I wish more people would remember this.

An argument from authority is not a fallacy in and of itself.

An appeal to false authority is always a fallacy, such as considering an authority's opinion on a topic on which they're not authoritative.

If the participants in a debate agree that an authority is legitimate, then an unchallenged appeal to their authority is not fallacious.

If an authority's opinion is contradicted by undisputed evidence, then an appeal to their authority is fallacious.

The whole point of the distinction is to admit authority as a valid source of information, in the absence of direct evidence, because we can't possibly reason from direct evidence in every single case.

> if the person in question is actually an authority in the domain

I haven't seen a name mentioned in much of the discussion here.

Who are we talking about from this list, and what else have they done? https://1password.com/company/

The truth of a statement is what matters, not who uttered it.

And, when you are unable to evaluate the truth of a statement for yourself, the expertise of the person making the statement is a helpful datapoint when deciding how much to trust it.

Right but there is no statement by competent person made here.

The audits could be classified as that but not "well they hire security people, they must know what they are doing!"

Hyundai hires engine developers and their engines explode nonetheless!

Sure it is: an appeal to authority is not a valid step in a deductive logical argument, unless you have somehow established that the authority in question is literally infallible.

Now, it's grounds for an (extremely) persuasive inference! And we know very little of what we consider known by strict deductive logic: we rely on weaker inferential reasoning the vast majority of the time. Grandparent's "means almost nothing" is much, much too strong.

But when we really want to know for sure that something is true, people are going to want to see proof, not a statement from someone who probably knows of proof.

> Sure it is: an appeal to authority is not a valid step in a deductive logical argument

Technically, unless you reinvented logic on your own, this in an argument of authority with extra steps.

If we're talking about fallacies, we're invoking old-fashioned classical logic.

The nice thing about having a notion of strict deductive reasoning is that it gives you an idea of what arguments might persuade someone of basic good faith, but who very much doesn't want to be persuaded. If you and your interlocutor don't both accept modus ponens then you won't get anywhere, but that's pretty unlikely in practice.

(And I'd actually argue that we each invent logic on our own and then notice that the logics are equivalent, but that's straying into metaphysics.)

If you want to go down this route, we know nothing of the real world from strict deductive reasoning because the axioms strict deduction flows from do not apply to the real world, but to mathematical universes where absolute truth is accessible to us. In reality, all statements we could use as premises are only probably true to a certain level of confidence, having themselves been constructed from inductive reasoning. Therefore, appeal to a good authority is as good of a step as any, by which I mean it's only provisionally worthwhile unless and until sufficient evidence comes in to demonstrate it is invalid in a specific case.

Absolutely we can't get very far with logic without relying on some axioms, and those axioms can't themselves be proven. But I don't think it follows that we need to accept every axiom someone proposes, such as what counts as a good enough authority. You and I probably agree on the basic existence and persistence of objects, for example, and we might as well pretend that we agreed to treat that as axiomatic ahead of time. I'm less sure that we'd have the same list of which people count as infallible-enough experts in which areas.

I'm really just here to stand up for the body of knowledge I learned in 9th grade Logic Camp. Good old classical Aristotelian logic is where the concept of a "logical fallacy" comes from; it really is all about deductive reasoning and not about inferences; and there really isn't a PhD-from-a-really-good-school exception to the fallacy of argument from authority. Just the same way that "X is false because George Santos said it" is simultaneously very persuasive, at least to me this week; and also a fallacy ad hominem.

> But I don't think it follows that we need to accept every axiom someone proposes, such as what counts as a good enough authority.

Nobody's saying we do, and I think there's a good middle ground we all actually inhabit where the director of the CDC, for example, is an authority on diseases when speaking in an official capacity, but we don't give a damn what they think about the latest movies. This isn't a difficult concept until we try to formalize it, really, at which point I'm sure we can run off into a bramble of paradox and bizarre conclusions we "must" accept in order to satisfy certain kinds of logical consistency.

> I'm less sure that we'd have the same list of which people count as infallible-enough experts in which areas.

This is a problem and we've seen it be a problem quite severely in recent years. Part of the problem is certain political groups following people with absolutely no recognizable expertise in anything except making money from people who don't recognize logical argumentation as even potentially useful: If it doesn't validate their pre-existing ideas, it's not only wrong, it's a trap laid by the enemy, and anyone who promotes it must be punished. Take that mindset, add some over-simplified and incorrect models of reality, and you have people who refuse to accept reasonable sources of authority for self-contradictory and purely emotional reasons.

Finally, logic has come a long way since Aristotle, and using some kind of consistent attempt at statistical reasoning is no less valid than declaring some probably-true statements to be axioms or postulates and reasoning deductively from there. Like diagnosing a disease: You can't use deductive logic to determine why you're having flu-like symptoms, you must use some kind of reasoning based on relative frequency of diseases and, possibly, incorporate the results of various tests in a more inductive fashion. "George Santos lies a lot" is a perfectly valid piece of evidence to incorporate into a worldview, just like "The seasonal influenza is more common than some horrendous infection which also initially presents with flu-like symptoms" is.

I agree about the problem —- I might quibble with the psychology, but close enough. But that’s exactly why the distinction I’m trying to draw is so important. If we keep in mind the difference between what we can rigorously establish and what we’re fundamentally taking on faith (however well-founded), then at least we can talk to people on the other side: clarify core disagreements, examine evidence, and occasionally, with entirely too much work, change a few minds. That may sound hopelessly optimistic, but shifting one mind in fifty would be an earthquake: for most purposes,’enough to declare victory.

Treat arguments from authority as indistinguishable from any other rule of reasoning, on the other hand, and there’s nothing to do but declare people who don’t share our view of authority irrational. And then I don’t know what the plan is.

It’s exhausting when people refuse to recognize well-established expertise, but I think it’s counter-productive that so many of us get defensive about it. Yelling at people to accept our authority figures isn’t working. It won’t ever work.

Here is where I think we part ways, philosophically speaking:

> If we keep in mind the difference between what we can rigorously establish and what we’re fundamentally taking on faith (however well-founded)

From my perspective, we're taking everything in the real world "on faith" (and there is a loaded phrase ripe to be deliberately misinterpreted) to a certain extent, and not just because of brain-in-a-vat arguments. For example, I sit in chairs thinking they're solid objects, but they're made of solid objects and might well collapse under me. In my experience, that doesn't happen to me, so my heuristic is that chairs are safe, but a heuristic isn't rigorous. It's "faith" if you want to phrase things that way.

Moving deeper, I trust that my senses provide me with accurate-enough reflections of reality I can use them to navigate my world safely, but I know enough about neurology to know that that isn't a given. Vision is reconstructed by the visual cortex from messy and incomplete nerve signals from the retinas, our sense of 3D space is reconstructed (based on low-level heuristics) from a pair of 2D images reconstructed from those messy retinal signals, and so on, from the bottom of the neurological hierarchy to the top of the conscious sense of self. The human machine lives off of best-guess reconstructions from incomplete and messy data.

This isn't mere acatalepsy, however: I think humans live in a physical world we're capable of perceiving accurately enough, and comprehending well enough, that we can accurately say we live in a real and comprehensible external Universe, and that some things don't go away even if you don't believe in them. Therefore, it's possible for our heuristic judgements to become more accurate at predicting reality over time, which is what separates knowledge from dogma.

Accepting that an authority is probably more likely to be right than wrong is a heuristic, and that heuristic can and should be improved, but all of our knowledge of reality is heuristic, so trying to treat reality like an axiom system is philosophically wrong-headed and incapable of dealing with the full complexity of reality as well.

I'd agree with almost all of that, but with two additions: I think we can locally approximate reality as an axiomatic system, with the axioms just being the stuff we've decided to treat as true for the moment. When the context changes what counts as an axiom changes, but that only rarely happens to me with chairs.

Second, I think there's at least a rough partial order on the things people propose as axioms: the order of how surprised I am when someone contests one, if you like. Very surprised, if it's the existence of external reality; not too surprised at all, sadly, if it's whether biologists are to be trusted over the pastor at their church on the origin of species.

The nice thing about that machinery is that when you meet the second sort of person, you're not forced to believe that they're fundamentally irrational and immune to all reason.

One more thing: trusting experts is a very convenient heuristic for me individually, and I use it all the time, but it's not epistemelogically all that useful. In principle you can always replace an appeal to the authority of a genuine expert with the evidence that they rely on to come to their judgement: if you can't, then they're speaking outside of their expertise. No one of us can win an argument on the internet that way; time is finite and we each only know so much. But if we all chip away at it, by supplying evidence where and when we can, we might get somewhere.

Appeal to authority is, instead of giving actual arguments you throw a name and say, "well, they surely know their stuff!".

Whether they know stuff or not is irrevelant to the fact person is trying to avoid having constructive argument.

So it could really be dismissed by "okay, they are experts, but how you're sure they didn't wrote it all on hangover?"