[FRIAM] hypocritical entailment

[Steve Smith]

I (just) spent a week with a 7yr old grandson and a 14 year old 
grand-daughter with their mothers (my daughters) during the stress of a 
"forced" move from Portland to Davis CA and watched the grand-children 
(cousins to one another) refine their tu-quoque arguments with their 
mom's off of one another's patterns... the youngster was learning from 
the sophistication of a teen and the teen was being grounded by the more 
base and direct approaches of the youngster.

The mothers (who are sisters) were very adept at parlaying most of 
those, but they got a few zingers through.  fortunately the grandfather 
(me) was there to see the meta-patterns and remember when the mothers 
(also known as my daughters) played those games against one another and 
me (30+ years ago).  it lead to some hilarious self-awarenesses for any 
and all (not the least, the one husband/father/son-in-law "outsider" in 
our family dynamic).

Mary (who did not attend this shindiggery) still carries a childhood 
phrase: "I know you are, but what am I?" which (for me) rhymes with "im 
rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you".

They both offer (IMO) an invitation to shift from antagonistic to 
agonistic engagement?  Ad Hominem seems to reinforce the antagonistic, 
though I've know a few who can receive and own and blend an ad-hominem 
attack in a way which is transformative of the discussion.   My 
daughters did this a few times with the tu quoques thrown at them but 
the ad hominem is usually harder to aikido (tenkan or mai mai?).

Parental authority roles suppressed most even vague attempts at 
ad-hominem... but I had my grand-daughters favorite one queued up to 
hand back.  Around age 5 she thought she could throw "you stink!" at 
almost anyone to disrupt the conversation... i still have that one to 
offer her at the drop of a hat... when delivered with a smirk it always 
gets an "et tu" look in response.  I try to use it less than once each 
time we spend much time together... don't wanna wear it out.  Perhaps a 
Zen Keisaku?

On 4/6/26 1:07 pm, glen wrote:
> It's a bit of a hobby of mine to circumscribe the Fallacy fallacy -- 
> where pointing out fallacies of the referent argument doesn't have 
> significant impact on the argument. I've lobbed some prolly 
> incompetent analyses at ad hominem, petitio principii, hume's 
> guillotine, and appeal to authority. An enduring one is tu quqque. 
> Here's the latest entry in my notes on it, logged here to welcome your 
> leisurely criticism.
>
> https://youtu.be/UWMh9SXjsNE?si=Hk_oFAcJRpqz-yGq&t=450
>
> The stance is two-pronged: 1. aspirational - a limiting process, 
> horizon point to shoot for and 2. some kind of accountability, 
> checking what you said versus what you did.
>
> Here's the expression of the stance in that video, by [Peter 
> Beinart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Beinart):
>
> "Before Donald Trump, the United States was profoundly hypocritical.  
> Presidents said one thing and then they often did something else.  It 
> was only a few, you know within a decade after Nuremberg right we also 
> we overturned it. We overthrew a democratically elected leader in 
> Iran, and laid the groundwork for exactly where we are here. We also 
> were the only country that used atomic weapons during World War II. 
> But there was something about the hypocrisy right, at least stating 
> you believed in certain principles, that created a space for Americans 
> to actually try to hold you to account. To say, you know what you 
> claim to believe in this and we're gonna try to push you. This has 
> always been the story of America that we haven't lived up to our 
> ideals. But the ideals have given something to aim for.  What's 
> different about Donald Trump is the trashing of any notion that 
> there's any moral standard for the United States whatsoever. You know 
> the Pope actually part of his message in the lead-up to and on Easter 
> morning was sort of not very subtly about that. Sort of the way in 
> which people are being like a inured and lulled into thinking that 
> this is normal, and reminding people that you actually can call them 
> back to a higher standard of some kind. And one thing I mean it's not 
> like I'm saying the International Criminal Court's gonna charge Donald 
> Trump or our generals. There's not jurisdiction over them. So I don't 
> see that happening. But Donald Trump's not even held accountable for 
> his domestic crimes let alone international crimes."
> Along similar lines (but maybe more in line with Bad Faith -- playing 
> a role but not really knowing you're merely playing a role) is this 
> suspicious entry:
>
> The Gradient and What It Means
> https://deeptimelab.substack.com/p/the-gradient-and-what-it-means
> https://deeptime-research.org/observability-gradient
> [preprint here](https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/faj5g_v1)
> [data here](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19342595)
>
> "Elliot Allan" is a bit of a mystery. He [exists on 
> GitHub](https://github.com/thegreatcircledata/yd-demographic-analysis) 
> for the data/code associated with his papers. Regardless, I enjoy the 
> attempt to map knowledge from-to belief using a fairly well-described 
> variable of "observability". Claude tells me this is not AI Slop and 
> maybe not even total crackpottery (with 5 emphatic weak points: 1. 
> suspiciously tidy stats, 2. over simplified 
> cleanliness/harmonizability of notoriously messy data sets/types, 3. 
> tacked on genetics, 4. false precision for the sigmoid, and 5. the 
> Banda Aceh death toll ascription).
>
> ... Sorry, that bent quite hard into ad hominem as opposed to tu 
> quoque. My main reason for including this ... speculation ... here is 
> the relationship between knowledge and belief (I think the difference 
> is one of degree, not kind, which is why this possible crackpottery 
> appeals to me.) Hypocrisy matters most when one's counterfactual ideas 
> are *about* one's self. E.g. everyone knows "Do what I say, not what I 
> do" is reliable wisdom, because the speaker isn't really making claims 
> about their self. It's clearly aspirational. But when an "every 
> accusation is a confession" subject like evangelicals who commit 
> adultery or get arrested for CSAM, the hypocrisy does matter.
>
> I am still trawling The Corpus for scholarly informal treatments of tu 
> quoque. So this is just a note along the way. FWIW
>