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Appeal to authority may be a fallacy in strictly formal logical reasoning, but it's trivially shown in probabilistic reasoning (which is the core of scientific reasoning -- reasoning under uncertainty) that if the data supports experts being right in disagreements on claims more often than non-experts, then an expert making a claim provides at least weak evidence in favor compared to a non-expert's opposition, knowing nothing else about the claim's veracity. Unless you're arguing by trading Coq proofs, it might help to consider a probabilistic approach for natural language arguments with degrees of informality and stop fighting over the various fallacies that don't really apply outside of strict formal logic arguments and instead spend time seeking the truth. For more, see: http://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/2003-korb.pdf

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Oaksford/publicatio...

http://www.pfeifer-research.de/pdf/pfeifer08rh.pdf

I can see how Clausen comes off as snotty. But his response is pretty neutral, even if he praises peer review as a filter beyond its actual merits. He sees a lack of appropriate effort to establish the claim from a nobody, why should he not be skeptical of such claims in general? It's the same heuristic people like Aaronson make on being highly skeptical of the latest P==NP or P!=NP proof uploaded to arxiv.




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