Gadling I agree that creationism shouldn’t be taught or presented as a science, but I don’t think using science to explain a religious phenomenon is inherently wrong. An example being the “10 plagues”, which one scientist and another researcher (whom both I forgot the names of) gave a pretty interesting explanation to what they believe caused the events (an example being that the blood wasn’t blood but was from crayfish, algae, or something like hat. I’ll have to reread it but it was pretty fascinating). In my own view on creationism, I think it should be treated as more of a philosophy than a “science”, and most creationist should do so thus. Dr Vigilante (talk) 17:47, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I wrote a sort of essay, you claimed there was a fallacy in it, you were wrong. End of discussion. I am not interested in your opinions, they are boring. --Hob Gadling (talk) 18:09, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
 * @Hob Gadling Most people wouldn’t exactly call my views “boring”, but I guess each to their own. Before I leave, here is the | video I was talking about and I believe it’s made by the same people who do Kurzgesagt in a nutshell. Dr Vigilante (talk) 18:40, 27 December 2023 (UTC)