[JonShartwell]

I don’t know, the criticism in OP seems pretty substantive to me. I don’t know much about this subject so I can’t really weigh in on how much the post makes sense but regardless appeal to authority is essentially the opposite of modern science. That’s why nullius in verba has been a motto of science for 300+ years.

On that point, scientists don’t need you to chastise people for questioning their authority online. I think a lot of them would be offended at the idea that you think that is what they want.

[panda-giddiness]

> I don’t know, the criticism in OP seems pretty substantive to me.

That's because it's a straw man argument. As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, the OP's concerns are addressed in the actual papers, which the OP conveniently ignores.

> appeal to authority is essentially the opposite of modern science.

Well, it's a good thing they're not doing that then. An appeal to authority is when you rely on an expert's prominence in one field to justify their opinions in an unrelated domain, e.g. putting credence in a software developer's pontifications on imaging black holes just because they're good at software. "Appeal to authority" doesn't apply to actual authorities in their domain – otherwise you would never be able to call expert witness at a trial, for example.

[thaway321]

>"Appeal to authority" doesn't apply to actual authorities in their domain – otherwise you would never be able to call expert witness at a trial, for example.

Not OP but I disagree, an appeal to authority can be any authority, even those that are experts in the field. Even the most knowledgeable experts make mistakes, so appealing only to authority is not enough, granted I haven't read the paper nor have any stake in this issue, so it's possible that when the op appealed to authority they were actually trying to appeal to the arguments presented in the paper by proxy, which is fine. But a bald appeal to authority is always flawed, and expert witnesses are just a concession the law has to make to get anywhere. In the words of Richard Feynman; "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".

[panda-giddiness]

> expert witnesses are just a concession the law has to make to get anywhere.

I'm not sure why you don't think that applies here? Only a slim fraction of the population is knowledgeable enough to grok the methodology of EHT.

I mean, if an appeal to authority were as you defined it, then engineers would be making an appeal to authority when they invoke Newton's laws (after all, they haven't derived them), biologists would be making an appeal to authority when they write python code (after all, they didn't write the python compiler), and so forth. Trusting that specialists can do their jobs isn't a logical fallacy – it's a type of inductive reasoning and, critically, a type of reasoning essential for the modern world to function.

[fesoliveira]

>I don’t know much about this subject so I can’t really weigh in on how much the post makes sense but [...]

Then how can you say the criticism seems substantive? He brings nothing to the table to show that his criticism is valid, it's basically "I don't like, therefore wrong". The proper way criticize their paper would be conduct your own experiments using their parameters and methodologies and show that the results you obtain do not match theoretical results or results of other observations through other means.

>On that point, scientists don’t need you to chastise people for questioning their authority online. I think a lot of them would be offended at the idea that you think that is what they want.

We question their authority on this specific subject they seem to be criticizing. If you make a claim without having at least the background to support said claim, what value does it have? It's the same as a person without background in microbiology or virology claiming vaccines don't work when they don't even begin to understand the science behind it and the mountain of evidence that says otherwise.