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by tshaddox 1520 days ago
Just to be clear, there's very little you (or any readers) ought to conclude from the fact that you know who Guido van Rossum is but are unaware of those other people.
1 comments

Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment, so I'm inclined to trust a known factor over three unknown ones. And he's known for good reason. Reputation is a thing. I figure I'm not alone.
> Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment

This is a classic example of the Halo Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect).

I trust his intellect and judgment for Python, and that's it. I don't trust him for programming in general, for example, let alone a completely different arena.

There's much better arguments for/against crypto than appeals to authority. Consequently, you then cited an appeal to majority to defend your appeal to authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Granted, the crypto debate on HN is pretty well hashed & Guido's tweet doesn't add anything to the discussion besides making clear where he stands on the issue

I don't care about logical fallacies in this case because the world doesn't work in a purely logical way. If programming was purely logical, it wouldn't be so fad-driven, for instance. And reputation ends up being one of the best ways to filter out useless noise in basically every useful discovery system we programmers have come up with.