Anyone who visits this page can judge the merits themselves: there’s no argument from authority involved. No one is claiming this form of argument is invalid because it’s on LW, or because Yvain wrote it, or because it has a catchy name that’s published on a website, or because it now has an easy-to-remember URL. I made a simpler citation, nothing more.
Providing a pre-existing URL that links to a well-written page created by a third-party is a form of evidence that shifts “Worst Argument in the World” from something that feels like an opinion to the title of a logical fallacy.
What other role, if not one of authority, play a pre-existing URL and the page being written by a third party, in shifting the status of the argument to a logical fallacy?
To clarify: I understood your comment as saying that when you encounter the “worst argument” somewhere on the internet, you would link to this article with the connotation “look, what you’ve just done is an officially recognised fallacy—a neutral party has written a nice article about it and there is even a domain for that”. Which may work fine until your opponent sees who has registered the domain and for what purpose.
The point of the argument from authority here is to catch the opponent’s attention. If he goes as far as looking up who registered the domain, we can be confident he has read the article as well. The argument from authority won’t work any more, but we don’t care: it has served its purpose.
Anyone who visits this page can judge the merits themselves: there’s no argument from authority involved. No one is claiming this form of argument is invalid because it’s on LW, or because Yvain wrote it, or because it has a catchy name that’s published on a website, or because it now has an easy-to-remember URL. I made a simpler citation, nothing more.
What other role, if not one of authority, play a pre-existing URL and the page being written by a third party, in shifting the status of the argument to a logical fallacy?
To clarify: I understood your comment as saying that when you encounter the “worst argument” somewhere on the internet, you would link to this article with the connotation “look, what you’ve just done is an officially recognised fallacy—a neutral party has written a nice article about it and there is even a domain for that”. Which may work fine until your opponent sees who has registered the domain and for what purpose.
The point of the argument from authority here is to catch the opponent’s attention. If he goes as far as looking up who registered the domain, we can be confident he has read the article as well. The argument from authority won’t work any more, but we don’t care: it has served its purpose.