LogFAQs > #948335036

what dbs said was an appeal to authority,

"He's right because he's a doctor" is fallacious, because it relies entirely on his status as an authority figure to validate his opinion. "He's more credible than you because he's spent decades studying this matter and publishing works on it which any of us can read while you saw a youtube video once" is not fallacious. That's just the basic concept of evaluating sources before citing them.

Doctors and epidemiologists are not always right, but the only alternative we have to listening to them is to make it all up ourselves, and that's just dumb. The best option we have is to listen to them and trust that they're operating based on the best available data until they are found not to be.