Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote:
Which would, in turn, be an appeal to authority. The whole thing comes down to some fallacy or other.
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Well, a citation of an appeal to authority as a formal fallacy is often misused in popular usage. Formally all it means is that being an authority does not in and of itself make a stated proposition true. So as an expression in formal logic it is a fallacy. However, that said, I'll take the advice of my podiatrist on how to fix my ingrown toenail over the advice of the intoxicated, schizophrenic fella who was babbling on about spiders down near the post office this afternoon... No, the podiatrist isn't necessarily right just because he's a trained and an authority. But he's also vastly better positioned to have a more informed and substantiated opinion than the nut-case.
Lots of folk talk about who is good, not good, etc. I'll give the assessment of an experienced, well trained person who actually worked with various folk a greater weight over the assessment of a random guy on the internet who has never trained with any of them. It doesn't make them absolutely right, but... I would guess folk would hold your advice on computer networking and operating systems over mine any day of the week. As they rightly should. So you do your best, you weigh the relative merits and experience of the observers and you move on with the experiment...
Otherwise maybe I should just go ask the crazy fella to pull out that other ingrown nail for me. Hopefully he'll spit some cheap vodka on it first to make sure it's sanitary...
