Logical fallacy poster

"Appeal to authority" doesn't even seem like much of a fallacy to me... If I'm an argument with a non-physicist on whether faster than light travel is possible, and I'm a non-physicist myself, am I better off explaining some elementary understanding of physics I happen to have or quoting a famous physicist?

I would think that a summary of the understanding of a famous physicist would be much stronger Bayesian evidence than some elementary secondhand physics explanation from me.

Of course, an entire physics textbook, complete with citations of key physics papers and findings, is probably stronger Bayesian evidence still.

Edit: Looks as though the poster addresses my point:

It is important to note with this fallacy that authorities in given fields may very well have valid arguments, and that one should not dismiss another's experience and expertise. To form an argument, however, one must defend it on its merits i.e. know why the person in authority holds the particular position that they do. It is, of course, entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not.

It sounds as though they're saying it's okay to borrow arguments from people in authority, but they're unclear on whether just taking their opinion at face value is okay.

To make your own personal estimate as accurate as possible, it seems like you'd want to average together independent estimates from many people that were familiar with the relevant arguments and evidence, weighting folks according to their expertise/prediction track record. It seems silly to privilege your own estimate. So I'm definitely in favor of relying on this sort of authority for making your own personal estimate, but you might not want to share them to prevent information cascades. See also.

so the poster provides an immediate pop quiz. feature not a bug?

Isn't that what posters are (usually) supposed to be?

What exactly is an applause light? Based on Eliezer's post, I see it as a description of a goal, without any specifics on how to achieve that goal. I'm not sure I see that in this poster; the poster presents an implied suggestion on how to reason better (look for fallacies like these in the speech of yourself and others).

If you're suggesting that being able to avoid these logical fallacies falls out of reading Less Wrong automatically, and the poster is therefore preaching to the choir here, that's a different allegation.

But, at least in my own experience, the sanity waterline of (say) an undergraduate dorm is typically so low that hanging something like this on the wall for communal reference might tend to improve the level of conversation.

Indeed. It's easy to fall into the Nirvana Fallacy and forget just how stupid humans are by nature and how just considering these points would lead to a significant rise in the waterline.

It's not obvious to me that Bayesian reasoning implies that slippery slopes always happen. In short, I don't understand your assertion.