I don’t know I think looking critically at why someone has a rooting interest in claims IS valuable.

Yeah using it as a silver bullet to kill all discussion can suck, but outright removing that context is going to leave others trying to engage in good faith in the lurch.

It’s the thing Republicans have been exploiting about trans people in sports for the past few years. They ask you “don’t look at the people asking just ask yourself if this is fair to sports”. It leaves out a lot of malice in the claims like

• the people asking about sports despise trans people as a whole and this issue is a stepping stone for them
• the party as a whole doesn’t care but needs a boogeyman to distract from their dreadful policies and lunatics at the helm of things

I’m not accusing the author of going that far but I need to illustrate why separating the argument from the author just isn’t a great idea.

Sean doesn’t want people to point out that he worked on Copilot. Here, the diagnostic question is something like, “Why do you think that the chatbots are good and capable?” The mental-health stuff is a distraction; he wasn’t melted by chatbot memes, he took a paycheck.

What? What a crazy idea, you have arthritis and papilloma wart on your ass for sure! Clear as day!

Strangly said but really they are just saying focus on the problem not the person.

Not sure why you need to convince anyone. Sure you like to run a team by concensus but that is not always possible. Some times you just have to make the call or run it up the chain to have some VP make the call and get people in line.

though i’d argue hat asking about the root cause of argumentation may be crucial to understanding perspective and general direction of reasoning