Weclome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.
You probably know where this entry is going: An arguer's popularity has nothing to do with the validity of his arguments, hence it is a subject change. It's becoming a cliché in a number of media that the average person doesn't care about the truth if he can be comforted by lies.
Even if people did have an innate attraction to the truth, there are other reasons a website could be lacking in popularity: Lack of promotion, bad format, inclusion of uninteresting material, etcetera.
What makes this fallacy worse is that more popular science websites such as Pharyngula often get comments accusing the visitors of being "sycophants" and "yes men" and sometimes claim that the site's popularity is being used as the basis for its validity, rather than the arguments presented. Such posts, however, seldom refer to any of the actual content.
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Doggerel Index
3 comments:
Can I be Whats-her-face?
The other one in this category that I enjoy is when people equate ranking with popularity. The most famous (to me) being the time that someone at StoptheACLU accused Ed Brayton of fishing for traffic by linking to their posts (they're one of the highest according to TTLB and Technorati). Ed kindly pointed out that he gets several dozen times their traffic, and the only one profiting from his links was them. They were strangely silent about that one, if I remember correctly.
It doesn't make you any more of an authority on anything of course, but blogging about sex never hurts your popularity.
Just so y'know.
;)
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