Why logical arguments are bad arguments

[benji]

"appeal to authority" is only bad when people don't like the authority, "oh that researcher has a clear agenda and was discredited ages ago by other people I already trust implicitly, so you can safely disregard everything they said"

No, appeal to authority is bad because it relies on the unspoken premise that the authority is considered valid by both people. It changes the debate and argument away from itself to focus on the claimed authority and almost never any argument of the authority only its conclusion. It's an attempt to circumvent argument not an actual argument. Appeal to authority isn't citation within an argument, it's a suppression of argument. If you and I are debating if it's raining outside me telling you that the Weather Channel says it is does not trump your argument that we should look out the window. The appeal to authority comes when I ask if you think your amateur looking outside really trumps a multi-billion dollar organization full of experts.

Also generally, appeals to authority come about in the form of appealing to their authority in some other manner to mean you should accept their authority in all things. The most typical example being Paul Krugman's New York Times column where his status as someone who has written an economics text book on mundane rarely disputed basics means you should listen uncritically to his pronouncements on every aspect of society. Or see another form of authority where proclaimed expertise on Biblical canon means your authority about God's unknowable divine plan trumps observation about what orbits what.

In fact, the use of logical fallacies that article is referring to is itself an appeal to authority, a trump card, once you identify the person's logical fallacy you link them to the website and declare victory. This is itself poor reasoning because it assumes that if you find a flaw in reasoning the person must give up their conclusion and adopt yours. In most instance it's the premises, not the reasoning or conclusion, that's the actual source of the dispute. The Born Again type like on ResetERA.com is a good example where the person doesn't challenge their premises (or the reasoning really) they simply change definitions of sins and sinners.

Searching for logical fallacies isn't a panacea because many of the worst arguments are perfectly logical.

I have no idea why that Popper article bothers wasting time with Rawls, it's the exact kind of appeal to authority I'm talking about. That because Popper said it, we should agree. The fact that Popper wasn't stupid enough to say it in the form the meme uses it and that the meme openly calls for the state to suppress the speech of anyone the state does not like plus the fact that the meme favors suppression of the meme itself needs no appeal to an authoritarian authority like Rawls who actually spends most of his time explaining why the state should be presumed to be allowed to violate liberty whenever it wants to.