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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta

Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and a long-time researcher into public health policy: https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, with a long history of research into epidemiological models: https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...

All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology.

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> All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology.

That was true as of January 2020, it is no longer true now. I don't know about Gupta, but both Bhattacharya and Kulldorff (and Ioannidis) are being hated by most of their colleagues at the moment.

I would even conjecture - in 10 years, if you are a recent PhD/fellow from one of those labs, you will have a very tough time in the job market.

Bhattacharya (and Ioannidis while we are talking about Stanford faculty) have gotten a lot of pushback and by no means represent any sort of consensus.

Well, just like Fauci has gotten a lot of pushback and by no means represents any sort of consensus.

From the Wikipedia link you posted:

> She is one of the primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-discredited paper[15] which advocated a focused response to the COVID-19 pandemic based on levels of individual risk.[16][17] The World Health Organization, as well as other numerous academic and public-health bodies, have stated that the strategy proposed by the Declaration is dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis.

Cool!

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

More like “defeasible”.

It’s not deductively valid in the same way that modus tollens is, but it is a often a good heuristic: the authority wouldn’t be recognized as such if they weren’t often correct in their area of expertise.

Thus, it’s fine to find an appeal “rationally compelling” as long as you bear in mind that the authority is also not infallible.

The reputation of an authority is not a rebuttal to an argument. It's simply a lazy way of of avoiding the argument by substituting the burden of proof to the identity of the authority.

Not in a formal, deductive way but it’s not obviously wrong to initially give an authority a bit of credence.

In this particular case, you brought up Bhattacharya‘s credentials. If another plausible expert disagrees with him, we’re at worst back to where we started; the fact that there’s a consensus he’s wrong, rather than just two dueling authorities, pushes back even harder.

It's not an appeal to authority. It's pointing out that the overwhelming scientific and medical consensus is against this trio.

...but that’s what you’re doing?

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