Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly
<i>Humans typically communicate in a way that resists shallow logical analysis. In a real conversation, people use words rather than terms, make utterances rather than sentences, and employ a wider variety of inference methods than modus ponens. A great deal of what is communicated and inferred in a conversation depends on context; the speakers and audience, their history, their shared knowledge and confidences, the feelers they lay out to establish mutual trust and rapport. Poking into this with your ad hominem stick betrays an ignorance of the way people actually communicate, and ignorance in general.</i><p>Well said.  And it's a lack of awareness of this point that often frustrates me about discussions here on HN.  I understand that most of us try to be mostly rational, most of the time, and that we want a high level of discourse here.  But too often, you see people acting like every discussion is high-school debate-club practice, and they start slinging "ad hominem" and "fallacy of the excluded middle" around like a high-school kid with a brand new super-soaker, eager to spray anyone in range.<p>But not everything that is said here needs to be treated like it was uttered as part of a debate.  Sometimes opinions are just opinions, sometimes anecdotes are enlightening, and sometimes generalizations, metaphors, analogies and other abstractions come into play.