It's exactly relevant to the claim that "the article" is "quick to proclaim" anything. The article is quoting the claim of someone who isn't rash at all.

We don't know that. The article didn't back up these quotations with reasoning, it just assumed that they were fact. This is pretty much the definition of an appeal to authority. A superior article would lay out how and why such disconnects exist; I have no reason to believe they do other than one person I'm never going to meet having said so.

No, an appeal to authority is when you say that because someone is an authority in one area, they should be listened to in another. In this case, this is her focus of study. I'm sorry if you think it's fallacious, but I'm gonna give the person who has studied the subject a little more weight than some rando on the internet.

> No, an appeal to authority is when you say that because someone is an authority in one area, they should be listened to in another.

It's really not.

You're not only mis-using appeal to authority, but you're now using argumentum ad nauseum to boot. You're wrong, and you're not advancing the discussion.

It also helps to keep in mind the distinction between logical fallacies, used in a strict logical sense, and strength of argument. The case here is one of "what is the evidence to support a belief?", not "are the argument's predicates and conclusions logically valid in a strict sense?".

The original argument was that the article was "too quick to proclaim". The rejoinder was that this wasn't the article's conclusion, but that of an expert on the subject.

The discussion has been advanced, the initial claim invalidated, and additional relevant information provided.

To reject the conclusions of the article simply because of an appeal to authority, without also presenting a stronger claim that the authority is invalid, doesn't advance the argument.

To persist in that is tiresome.

A key question is whether or not the authority in question is credible. I've engaged in any number of discussions where showing credibility is at issue, and showing a particular source's good faith or record of admitting error (or not relitigating falsehoods) is crucial to qualifying or impeaching a witness. Again, you've not done this.

Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" is popular around here for various reasons. The derived graphic on hierarchy of disagreement is also strongly recommended.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarc...

You might also want to catch up on your logical fallacies and how/when they're appropriate or not.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html http://www.skepdic.com/authorty.html http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority...

Note that key to these is the question of expertise.

You know I'm not whoever you were arguing with, right? I'm just here to point out that you might want to double-check a definition.

(Oh, and it's "ad nauseam", not "ad nauseum." HTH!)

Wrong. Appeal to authority (argumentum ad vericundiam) says that: because Ms. X is an expert on Y, this statement she made about Y must be true.

There's no condition requiring the subject matter to be outside her area of expertise, in fact it wouldn't make sense there - since she's not an authority on areas not her expertise, it can't be an appeal to authority in that instance.

It's still not relevant to the point, as this is her field of study. I would trust her to know what's going on before any random doofus on the internet.

If by "I trust her to know what's going on" you mean you would put faith in a proposition she makes based solely on her domain knowledge, that's literally the fallacy.

Sure - trust her to know the data in the space better than some random doofus. That's sensible, and why we have experts.

That doesn't mean you can grant her extra consideration when evaluating the soundness of the argument she makes with that data as support - the logic contained in that argument does NOT depend on her being a domain expert, but on being a good logician. That's what the fallacy points out.

I don't think we're disagreeing, but I wanted to clarify the distinction between her being a field expert and her being an argumentative expert.

Argument to authority and argument to expertise are two different things.