I guess this is just an extension of your principle, but when people do give reasons why they think Harry Potter as literature is bad beyond Rowling, I get frustrated (because critiquing and rating fiction is a general hobby of mine). I agree with some of the harsh criticism of HP, while some of the other critiques seem like silly motivated reasoning. Whether those flaws are enough to give the work an overall bad rating is a subject for another day (I myself enjoyed Harry Potter as a kid and don't regret it, I would be more critical of it today as an adult hough), but the reluctance to admit its potential merits and explore why it became so popular is unfortunate. It might even mask more interesting critiques that go unnoticed. We were able to do so for Lord of the Rings, despite Tolkien's politics being arguably worse.
Assuming the speaker is truthful*, this argument seems perfectly valid to me, though it is best read in reverse
“So and so was always the worst, even before this bullshit, I could tell by his whole ‘sensitive’ guy thing. Never trust a man who cries in public 🙄”.
In the correct order
Never trust a man who cries in public 🙄. I predicted that so-and-so was a bad character because he cried in public. Now my prediction has been validated, and his badness has been exposed"
This is logically the same as "Einstein's theory predicted the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit, and his prediction was validated, therefore we should believe, or at least give more credence to, Einstein's theory"
*If dealing with a person who might not be perfectly truthful, I would want to see evidence that the prediction was actually made.
The problem with the Rowling Roll isn't that it has no argumentative force for the conclusion that, say, sensitive men are terrible- it does have some argumentative force. The problem with the Rowling Roll is that it cunningly makes it difficult to push back against the claim that sensitive men are terrible without looking like you're defending the bogeyman of the week.
I guess this is just an extension of your principle, but when people do give reasons why they think Harry Potter as literature is bad beyond Rowling, I get frustrated (because critiquing and rating fiction is a general hobby of mine). I agree with some of the harsh criticism of HP, while some of the other critiques seem like silly motivated reasoning. Whether those flaws are enough to give the work an overall bad rating is a subject for another day (I myself enjoyed Harry Potter as a kid and don't regret it, I would be more critical of it today as an adult hough), but the reluctance to admit its potential merits and explore why it became so popular is unfortunate. It might even mask more interesting critiques that go unnoticed. We were able to do so for Lord of the Rings, despite Tolkien's politics being arguably worse.
Assuming the speaker is truthful*, this argument seems perfectly valid to me, though it is best read in reverse
“So and so was always the worst, even before this bullshit, I could tell by his whole ‘sensitive’ guy thing. Never trust a man who cries in public 🙄”.
In the correct order
Never trust a man who cries in public 🙄. I predicted that so-and-so was a bad character because he cried in public. Now my prediction has been validated, and his badness has been exposed"
This is logically the same as "Einstein's theory predicted the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit, and his prediction was validated, therefore we should believe, or at least give more credence to, Einstein's theory"
*If dealing with a person who might not be perfectly truthful, I would want to see evidence that the prediction was actually made.
The problem with the Rowling Roll isn't that it has no argumentative force for the conclusion that, say, sensitive men are terrible- it does have some argumentative force. The problem with the Rowling Roll is that it cunningly makes it difficult to push back against the claim that sensitive men are terrible without looking like you're defending the bogeyman of the week.
As Rowling's case illustrates, people's reasoning often starts with what would be the conclusion, and the rest is rationalization (as per https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).