If...

[bellatrys]

all you can do in response to specific criticisms, is to invoke Authority - be it of official credentials, or age, or popular acclaim, be it on one's own behalf or on the behalf of others being criticized - and never once to actually address the specific criticisms made, then you're not going to get very far with me

Comments

[fastfwd]

What do you call it when you attack someone and, after they respond, you attempt to invalidate their arguments by claiming they might not even be who they say they are?

Is that more legitimate than "Because it says so right here in the Bible"?

"I do not think that word means what you think it means"

[bellatrys]

Perhaps you're new to these internets, and unfamiliar with the phenomenon of people pretending to be someone else, even someone else famous. But I assure you it happens in comment threads fairly often, on political blogs and on fandom ones, and so a certain amount of reasonable doubt is always present when someone hitherto unestablished shows up in a thread claiming to be someone prominent. (eg "Was that really Gail Simone?" recently on girl-wonder.org.)

However, even if you haven't seen that happen, you should still be able to grasp the idea that allowing that a poster showing up and throwing childish tantrums *might not be* the person they're claiming to be, is *complimentary* to the person whose name/handle is being used - ie, we're allowing the possibility (however remote) that Datlow isn't totally illogical and arrogant but only had her name taken in vain.

Re: "I do not think that word means what you think it means"

[fastfwd]

Oh, silly me. Perhaps I am too dumb to be on these internets. I did not realize that this lj was so important and renowned that bizarre people would come here and pretend to be famous people, just to annoy you.

What I should have said was, "So what do you call it when someone shows up to answer nasty remarks made about her and you invalidate her anger by calling her a troll and suggesting it's not even her?" I thought there might be a single term to describe how you can win an argument faster if you simply dehumanize someone. Then you don't have to treat her like a human being.

How dare she respond at all when only your point of view is acceptable anyway?

But you have a point. How do I know I'm talking to the actual bellatrys and not someone who has hacked this lj? This imposter problem is much bigger than I realized.

Well, I don't know it's really bellatrys. I can't tell. I am way too naive for these internets. I'm going to go over to cat_macros because over there, I can has cheezburger nao and it can be condescension tiemz from cats instead. And if I stay

But that *is* the point

[deiseach]

"I did not realize that this lj was so important and renowned that bizarre people would come here and pretend to be famous people, just to annoy you."

How, in the greater scheme of things, did The Real Ellen Datlow If It Is She ever hear of this small corner of the interwebs? And so fast?

Our hostess does not think she is so important that her slightest word has the Movers And Shakers of the fandom world cowering in their boots or hanging on her every word.

If someone came on the phone claiming to be Bertie Aherne wanting a word with me about what I'd posted on my blog about the recent government election here in Ireland, my first reaction would be "G'way, yeh chancer!"

I would indeed be very, very surprised if it really did turn out to be An Taoiseach.

Same applies here - "I'm Ellen Datlow and I heard you said mean things about me!" "Oh, yeah? Well, I am Marie of Romania!"

[lyorn]

I might misread you, but I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

When e.g. writing SF, it's not that important to understand general relativity, but to realize that unless you put a "tweak" in and make it in some way believable, you will have dependencies between speed, gravity and time, which are described by formulas in the textbook.

Of course, if any reader is arguing with you about the lack of FTL travel through normal space, you do not need to quote Einstein, you can just say, "because it's my world and I do what I like" -- privilege of the author. Most authors seem to prefer the occasional appeal to authority, though.

no, this isn't about fiction

[bellatrys]

(well, unless someone is using their fic as a platform to deliver A Lecture Unrelated To Story) - this is about someone saying in a RL argument "You have to accept my views of the way the *Primary World* is, because Grand Master X says that's how it is!" And usually not to do with "hard" science things, but re sociology/economics/ethics - precisely the areas that you can't run controls and experiments on easily or at all.

This is *extremely* common in liberal arts departments at college... so much so that there is an ancient humanities-fannish term for it, ipse dixit, "He said it", referring to Aristotle, because of the longstanding university habit of citing him and acting like that was a checkmate.

Obviously, if you don't start out with any respect for Aristotle, this will fall totally flat - which makes for comic effect when someone raised as a Doctrinal Aristotelian tries it out anywhere else. Likewise invoking St. Thomas Aquinas, or Plato, as endgame gambits only. (See also examples of people going "George Washington/Thos

Re: no, this isn't about fiction

[lyorn]

Mhm, your physics example got me into epistmological confusion, because IMO most of our world knowlege comes from extrapolation (often considered assumption and thus invalid), or book learning (going by what experts on the subject have said).

That's why

The sober, analytic explanation is that for an Argument for Authority to truly work, both sides have to understand thoroughly the matter under debate - which makes the Invocation of Authority utterly unnecessary.

seemed to me overly dismissive of existant knowledge. In the field I'm currently working in I'm utterly dependent on experts being correct with regards to medicine and physics, while the depth of my own knowledge is only enough to read and understand an article in "Scientific American" on the subject -- not to understand, verify or debate the process that led to the article. So if anyone asks, "What are you doing and why?" I'll be quoting experts like whoa.

I have gone over the Post That Brought This On by now, so I see your context a lot better.

I would also have

Okay, here's a pretty good summary of the whole fallacy

[bellatrys]

by someone who has a Ph.D. in the subject and not just a B.A. - not that that should sway you, mind you [VEG], and I disagree personally that only the Argument From Misleading Authority is bad, because the whole notion of an Argument From Authority is antithetical to science. It's (like Russell says) not *who* says something, but what they say & if true/false/sensible/unreasonable, that matters.

Sometimes the waters get muddied, or rather muddled thinkers/poor communicators muddy them, by mistaking giving credit to one's teachers/mentors/inspirers, and thus showing appropriate intellectual humility, for appeals to authority. But it shouldn't ever be too hard to sort out "I didn't come up with this btw, so-and-so did first that I know of" and "We know it's so because So-and-So said so". (And of course, like I noted at the outset, if the subject being argued is what phrasing/concepts were talked about, or who said them first, then "Bob said X!" is *perfectly* appropriate in a debate.)