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The title's use of "Harvard" is interesting in that it hints at appeal to authority. Imagine that the astronomer were based at Lackawanna College. Would that i
by apo 8y ago
The title's use of "Harvard" is interesting in that it hints at appeal to authority.
Imagine that the astronomer were based at Lackawanna College. Would that information be worth conveying through the title?
"Lackawanna College Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua"
I doubt it. The problem with appeal to authority is that there's no place in science for it. Not only that, appeal to authority undermines science itself.
As Carl Sagan put it in The Demon-Haunted World:
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/535475-arguments-from-authority-carry-little-weight-authorities-have-made https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/535475-arguments-from-autho...
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIn a way, quoting Carl Sagan is an appeal to authority in itself. If the same words were said by /u/RandomRedditUser, the quotation would carry less weight. You could also see the "Harvard Astronomer" and "Carl Sagan" here as appeal to expertise, for which university association is an imperfect proxy.
- apo 8y agoI see how it could be interpreted that way. But my purpose was to credit the author and his book. Had I left the quote without attribution and claimed it as my own, I'm sure someone would have suggested I should take a refresher on plagiarism. Ditto had I paraphrased Sagan without attribution. If I had merely given the quote without a link or context, I'd run the risk of perpetuating false quotes. Had /u/RandomRedditUser written the text instead of Sagan, I would have cited it in the same way.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI'm not criticizing the way you quoted Sagan; what I'm trying to say is that there's no escape from any kind of "appeal to authority". There's too many people saying too many things that are too expensive to evaluate on their own merits; we all use heuristics to filter and rank stuff. Appeal to authority/expertise is one of those (and, as all heuristics, imperfect).
- nwienert 8y agoThis is news, not science. The science will come after. If Linus Torvalds makes a bold prediction about Linux, it carries more weight. Likewise here.
- apo 8y agoThe creator of a work has unique rights over that work. There are literally authorities on created works. They are the "authors." I think what Sagan is getting at is that no such relationship between scientists and science exists. Although the author of a scientific paper can be an authority on it, that authority doesn't extend to the subject of the paper.
- dekhn 8y agoif I want to convince somebody of something scientific, I point them at a textbook written by an authority (say, Bruce Alberts, who wrote Molecular Biology of the Cell). For each fact in the book, it contains citations to the original scientific publications (most of whom were written by authorities, but some simply by experts). Probabilistically, it seems like authorities are the least likely to be wrong.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- x1798DE 8y agoThis is not an appeal to an authority, though (which you acknowledge with your "hints at" comment). An argument from authority is of the form "this guy is at Harvard, therefore his argument is correct." What is happening here is that the popular press is using the professor's association with Harvard as a heuristic to determine whether or not to take him seriously enough to publish his arguments. To a first approximation, this is a reasonable thing to do, because it's using the prior probability of someone having something interesting to say to guide your choice of where to devote your scant attention. By no means is this a substitute for an actual substantive evaluation of the claims being made; when that happens, you have fallen prey to the appeal to authority fallacy.