Re:The Big Alien Theory
by moralestapia on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @04:34AM
(#27366329)
The fallacy lies in assuming anything connected w/ authority.
You wrote it yourself: Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, _or not_.
Re:The Big Alien Theory
by silvester23 on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @04:56AM
(#27366461)
Evaluating whether something is likely to be true is not the same thing as evaluating whether something is true.
If I'm in a windowless room and don't know whether it's raining outside, I might assume based on the season that it is more or less likely to be currently raining.
That does not mean that if I actually look outside in the middle of summer, I won't believe my eyes if I see raindrops.
> The fallacy lies in assuming anything connected w/ authority.
If we didn't take shortcuts in generalizations no generation would get further than the previous. Of course you can generally assume an authority on a subject is correct. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't question them, just that most of the time you'd simply be wrong.
OP does not make this mistake. He assumes the argument is probably not idiotic, because the author is probably not an idiot (in this subject).
Again, the fallacy is in assuming it must be correct (thereby bypassing the argument itself). Probably correct is a very different thing, and is why we have credentials in the first place. An idiot will likely make an idiot’s argument. It doesn’t mean he can’t have a spur of brilliance... but it’s not likely.
Alternatively, from a programmer perspective... the compiler is probably not the one that’s wrong. It could be, but it’s probably you.
Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, or not. That doesn’t mean it has no place is evaluating whether the argument is likely to be constructed well and without trivial mistakes. It also doesn’t mean authority is useless, just that it’s in no way the final say (the argument of course should hold up on its own)