I suspect that argument from authority, like "goto considered harmful" and Moore's Law, have entered the public consciousness in a warped popular form that barely resembles the original.
In topics in which I am not a subject matter expert, I can and should defer to the actual subject matter experts, absent very compelling evidence to the contrary. I'm not perfect at this, but I first read Epistemic Learned Helplessness at about the right time several years ago and it re-appears unbidden in my consciousness to hit me in the back of the head any time I start thinking an expert might be wrong in their area of expertise.
Reluctance to do this because of misguided applications of the argument-from-authority fallacy is probably one of the root causes of antivaxx, climate "skepticism", flat-eartherism, and other hot political topics with a vocal population who have convinced themselves that authorities are not to be trusted. You can never successfully argue for instance that "AGW is probably true because 98% of climate scientists agree with its foundations", because the answer is always, "that's the argument-from-authority fallacy", even though reliance on authority is the correct approach. What you inevitably get instead is two or more laypeople clumsily trying to debate the nuances of a subject that they have no academic background in.
I think the (or at least an) underlying issue is the conflation of arguments with their respective fallacies. Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them. It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most likely correct on this count.
Just like pointing out a slippery slope may be entirely correct; it's only a slippery-slope fallacy if there's no evidence that the slope is, in fact, slippery.
> Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them.
That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy.
> It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most likely correct on this count.
Sometimes this works (the Earth orbits the Sun) and sometimes it doesn't (sanitizing hands/scalpels is actually a good idea between dissecting cadavers and doing c-sections).
> Sometimes this works (the Earth orbits the Sun) and sometimes it doesn't (sanitizing hands/scalpels is actually a good idea between dissecting cadavers and doing c-sections).
This is actually a perfect example of the difference between argument-from-authority and argument-from-authority-fallacy!
Galileo didn't say "the Earth orbits the Sun because I say so and shut up." He said "the Earth orbits the Sun, here take a look."
Not fallacy.
The physicians who refused to wash their hands didn't say "washing hands has no measurable impact on mortality and here's our data to prove it", they said "gentleman doctors do not have dirty hands, and shut up."
> That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy.
This is the point where branding things as fallacies breaks down, and is very much the point of the article.
Calling “argument from authority” on somebody’s point is one of the weakest rebuttals you can provide, because you’re not really tackling the substance of the argument.
In this case, “98% of scientists agree that AGW is happening” implicitly says “and I have all the arguments provided by those 98% on my side”. Presumably, if AGW isn’t happening, their arguments are wrong somehow, and you should be able to point out how. It’s not just appeal to authority, it’s saying “here’s a big body of research, tell me where it went wrong”.
Ultimately, nobody is an expert on everything, and heuristic thinking has to take over at some point. Overwhelming expert consensus is a damn good heuristic to go by.
> Ultimately, nobody is an expert on everything, and heuristic thinking has to take over at some point. Overwhelming expert consensus is a damn good heuristic to go by.
Sometimes.
I don't know enough about physics to even really understand the standard model. I still believe that it's pretty much true.
However this approach is a bit limited. There simply aren't experts in macroeconomics that could convince me of anything on an appeal to authority basis in that same way.
Ultimately, arguments are much cleaner and more convincing if you can simply and directly argue the point. For those arguments that are not so amenable, expert consensus may be a practical alternative, but at best it's a least bad choice, not something to be lauded.
That's a very interesting approach in the article, and yet something like that will likely never see the light of day. In my opinion much of the blame for the decrease in public trust of experts lies with the experts themselves for their lack of epistemic honesty and apparent disinterest in self-improvement.
It seems to me that another name for this vice is something like the Dunning-Kroeger effect, or, equivalently, simple laziness. Sure, I might think that I've found a mistake in general relativity or something. But I also know, or I should know, that physicists have put in years and years of work to understand those arguments and I just haven't.
So the failure to exercise an appropriate degree of epistemic learned helplessness might also be interpreted as a failure to recognize, or a lazy unwillingness to accept, that acquiring subject-specific knowledge---as well as subject-specific metacognitive knowledge to indicate to one that one lacks substantive knowledge, takes actual work which one has not put in.
> "In topics in which I am not a subject matter expert, I can and should defer to the actual subject matter experts..."
i'd contend the word 'defer' is too strong. one should accept that SMEs have made reasonable arguments based on information you don't have (like the many wrong lines of reasoning they've already attempted). "epistemic learned helplessness" would then lead you to defer to the expert, but that's not the only rational response in every case.
there's a different skill, discussed secondarily in the essay, for sniffing out bs. that's probably best termed 'wisdom', or informed meta-pattern-matching. so another rational response is to use your wisdom to decide how much to trust the expert. trusting the expert is not necessarily an either-or thing.
I also like to think of it as a lack of imagination in how deep knowledge in an area can go, in terms of people with advanced degrees in a given field. Its either that knowledge for them is shallow, or that the principles that apply to their knowledge area apply elsewhere. At the same time, people with advanced degrees in an area are the only people who are constantly contending with what humanity DOESN'T know about a subject, so they are less likely to position themselves as authoritative. Experts saying they're making calculated guesses which in reality have a 5 9s chance of being true can wither to the bystander from an argument from someone who speaks with absolute ignorant conviction.
I suspect that argument from authority, like "goto considered harmful" and Moore's Law, have entered the public consciousness in a warped popular form that barely resembles the original.
In topics in which I am not a subject matter expert, I can and should defer to the actual subject matter experts, absent very compelling evidence to the contrary. I'm not perfect at this, but I first read Epistemic Learned Helplessness at about the right time several years ago and it re-appears unbidden in my consciousness to hit me in the back of the head any time I start thinking an expert might be wrong in their area of expertise.
Reluctance to do this because of misguided applications of the argument-from-authority fallacy is probably one of the root causes of antivaxx, climate "skepticism", flat-eartherism, and other hot political topics with a vocal population who have convinced themselves that authorities are not to be trusted. You can never successfully argue for instance that "AGW is probably true because 98% of climate scientists agree with its foundations", because the answer is always, "that's the argument-from-authority fallacy", even though reliance on authority is the correct approach. What you inevitably get instead is two or more laypeople clumsily trying to debate the nuances of a subject that they have no academic background in.