[clairity]

you see this sort of (religious) appeal to authority prevalently on topics like mask wearing, with phrases like “based on science” and “science tells us...” to justify largely politically-based beliefs, in many cases citing administrators or doctors (who are generally not first and foremost scientists) as ‘evidence’ (npr & nyt literally does this every day).

science has told us so far that masks might help at the margins, but hasn’t proven it, which indicates it probably shouldn’t be counted on as a primary mitigative measure, but the public signaling value is just too irresistible for the believers (transmission principally happens in private where social norms oppose mitigative measures).

[BlueTemplar]

Doctors' hands on experience gives them a special kind of knowledge pretty close to scientific. Also, science doesn't really proves, but rather disproves, and the "softer" the science, the harder it is to get any certainties... (And medicine, unlike biology, is a soft science.)

[clairity]

it's not that doctors don't have specialized knowledge that might be stochastically predictive in specific cases, but that their experience, especially around something like a pandemic, skews their perspecive in ways that are very difficult to self-identify and compensate for. and that's on top of doctors holding their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views too.

in other words, expertise is narrow, and treatment experience isn't research.

[BlueTemplar]

Everyone has their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views. I would not discount doctors' specialized knowledge as 'not science' (or worse, 'not evidence'). You just have to remember that medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).

[clairity]

that's intuition, not science. that doesn't mean it's not useful, it's just not useful as science. the point of the appeal to authority fallacy is to identify and unbias us against that kind of rhetorical trap in argumentation.

[marketingPro]

I don't understand this. If I spend my life designing bridges I still have to prove it with math. What kind of medicine is not science but "hands on"?

[BlueTemplar]

Bridges are a good example. You have to remember that bridge building (as pretty much any field of engineering or even science) didn't start out as math-first, but as experience-first. And there's really no opposition there, after all whole fields of science (the 'soft' sciences) don't (can't) even use math ! Medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).