FWIW, much as I get annoyed by Michael's constant negative comments about Google (experiences which are fairly foreign to my own experience there), they are still his experiences. Take them with a grain of salt, but take everyone's experiences from the Internet with a grain of salt.
Also FWIW, I have a number of friends who are generally shiny happy people who were basically ground down into dust in their Ph.D programs. They stayed for the whole time and not just the first year, but around year 4-6 even the most mentally stable and cheerful of them start saying things like "My life is miserable. I just want this to be over."
MOC: I spent a year in graduate school. Life-wise, graduate school is a pretty negative experience.
Shardling: Probably worth pointing out that MOC has an extremely negative view of many of their life experiences.
That's exactly the form of an ad-hominem argument: Person A makes a statement, person B brings up some fact about person A that would lead them to make that statement, ergo person A's statement is invalid. The problem here is logical, not personal: just because MOC has made negative statements about other things does not mean this negative statement is without basis.
I read no such personal opinion into your post: I'm attacking your logic, not your tone.
Ad hominem attacks are when you imply that someone's argument is invalid because of their background. That's what makes it a fallacy -- the validity of someone's argument is completely unrelated to their personal qualities.
In contrast, when someone offers an anecdote about their experiences, or in general offers their subjective judgement, then knowing something about them is damn important! For instance, if I knew MOC was a compulsive liar, that would certainly be relevant. Likewise, if MOC was in general an optimist who was loath to ever say anything negative, that would lend extra weight to their comments on grad school.
FWIW, much as I get annoyed by Michael's constant negative comments about Google (experiences which are fairly foreign to my own experience there), they are still his experiences. Take them with a grain of salt, but take everyone's experiences from the Internet with a grain of salt.
Also FWIW, I have a number of friends who are generally shiny happy people who were basically ground down into dust in their Ph.D programs. They stayed for the whole time and not just the first year, but around year 4-6 even the most mentally stable and cheerful of them start saying things like "My life is miserable. I just want this to be over."