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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

> And given government advice around the world, it seems pretty clear that masks are understood to do more good than harm.

That's an appeal to authority. It also doesn't mean it's incorrect but it's not evidence of anything.

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An appeal to authority is a good reason to believe something if the authority can be understood to be knowledgeable. It's especially useful in cases where your readers can't all be expected to understand the nuances of the decision making involved and you want to avoid appealing to emotions (which works better). What basically never works are appeals to logic, frequently even here (a place which explicitly stimulates it). The reasons for why it doesn't work here (miles of text with pedantic arguing, usually not a lot of substance) are different for why it won't work in public (people don't feel like doing that with you, usually) but they are there.

Especially in a case such as this an appeal to authority can be useful, as there is a big bad-faith storm of "discussion" surrounding the subject that really isn't doing anyone any favours.

True, but you can never use it to prove that something works, especially in a case like this where governments are acting under time and information constraints.

Use the force, Luke.

It is not enough for the authority to be knowledgeable, their incentives must also be aligned. If people appeal to the authority to do something, then it may do whatever is expedient regardless of merit.

With limited knowledge, I'm inclined to go along with measures that are low cost and have a plausible explanation wrt. effectiveness. That being said, if the mask situation has shown us anything, it's that the authorities are neither trustworthy nor competent.

What would be an example of misaligned incentives in the case of mask wearing? A fabric maker conspiracy?

How did the mask situation show that authorities are not trustworthy or competent?

I used 'understood' because it is what I believe the scientific consensus to be. Since I do not use this for anything else, there is no 'appeal to authority' in my original comment.

That said, let me double down and state that I wholeheartedly recommend using the scientific consensus as a prior for your opinion on any given topic. :)

"Appeal to Authority" is a crap fallacy (or maybe a crap name for a fallacy). "Appeal to hierarchy" might be a better description.

Otherwise going to a doctor for a sickness, or hiring an engineer to build a house would be fallacious as well.

(And give the amounts of PhDs that are incompetent or just crazy in areas they should know better is astounding but I digress)

It's... Either badly named or applied without nuance. It's not about situations like "they're an expert on X, therefore I trust their opinion on X". Instead it's for "they're an authority on something, therefore if they have opinion on X, I should trust it".

It’s not a crap fallacy, it just doesn’t always apply. It’s a fallacy only in the case that you are trying to establish a strictly logical argument (in the mathematical sense). “You should do this because that expert said so” is a rational argument, not a logical one.

Your are conflating what is practical with what is true in logic and argumentation. It is practical to accept our doctor's diagnosis because we trust that the medical system produces competent doctors and because of constraints on our time. If you claimed that a diagnosis must be true because it came from a doctor then you would appealing to authority.

When you trust your doctor or lawyer, you're also appealing to authority. It's not wrong for a person on the ground to look to various national/international institutions as signal (evidence) for a hypothesis, and to adjust as their life experience guides them.

It would be if the reason the advice was given by governments was NOT at the behest of doctors/scientists fighting the pandemic. However it is, so in this case the governments are just the messenger best able to broadcast the message and ensure a high level of compliance.

I'm pretty sure at some point in history most governements were aligned to say that homosexuality is a mental disease.

Don't trust anyone but yourself.

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