Logical fallacies are viewpoints brought up during arguments which appear logical on the surface, but when you dig a little deeper are in fact mostly unfounded. One common fallacy is the appeal to authority, where you assume that just because someone is an "authority," that they have to be right. For example, "Pope Urban VIII said that Galileo's views were wrong, so since I trust the Pope I'm going to agree with the Pope and say that the universe is actually geocentric." Sometimes the flaw is that the "authority" isn't actually authoritative in the topic in question - the Pope isn't an astronomer, the President of the US isn't a meteorologist, etc. But even if the "authority" is actually an authority, that doesn't make him/her automatically correct. Even authorities make mistakes - look at Tycho Brahe for example. This is also the entire point of peer reviewed journals, to give the authorities the chance to duke it out.
So that said, when the NY Times Magazine devotes a 28-screen-long article to singing Freeman Dyson's laurels as a motivation for us to listen to his arguments about CO_2 levels, I find myself quite disappointed. Dyson is an authority on quantum physics and sci-fi concepts (such as the Dyson sphere, which led to Larry Niven's Ringworld concept/series); he is NOT an authority on environmental science. I don't care how many people think he's a genius, he isn't a genius in this field. And even if he were, even authorities can make mistakes. It is NOT appropriate for the NY Times to promote an individual's ideas based solely upon that individual's reputation. If the article were billing itself as a biography of Dyson's life, it could be an excellent one, but the article is trying to give us a view of Dyson's ideas and as such it is a remarkably poor one.
I guess in the end by expecting the NY Times to live up to its reputation, I too am guilty of putting too much faith in authority.
1 comments:
Oh, appeals to authority aren't as bad as all that. If a genuine authority on the subject says P, that gives me some evidence in favor of P. That evidence can be overriden in all kinds of ways, of course, but an authority is an authority for a reason, and sometimes turning to authorities isn't only reasonable but practically necessary. If I need decent information about some issue, but don't have the time or resources to go for anything conclusive, authority can be a huge help. That's a huge part of why most people can reasonably believe that the cars they drive are probably safe, or that the Wall Street bailout is probably necessary to save the American economy, or that the things their friends say are good for them probably are.
That's why I agree with you that Dyson's lack of a background in environmental science counts against the relevance of his views to the global warming debate, but disagree with everything else you say in the second paragraph. If he were as distinguished an authority on environmental science as he is in physics, it would be deeply relevant if he were strongly at odds with the dominant view in his field on an issue of great public importance. Even though he's not, just being a genius about something else gives him some (albeit significantly weaker) authority on enviromental science--probably enough to make it reasonable to pay attention to him, even if not to trust him.
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