Note that appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy- because scientific arguments are not pure logic. Instead, we use priors (authority) to evaluate the quality of statements. |

I don't agree the pandemic response was filled with malicious falsehoods; the public health officials acted in good faith. I think most people haven't benen public health officials during a global emergency and fail to appreciate the challenges of threading all the needles simultaneously.

X: We shouldn't listen to health experts! They got it wrong at the beginning of the pandemic when they told us not to buy or wear masks, and therefore they are wrong now too!

Y: Wait, that doesn't make sense.

X: Strawman!

Y: Oh sorry sir/madam; you are correct. Please carry on.

They are used far too often to shut down some debate: Oh, you want to do this yourself? Not-Invented-Here-Syndrom! Oh, you want to buy from a reputable vendor? Appealing to authority!

I believe the "appeal to authority" fallacy is especially misguided: it's impossible to verify every statement we rely on from first principle. At some point, when the New York Times has an article highlighting the benefits of vaccinations, while @TheyAreTryingToKillYou241234 on twitter says the MMR vaccine will cause your kids to grow a second head, it is perfectly fine, or even necessary, to consider the source of some information as evidence in evaluating it.

This mechanism, of evaluating sources of time and establishing trust, is so pervasive we tend not to even notice it. You are far more likely to hand your car keys to your spouse when asked than to a random stranger.

I'm making the point that often times, appealing to authority is most likely to produce the correct answer.

But you can gain some idea of probability that something is correct or incorrect. For example, if 99 of 100 doctors agree that vaccines do not cause autism, that does not necessarily mean that vaccines do not cause autism. But chances are really good that the 99% of doctors are correct.

Nice job giving the formal name of a logical fallacy, though. Adds a lot of credibility to your argument!

You do buy arguments from authority every time you listen to your doctor's advice regarding your health. It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to consensus expert opinions on climate change and if you think they have changed their phrasing over the years by assuming the sale it’s because they no longer have doubts about the cause of climate change.

While I'm here, another problem with things like this is the tendency for people to use them as an argument-refuter-o-matic. Indicating an argument is fallacious is not a rebuttal of the argument: it's merely an indicator that the argument is incomplete. Using fallacies to rebut an argument is, somewhat ironically, itself a fallacy.

But note there's also something I like to call the "Fallacy Fallacy": People read the wikipedia list and consider them some sort of universal natural law.

Case in Point: "appeal to authority". This can indeed be fallacious, within the context where these were formulated, which is probably academic publishing. If someone says they've created an HIV vaccine, it would be very wrong to start using it without clinical trials just because the inventor is some famous researcher.

If you try to apply the same to daily life and online debate, you're going to wither and die within a month.

Example: you're experiencing chest pain. What do you do? You see a doctor! Do you subject them to a quiz on heart disease, and do you re-run every trial that contributed to your treatment? Of course not -– it would cost trillions and take many lifetimes. Instead, you trust your countries certification scheme, and you trust the scientific establishment. Both are authorities.

When you return to your favourite restaurant, you are extrapolating expected future performance based on past experience. in other words: you trust them. Or in even otherer words: you consider them the authority on Fried Chicken and rely on that to guide your decisions.

There are only two ways to gain an understanding of the world around you as needed to do anything: direct experience, and what others tell you. The fraction of required knowledge that you can individually verify from first principle is probably somewhere below 1%. For everything else, you need to rely on other's direct experience, by continually fine-tuning individual measures of authority by comparing to direct experience where possible, and integrating with other sources where not.

I'm not sure the "appeal to authority" is about that though. If it was meant as you describe it, it could just be called "appeal to a biased authority" or "appeal to a non-authority" and everyone would agree it is fallacious to do so.

Take your example: "Trusting your doctor when you are sick is not an instance of fallacious reasoning".

According to the "fallacy" people, this IS actually a case of fallacious reasoning. It amounts to saying:

"His opinion on this medical matter is correct because he is a doctor"

whereas (they maintain), his opinion could just as well be wrong, and you can't tell without examining the individual specific case thoroughly, through actual examination, not quoting past expertise.

ad hominem - someone you know to receive large sums of money from cigarette manufacturers gives you several plausible sounding reasons why cigarettes don't cause cancer. It's an adhominem to doubt his arguments based on your knowledge of how he's getting paid, but it's also sensible.

argumentum ad populum - an argument isn't necessarily true just because lots of people believe it, but in the absence of you being able to work out the absolute truth from first principles, it's completely sensible to take into account what other people believe when you evaluate your options, or what people in your situation have typically believed (appeal to tradition)

denying the antecedent - red sky in the morning implies shepherds should take warning. It's not true to say that just because there isn't red sky in the morning, then shepherds should assume the weather will be fine, but excluding one of the conditions in which shepherds need to be careful is weak evidence that shepherds will be fine.

The old 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' one, although I didn't see it on this page. Actually it is. It is weak and incomplete evidence of absence, but in the right circumstances it can be perfectly reasonable to change your opinion on whether something is present or not based on a lack of evidence for it being present.

In the real world, weak evidence is often the best we're going to get and we're often going to be in situations where thought shortcuts are necessary and valuable.

Pointing out fallacies is usually poor argumentation. My pet peeve on this one is the 'burden of proof'. Normal human debate isn't a game with strict rules and a judge that awards points, and I'm not sure it'd be any better if it were. You engage in a debate with someone when you both want to change the other persons mind. If you didn't want to change their mind you shouldn't be debating with them. You're very unlikely to change their minds by telling them that the burden of proof is on them not you (much more likely to end up arguing about who really has the burden of proof, a fruitless and uninteresting topic).

1. Appeal to Authority

An appeal to authority can be a good sign that someone does not actually know what they are talking about and are regurgitating the words of some pundit. However, the progression of human knowledge at the rate we enjoy it today entirely depends on specialists of their particular field deferring to the knowledge of an authority outside of their field. And laypeople have basically no criteria to use to select which authority will tell them what they “know” except for perceived credibility of the authority (see “Ad Hominem”). A simple example is the roundness of the earth. Can most people derive from first principles an empirical method that would allow them to witness first hand the curvature of the earth? No. Most people must take the word of scientists and mathematicians this for this at face value (at least, they did until airplanes and photography were invented). In the scheme of things, though, it's relatively simple to demonstrate that the earth is round; other things are not so simple. The sum total of human knowledge is built upon a hierarchy expertise and authority where each higher layer depends on the correctness (or correct-enough-ness) of the layers below, the vast, vast majority of which individuals at the top layers cannot verify even a little bit, let alone 100% (Hierarchy might not be the correct model here but it's a simple short hand). When two non-experts in a field are arguing about something, practically speaking, they are either depending on the knowledge of a multitude of authorities or they are talking out of their asses. 99.9% of discussions regarding any given topic online could probably be said to fall into one of those two categories.

2. Ad Hominem

As being able to trust in the authority of experts is such an important aspect of confidence in your conferred knowledge of something, you must consider the reputation of that authority when choosing what to believe. As such, if you do not have the expertise to personally establish on a factual basis that what someone is saying is wrong, you can only consider the credibility you perceive them to have (or become an expert yourself, which is simply not a scalable approach). If someone is telling you that a salesman has a reputation of selling faulty products, it is not fallacious reasoning to use their lack of credibility to inform your decision not to buy whatever they are selling, despite your inability to personally examine the quality of the product for sale. Or, I should say, it is considered fallacious but is actually not flawed reasoning by any useful metric.

The above “fallacies” are rooted in, essentially, tools that we must use to make decisions at a reasonable pace. Pointing out that someone has used one of these tools isn’t particularly productive when they are a necessity. I’m sure there are more like this, but none come to mind at the moment. There are more “fallacies” still that are just plain abused, for example, the Slippery Slope. People misunderstand this one, unfortunately. They see a slippery slope argument and think “Aha! That’s a fallacy! You are wrong!” I’d call this the fallacy fallacy but that would be saying that their only mistake is to ignore the substance of the discounted argument. The problem is, there actually ARE slippery slopes! It’s an exercise in taking a process to its natural conclusion given that several steps naturally follow. The fallacy only occurs when the slope isn’t actually that slippery or the steps don’t naturally follow.

There are, of course, fallacies that practically always result in flawed reasoning, such as Circular Reasoning. Some of these I think it’s safe to just call them out as totally garbage.

In summary, some arguments are mis-identified as fallacious, often the Appeal to Authority, Ad Hominem (and to a lesser extent the Slippery Slope, among others), because their inclusion on the list of fallacies makes people think reasoning that relies on them can never be sound. This belief could not be further from the truth.

That's not the only kind of argument that exists though, and we're pretty unlikely to be in that kind of argument on the internet talking about current events. When trying to tell from incomplete facts what's more likely to be true, listening to what an expert says is a pretty good start.

It might be the "rational thing to do" but it's not a logical argument -- which is what makes it a fallacy.

Fallacies can often be the logical thing to do. E.g. an "Ad Hominem Fallacy" might save your ass when the other person puts forward a perfectly logical argument, but to serve their own selfish reasons to your detriment. An "Appeal to hypocrisy" can serve to highlight when the person you debate with wants you to stop doing something (because eg. they say its bad) but keeps for themselves the benefits of keeping doing to (and thus gets the upper hand on you). And so on.

Still, like those things "Appeal to authority" is not a logical proof based on the content under discussion (and axioms, logical steps etc), but a "because X says so" on the status of person X (eg. their expertise).

That's what makes it a fallacy. Whether what that person says is true or not, or even whether it's more likely true than not, is irrelevant.

In either case, it's not a logical proof (in the formal sense) nor a definite proof (the person with the expertise could for example be lying to further their interests, or mislead for some other reason).

In the context of a formal argument, the act of quoting Henry Ford would have been either the fallacy of appeal to authority (if the quote's provenance were meant to demonstrate its veracity), or the fallacy of bare assertion (if it were meant to stand on its own). I didn't invoke those fallacies because I understand that, outside the context of a formal argument, appeal to authority is a reasonable heuristic, rather than a fallacy. There's nothing fallacious about saying, for example: "Most doctors recommend getting vaccinated, so you should probably get vaccinated."

In this context, my reply is also not fallacious: it's reasonable to doubt the reasoning ability of a vicious anti-Semite, particularly on the subject of nefarious bankers, which is closely intertwined with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

And you presume that I am arguing on behalf of authority, as opposed to giving an example of a "large mass of humans who believe the same thing". You haven't discredited them, you have only mocked me for choosing to believe in an expert body. That is fine, and we should always question authorities and their methods.

But flippantly saying "How is this not making an appeal to authority" is frustrating. Yea, so what? Are the authorities wrong? Unless you can answer that essential question your needling on this point is irrelevant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority