What irony? People want to have authorities that can be appealed to, so if you value epistemic rationality, just saying it’s bad to appeal to authority won’t work as well as capturing the drive: providing authorities who can be appealed to in order to support memes beneficial to epistemic rationality, including that it’s bad to appeal to authority. If you leave the drive uncaptured, someone else can capture it.
It’s ironic in the same way that adding the text “DEFACING STOP SIGNS” under the main text of a stop sign is ironic.
The method used is the very one which is being condemned / warned against, and the fact that it works better than other methods (in both examples) only adds to the irony, as one should assume that something that preaches not doing exactly what it’s doing would invalidate itself, rather than its actual effect of producing greater results due to a quirk of humans.
-- Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”
(Yes, I am aware of the irony of appealing to authority to mock someone who says we need to defer more to established authorities.)
What irony? People want to have authorities that can be appealed to, so if you value epistemic rationality, just saying it’s bad to appeal to authority won’t work as well as capturing the drive: providing authorities who can be appealed to in order to support memes beneficial to epistemic rationality, including that it’s bad to appeal to authority. If you leave the drive uncaptured, someone else can capture it.
It’s ironic in the same way that adding the text “DEFACING STOP SIGNS” under the main text of a stop sign is ironic.
The method used is the very one which is being condemned / warned against, and the fact that it works better than other methods (in both examples) only adds to the irony, as one should assume that something that preaches not doing exactly what it’s doing would invalidate itself, rather than its actual effect of producing greater results due to a quirk of humans.