To be clear, it's not me who's bringing up the authority of anyone, it's the article's author who does: he's the one calling people "giants of AI".
Which he clearly does to give his own article authority, that it wouldn't have otherwise. He wouldn't write a whole Substack piece to criticise something some random, anonymous user of FB, HN or Twitter wrote. He has to comment on the "giants of AI", otherwise his piece is basically irrelevant, just another voice adding more noise on top of the constant cacophony of opinions on the net.
The same way, when Geoff Hinton resigned from Google, a whole bunch of articles in the lay press (The Guardian, NYT, others I don't remember but scanned briefly) introduced him as "The Godfather of AI". A clear ploy to make the article interesting to people who have no idea who Geoff Hinton is, or what he's done for "AI" to be called its "godfather" *.
It would be much more straightforward for the article author to criticise the opinions he disagrees with by saying something like "Yann LeCun says so and so. I disagree because this and that". No need to say anyone is a giant of anything, to make a big, splashy impression to your reader. If your opinion has weight, it can make a splash all by itself. If it doesn't, tying it up to a "giant" will only make it sink faster.
HN has a similar guideline, in fact:
>> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Basically, an appeal to authority is really the flip side of an ad-hominem: it tries to shift attention to the person, and away from what they said.
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* It's because he, Bengio and LeCun are the Deep Learning Mafia.
Which he clearly does to give his own article authority, that it wouldn't have otherwise. He wouldn't write a whole Substack piece to criticise something some random, anonymous user of FB, HN or Twitter wrote. He has to comment on the "giants of AI", otherwise his piece is basically irrelevant, just another voice adding more noise on top of the constant cacophony of opinions on the net.
The same way, when Geoff Hinton resigned from Google, a whole bunch of articles in the lay press (The Guardian, NYT, others I don't remember but scanned briefly) introduced him as "The Godfather of AI". A clear ploy to make the article interesting to people who have no idea who Geoff Hinton is, or what he's done for "AI" to be called its "godfather" *.
It would be much more straightforward for the article author to criticise the opinions he disagrees with by saying something like "Yann LeCun says so and so. I disagree because this and that". No need to say anyone is a giant of anything, to make a big, splashy impression to your reader. If your opinion has weight, it can make a splash all by itself. If it doesn't, tying it up to a "giant" will only make it sink faster.
HN has a similar guideline, in fact:
>> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Basically, an appeal to authority is really the flip side of an ad-hominem: it tries to shift attention to the person, and away from what they said.
__________________
* It's because he, Bengio and LeCun are the Deep Learning Mafia.