The use of "we" is not "faking an authoritative voice," it's just a standard feature of a certain kind of formal writing. I'd be happy to pillory the paper for

The use of "we" is not "faking an authoritative voice," it's just a standard feature of a certain kind of formal writing. I'd be happy to pillory the paper for being bad, but let's not fault the author for at least conforming to standard conventions and making it easy to read and dissect. Waggoner's article is actually more bizarre to me on the second read. The claim does not appear to be that the paper bad, just that interested, non-credentialed amateurs don't get to have (public) opinions, no matter how well-reasoned. While I'm highly skeptical of armchair epistemology a priori, there are plenty of criticisms of the (un)linked article that are more interesting and educational than pointing out it's written by someone without a PhD in epistemology.