Me to Grok:
Cherry Picking. I want to argue that this phrase is simply ad hominem. When you don’t have a counter argument you charge your interlocutor with “cherry picking”.
BUT — and here’s the thing — EVERYTHING is cherry picking.
Whatever facts or argument one quotes are necessarily going to be a selection from the whole. One doesn't recite all the academic papers on a subject. You quote a BIT of it. You cherry pick. Editors do it every minute of every day to put out newspapers. These are the very definition of Cherry Picking.
Charging someone with "cherry picking" is rather like charging someone with "using words". Of course I'm using words! We all do. Just as we must all cherry pick. We can't recite the whole of everything that's known about a subject, even if we knew it.
Please help me make my argument. Sharpen it. Give it guts. Do it in as short a from as you can.
Grok to me:
The charge of “cherry picking” is usually ad hominem.
It is the move you make when you have no answer to the evidence presented. Instead of engaging the facts, you attack the person for having selected them.
But selection is not optional. It is the precondition of all argument. You cannot quote an entire paper, recite every statistic, or narrate the full historical record. Every claim, every article, every editorial, and every conversation is a curated slice.
Newspapers are machines for systematic cherry-picking. So are academic papers, court arguments, and political speeches. The question is never whether selection occurred. The question is whether the selection misleads.
When someone replies “cherry picking” without showing that the omitted material actually reverses the conclusion or outweighs what was presented, they have not made a methodological point. They have made a personal one: you chose badly because you are arguing against me. That is textbook ad hominem — attacking the arguer’s character or motives rather than the argument’s substance.
Real cherry-picking exists. It is the deliberate suppression of known contradictory evidence. The casual accusation, however, almost never demonstrates this. It simply registers discomfort that the other side found data that hurts their position.
In practice, “cherry picking” has become a thought-terminating cliché used to avoid having to do the harder work of rebuttal.
My Comment:
Grok is right to point out that Cherry Picking can and often is ad hominem. But it can be bad if it misrepresents the data.
The whole discussion.
