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pokes head in and looks around Okay, I'm new here, and maybe I shouldn't open by poking a sleeping dragon, but I can't help but try and take a small crack at this. firm nod
As I understand it, the crux of the article is concern about irrational arguments which imply that valid points and rational arguments should be discarded if they are somehow associated with irrational, unsuccessful, or commonly disliked people. Many of the comments on the conservatives quote seem to ignore that context.
Also, debating the semantics of the article rather than its core meaning (Whether or not the word "evidence" should be used to describe such, for example) is counterproductive, distracting and not really assisting people in learning rational thought.
That said, I feel that even out of context the point is still valid. One major and somewhat flawed assumption in many of the comments here as well as consistently elsewhere is that smart people are more likely to arrive at the "correct" answer than stupid people.
Stupid people often arrive at the correct conclusion, either by luck, or because a question isn't actually very difficult, or because they may listen to the advice of others.
Smart people often arrive at the incorrect conclusion, as they do not (and can not) always gather enough evidence to make a sufficiently informed decision, and sometimes take false advice or evidence under consideration.
Both smart and stupid people can and will often lie about their findings for many reasons, or they may disagree over what defines the correct conclusion.
Such associative statements are therefore so weakly weighted as evidence that they are only really worth mentioning if no other evidence can be found, and an argument which relies solely on such weak data as this is not to be trusted as truth.
At best, it may serve as a cautious guess until more reliable evidence can be found, which would quickly render the opinions of unreliable people (be they stupid or smart) obsolete.
In the Charon's orbit example, this would be less like using small weights in a room (Which is very fine, very precise evidence), and more like trying to track Charon's movement using blurry pictures taken at random across the entire night sky. If some of them had inaccurate timestamps.