Comment by shaki-dora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaki-dora | Hacker News Reader

The concept of "fallacies" is somewhat overdone, to the point where I'm tempted to coin the "fallacy fallacy".

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.

Fallacy fallacy exists: assuming that because a reasoning contains a fallacy, its conclusions must be wrong. They're simply unproven.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

Appeal to authority is a fallacy exactly because you can't trust New York Times just as you can't trust @TheyAreTryingToKillYou241234, but you do. An authoritative opinion is not an evidence.

So how are you supposed to make an informed choice on vaccination? You can't trust the NYT, apparently, and probably not the New England Journal of Medicine, either?

Do you just count the number of sources supporting the different views? That would seem to be some other, equally bad, form of fallacy.

Is there any sort of evidence that is valid in your critical eyes that can be transmitted electronically? Or does anyone faced with the choice to vaccinate their children have to run their own randomised clinical trial? That would seem prohibitively cumbersome, and also logically inconsistent because you would have to find a few thousand people willing to participate in your trial who shouldn't trust you not to poison them, by your logic.

In simple terms I'd say there are authoritative opinions and there is evidence presented by authorities. You may trust some authorities to provide you with all the necessary evidence to form an opinion, seek evidence from multiple independent authorities, etc. and form an informed opinion. But you cannot trust an authoritative opinion in a newspaper. Newspapers exist to make people trust them, to appeal to authority so they can influence people's opinions arbitrarily any way they see fit and sell that influence, pretty much guaranteeing you are not exposed to an informed opinion.

I don't quite the distinction you're making. A paper being published in a reputable journal is almost by definition relying on its authority. Even if they allow you to download the underlying data, it won't contain any personal identifying information of trial participants that you could verify.

> Newspapers exist to make people trust them, to appeal to authority so they can influence people's opinions arbitrarily any way they see fit and sell that influence

That just reads like some conspiracy theory. Newspapers get people to trust them by being reliable. I don't need to evaluate every single story they run when I have done so with some subset and usually found them to be correct.

> Even if they allow you to download the underlying data, it won't contain any personal identifying information of trial participants that you could verify.

Yes, that's a problem. That's why you need multiple independent authorities to get to a usable level of trustworthiness of information.

> Newspapers get people to trust them by being reliable.

If you are an expert in any subject newspaper reports on, you should be able to find plenty of evidence that it doesn't report anything how it actually is from your expert opinion. Best case it reports one tiny thing correctly and ignores all other facts important to make an informed opinion.

Trust is not a binary thing in this context. It is OK to believe that one source is more credible than another, and as such is more useful for guiding an opinion, while still being aware that it might be wrong or misleading. This is inevitable in a society that deals with too many complex issues to be an expert on everything yourself.

An extreme example: I do not, as far as I am aware, know any of the contributors to the most recent IPCC report, nor am I qualified to independently assess its correctness or able to reproduce its underlying experimental evidence. Does this mean I should not be concerned about the effects of global warming? No, because in the absence of any better sources, the IPCC report is the most credible material I have available.

The key thing here is that I am trusting the authors to be authorities in their own field of expertise. The appeal to authority fallacy is more like trusting Prof Sir Cumulus McCloud, who is a Nobel laureate for his research into a mechanism for global warming and the lead author of a large section of the IPCC report, on the best way to make cupcakes.

(That is, while it is fallacious to assume absolute truth based on authority alone, granting some credibility in proportion is not unreasonable. A different type of fallacy, sometimes called appeal to false or undeserved authority to distinguish it, is relying on authority in one field to establish credibility in another.)

Setting impossible standards only keeps you believing what you want to believe and what you already believe. It's logically equivalent to blind faith, you believe what you want to believe rather than what has most (even if imperfect) evidence.

You are forgetting that your status quo belief also has to come from somewhere, and its quality of evidence is probably worse than those alternatives you are attacking for not being good enough to change your belief. If it was better you would present it.

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