thaway321

>"Appeal to authority" doesn't apply to actual authorities in their domain – otherwise you would never be able to call expert witness at a trial, for example.

Not OP but I disagree, an appeal to authority can be any authority, even those that are experts in the field. Even the most knowledgeable experts make mistakes, so appealing only to authority is not enough, granted I haven't read the paper nor have any stake in this issue, so it's possible that when the op appealed to authority they were actually trying to appeal to the arguments presented in the paper by proxy, which is fine. But a bald appeal to authority is always flawed, and expert witnesses are just a concession the law has to make to get anywhere. In the words of Richard Feynman; "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".