If they have salient points that stand up to rigor, then yeah? This is pretty much an appeal-to-authority argument, isn't it?
FWIW, I have no context on the specific claims made by Peterson, but I've increasingly seen a line of logic that suggests you need to have a PhD in a topic in order to think critically about it.
No. If the parent comment said "because Jorden Peterson has 20 years of experience, his opinion on topic X must be correct" then it's an appeal to authority. They didn't say that.
By the way, abusing terms is another sign for fake intellectuals...
I didn't say my argument must be true because I have a PhD. I said you should trust that I'm not talking out of my ass because I have a PhD.
I'd much rather you read my arguments and criticize my content.
The fact is, criticisms in these things come from all angles. I was simply preempting one type of criticism in saying I have a PhD so I have thought about this and studied it a lot.
And then directly responding to another (that reddit is full of crap) by saying the content is what's important anyway.
I'm not saying I'm right because I have a PhD. In the post I drectly say "I'd much rather you read the arguments anyway"
Sigh, why do his qualifications matter… You should be asking if his argument is sound and backed by evidence instead. People with PhDs have been wrong many times in the past.
In most cases I disapprove of flaunting academic credentials to strengthen an argument, since that is just appeal to authority. But in this case I feel it was relevant to your question.
> If the argument is sound and based on correct premises
Therein lies the rub. The problem with a layperson doing this kind of analysis is that they might not even realize that certain beliefs are unfounded assumptions. Obviously experts are also vulnerable to the same thing, and they can have other biases, but they won't make the unintuitive mistakes that their field has learned to avoid through empirical study.
I guess what this argues for is peer review, which I suppose is what this comments section is in a sense. But the article doesn't link to any criticism, nor does it seek it out.
The point from this post that really resonated for me was pointing out that the author if the original paper, even while claiming that arguments should be based on merit and not on expertise or credentials, went out of their way to project that they had that expertise and those credentials. Its disingenuous.
You are incorrectly stating the Fallacy of the False Appeal to Authority. Citing an expert in their area of expertise is not an argumentative fallacy.
I have no views as such on the study in question. I just know that there is a study by an expert and there are bko’s objections to it. Which one is more believable? I think it is much more likely that you are wrong and he is right.
I’m guessing you haven’t read the professor’s work. The academic work he published and not an article in a magazine. So you don’t know if your objections have been accounted for in his work. You won’t take an expert’s claims at face value and instead trust your judgments on an issue you have no expertise on? This reminds me of Asimov’s famous quote.
One side is producing research papers and other sources. You are saying you have a PhD in this area so trust you.
I do not know you, I do not know if the PhD in question actually qualifies you to speak on the subject, and I do not know if it did that you would actually be fully up to date on the subject. I do not necessarily want to dismiss this out of hand as an appeal to authority, but as a layperson, you do not making a convincing argument when it boils down to "Listen to me, I have a PhD, trust me over these other people who have PhDs who are also publishing peer reviewed papers that disagree with me."
Those examples of appeal to authority are a lot more nuanced than I’ve generally seen. It’s generally more blunt, like “we interviewed 5 PhDs about climate change and they all state that there’s no good evidence to support it.” Those PhDs however, were not experts in a domain that could validate an assertion on climate change.
The more nuanced versions in the examples make an uncritical assertion, based on an appeal to an authority in a closely related domain, to overturn an established set of “validated facts” (for the domain, say what you want about a religious creed).
I see this phenomenon on HN and Reddit quite a bit. Some expert will publish a paper and there is inevitably a comment of the form, “The conclusion could be a result of...therefore the paper is trash.” People act as though their initial ruminations on a topic qualify them to properly critique an expert's research.
I try to keep in mind that if I could think of a possible objection or insight with a few minutes of thought then the expert is surely aware of this too. I think it’s common for someone who has acquired expertise on one area to think their insights apply to other unrelated areas. For instance Paul Graham has famously bashed philosophers but he certain doesn’t know what he is talking about.
I don't think all examination of qualifications constitutes a genetic fallacy. If anything it's closer to an argument from authority plus a closed-world assumption (i.e. I only accept arguments from authorities). But expertise and authority has a significant role in science, and not entirely an improper one imo. If I say that I prefer to hear expert analysis of nuclear reactors from someone with a PhD in nuclear physics, rather than from someone with a PhD in another field, that seems like a decent epistemological heuristic. The qualifications don't prove anything about the argument, but in general I expect people with relevant qualifications to know more of the relevant facts, so am more willing to defer to their judgment.
It's doubly the case when the original article author promoted the article as being by an "MIT PhD". If someone is explicitly invoking their credentials to add weight to an argument, investigating whether the credentials are relevant seems reasonable.
Just wanted to point out: the appeal to authority argument is only a fallacy when the cited source is not a legitimate authority.
Theologians would want to disagree, but I would argue that an overwhelming number of scientists does constitute a legitimate authority on whether or not something (god or otherwise) does or does not exist.
It is precisely because their advocacy for metaphysical idealism is unusual for people with their academic qualifications that they are worth mentioning, and why its worthwhile to listen to them explain their positions at length.
Appeal to authority is where you present a person's status or credentials as primary evidence that their argument is correct. I've done no such thing here.
Yes it does, but that doesn't make their arguments valid. My whole point is not to keep experts out, but to judge the content on its scientific merit alone.
interesting, but i want to nitpick on the appeal to authority:
> This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.
Such arguments are fallacious even when person A is a well informed individual who is sufficiently well qualified to understand the subject. Not recognising this misses the spirit of the fallacy - that all claims must be substantiated and that prior performance is /completely/ irrelevant as to whether any individual claim is valid - even when that experience makes it the case that person A is the foremost expert in the field.
Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is. Put more correctly: experts know better, but aren't perfect. For example, were I to cite Peter Duesberg, a well known virologist, about HIV transmission, I'd be wrong, even though he's an expert virologist.
I assign higher priors to subject matter experts until I have reason to believe otherwise.
FWIW, I have no context on the specific claims made by Peterson, but I've increasingly seen a line of logic that suggests you need to have a PhD in a topic in order to think critically about it.
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