@ryan It's an informal fallacy not a formal one, but other than that you're spot on.
Appeal to authority is always fallacious because people aren't right because of "who" they are, but because they were themselves able to present a compelling argument.
We don't know general and special relativity are true because Albert Einstein came up with them and we know Albert Einstein is really smart. We know they're true because the model he created explained gaps we already had in our understanding of Newtonian physics. And he wasn't right on all things, he was wrong on a lot of quantum mechanics, so being an expert who is really smart obviously didn't make him correct all the time. At the end of the day, reality is what chooses who is correct in science, not authority.
For an example of authorities who were consensus but were also wrong, the ancient Greeks were held as high authorities on many topics and they drove the consensus, and many of the theories they presented were simply wrong -- bile theory in medicine, elemental theory in the composition of matter, many other things, they were factually incorrect and led people down the wrong path, but because they were so respected their ancient analysis was the consensus.
Epistemologically there are limits to what can be known in general, but appeals to authority can cloud this reality. "Oh, an expert said it is true, they must know" -- but a lot of things we can't know for certain until the future comes and we can see what predictions comes true and which do not.
In the media, there's actually a surprising number of times that a "doctor" says something, and later it turns out that person was a chiropractic "doctor" (something that takes a couple years study at a private institution to become and is not a licensed medical doctor) -- and so the "expert" isn't one and is just saying something the media agrees with but isn't necessarily true.
We don't know general and special relativity are true because Albert Einstein came up with them and we know Albert Einstein is really smart. We know they're true because the model he created explained gaps we already had in our understanding of Newtonian physics. And he wasn't right on all things, he was wrong on a lot of quantum mechanics, so being an expert who is really smart obviously didn't make him correct all the time. At the end of the day, reality is what chooses who is correct in science, not authority.
For an example of authorities who were consensus but were also wrong, the ancient Greeks were held as high authorities on many topics and they drove the consensus, and many of the theories they presented were simply wrong -- bile theory in medicine, elemental theory in the composition of matter, many other things, they were factually incorrect and led people down the wrong path, but because they were so respected their ancient analysis was the consensus.
Epistemologically there are limits to what can be known in general, but appeals to authority can cloud this reality. "Oh, an expert said it is true, they must know" -- but a lot of things we can't know for certain until the future comes and we can see what predictions comes true and which do not.
In the media, there's actually a surprising number of times that a "doctor" says something, and later it turns out that person was a chiropractic "doctor" (something that takes a couple years study at a private institution to become and is not a licensed medical doctor) -- and so the "expert" isn't one and is just saying something the media agrees with but isn't necessarily true.
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