I think you're ignoring the role of psychology. I think you do this very explicitly in your first comment:

>some Silicon Valley developers, one of the highest paid professions in one of the highest paid areas of the world, only made a decent salary instead of a fantastic total compensation package?

The relevance of the integrity of the managers to the ways people make decisions that determine the course of their lives is not something to be taken lightly. This applies even if the consequences themselves do not appear to be so dire. There is a distinctly painful feeling that comes along with devoting your life to someone who abuses that. For those familiar with this perception, the idea that you could ignore it is preposterous. From your perspective, whatever it may be, it could beyond your imagination and experience.

You might say this:

>Is it really 'heartbreaking' when someone's 17-year-old cat dies? It's a normal and expected outcome; plus, not only were they lucky enough to afford a pet and keep it in good health, the animal itself hasn't lost much, considering it's limited cognitive capacity.

And yet anyone who has been through or even near this situation would find the argument to be incredibly callous, because the formation of human emotion has so much more to it than simply evaluating one's present situation.

I understand the sentiment that perhaps nobody is entitled to a fantastically large amount of money and that people living what we call the good life are a small minority in the world. However, that just isn't the story here.

Connections between humans are what make society possible. It's reasonable to care when they are abused.

The comment you quote was trying to point out that they will recover from this, and have a fantastic career ahead of them.

It was not meant to be a comment on how it feels today, or to suggest that we shouldn't feel empathy for them because of their future position.

I just meant that in a few years they'll look back on this and laugh, which makes it story much less sad. Do you disagree with that?

Look, I'm coming from the perspective of an outsider. OP seemed to suggest it is heartbreaking to read about Zynga, which is what I was responding to. If one of my close friends was working there, I would absolutely feel a different way.

Similarly, if I read about a kid's cat dying on the internet, it might just make me feel a bit down. When my dog died, heartbroken was exactly how I felt.

Yes, I'm sure everyone will eventually recover from being worked to the bone and having faith in someone who essentially cheated them.

Well, okay, maybe some of them might have been under a lot of stress and that might affect their personal life and even health or life expectancy.

Maybe some of the talented people who might have a fantastic career ahead of them won't recover and become jaded or leave the industry altogether.

Maybe none of that is heartbreaking, strictly said. It's "highly unfortunate" or "really sad", perhaps.

What really grates is your decision to nitpick about the choice of words because you saw something that was even sadder on TV.

I don't know, I kind of read your comment to say that unless you're dying some horrible death you shouldn't be using the word "heartbreaking" to describe the plight of someone. I think it would be heartbreaking for someone to toil away their time with family and friends in the hopes of a payout only to have it blow up in their face. Relationships do die and health does suffer from the strain of some peoples endeavors. While you can say that these programmers and artists brought it upon themselves and took on that challenge, at the same time there is enormous pressure by employers and the culture itself which reinforces the notion of grinding away and sometimes poor work/life balances.

I think it's very hard to define exactly where your slippery slope of perspective begins and ends. Bottom line is that greater injustice is never an excuse for injustice. Neither are acceptable.

Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument and not a logical fallacy. While the argument doesn't prove or disprove anything, it can show inconsistency. For example one person might say "I think taking the middle ground is always a good thing" and one might reply "So the middle ground between Hitler and Stalin is good then?", if the first person were to say "no" he would have exposed an inconsistency in his logic, rendering his first statement all but useless.

While there was a "reductio ad absurdam" in there, it appears that term was used in error. From the rest of the post, the complaint appears to have been about an alleged "straw man argument".

I have no comment on the issue, I just wanted to point out a terminology confusion.

You are both right. My use of the term was in error. I meant to say it was reduced to absurdity while being presented as an inevitable logical conclusion, which is a straw man argument.

Without the straw man, reductio ad absurdum alone is just a tool, not a fallacy, as you say.

By way of being pedantic -- reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy. Showing extreme consequences by taking assumptions to their conclusions is perfectly valid. That's the whole point of reductio.