I know that your post was supportive and appreciate your comment, as well as the other FRiends I tagged in my rant, and I apologize for going so far off-topic.
TXnMA lists ":-( Buttons" on his home page. Trollish behavior, especially personal attacks - is among mine, but I put my reactions in the simmer bin and often don't post them until I've had some time to cool off, if I elect to post them at all. My Internet troll-stomping days are far behind me. I try to give folks the benefit of a doubt, avoid confrontations and frankly, I find arguing with idiots to be a waste of time. TXnMA is obviously
NOT an idiot and his knee-jerk reaction to a perceived attack on his profession is understandable. But, his lack of tact, self-control and logic reveals he is common-sense challenged. You cannot win people to your pov by demeaning them.
Full Disclosure: I work with PTSD and TBI veterans (as part of my own PTSS therapy) and have seen the results of such confrontations turn very bad, up-to and including violence and suicide. As a scientist, I'm sure TXnMA has encountered Newton's third law and should be prepared to have it bite him in the @$$ when he goes over-the-top.
I've mellowed with age, but once in a while, other-wise intelligent people offend my sense of courtesy and fairness. As a Christian for over 5 decades, I really try to turn the other cheek, but once in a while one must armor-up and stand your ground.
The straw-man rhetorical technique is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than your opponents actually offer. It is not a logical fallacy to disprove a weak argument. Rather, the fallacy lies in declaring one argument's conclusion to be wrong because of flaws in another argument.
One can set up a straw man in several different ways:
1. Present only a portion of your opponent's arguments (often a weak one), refute it, and pretend that you have refuted all of their arguments.
2. Present your opponent's argument in weakened form, refute it, and pretend that you have refuted the original.
3. Present a misrepresentation of your opponent's position, refute it, and pretend that you have refuted your opponent's actual position.
4. Present someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, refute their arguments, and pretend that you've refuted every argument for that position.
5. Invent a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs that are criticized, and pretend that that person represents a group that the speaker is critical of.
For example, one might argue that "
Charles Darwin believed in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, which has been discredited (by scientists). Therefore, Darwinian evolution by natural selection did not occur." This is a straw man fallacy because the Lamarckian ideas of inheritability of acquired characteristics aka "soft inheritance" were only a small part of Darwin's overall theory; the fact that he was wrong about them does not prove the theory as a whole to be false.
Rather than address my comment in a reasoned argument, it was bombarded with personal attacks, an assertion that he knows the mind of God and testimony that he's NEVER encountered a genuine scientist who claimed that "
Science is infallible" - a text-book straw man. That I've never met in my profession a genuine clown without a sense of humor does nothing to prove they do not exist.
To get back on topic, the subject of the article under discussion concludes that scientists, based on their previous observations, conclusions and testimony about "a textbook example of a Type II-P supernova" were victims of yet another scientific fallacy which they previously held as fact.
I recall being taught the "origin of Earth's Moon" in my 5th grade science class some 50+ years ago. It was presented as undeniable (infallible), settled fact and my test grades depended on regurgitating the "correct" answer. In my lifetime I have seen no less than 7 alternative "scientific"
theories about the Moon's origin (and that doesn't include the multiple hypotheses of "Ancient Alien Theorists" from the
Church of Giorgio Tsoukalos who is not a "genuine scientist", but plays one on TV and the Internet and is pied-piper to millions across the globe who hang their salvation on his every theory about ancient alien "gods". Perhaps that early encounter with science as fact informed my current skepticism. This is in no way proof, nor do I assert that all "settled" science is flawed, only that my God has a cosmic sense of humor.