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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority.

Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.

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The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context.

Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context.

There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.

A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy.

In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.

It's not an "appeal to authority", it's a qualification to speak on the subject. I used to work at Microsoft, but why would you care about my guess as to the internal workings of the Google+ team?

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