Appeal to authority is perfectly reasonable when you're appealing to a person who trusts the authority you're appealing to. His reasons for that trust may be good or bad, but that appeal constitutes evidence to him.
If Kahneman says Taleeb changed his views, I take that as evidence in favor of Taleeb's ideas being worth looking at.
I came to LW largely because of the converse - the references to Jaynes and Korzybski was evidence to me of good intellectual taste.
His reasons for that trust may be good or bad, but that appeal constitutes evidence to him.
Sure it is, but always in the context of evaluating the probability of someone to be a good source. If you later find out that Taleeb sucks, then you would lower the value of Kahneman as an authority (as I did).
"Appeal to authority", used as a fallacy in the original comment, evades this by proposing almost-absolute value or truth, for which you should not doubt: "People like you have no idea what Taleb does, and how wildly successful he has managed...
The recent discussion on neo-reactionary-ism brought out some references to (intellectual hipsters and) meta-contrarianism linking to a 2010 posting by Yvain.
For some time I've been thinking about "narcissistic contrarians" -- those who make an art form of their exotically counterintuitive belief systems, who combine positions not normally met in the same person. There can be good reasons for being a contrarian. If you're looking for a scarce resource, it may help to not look where everyone else is looking, hence contrarian stock market investors may do very well, if they actually see something others don't; same with oil explorers. Less creditably, I believe Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise made reference to the way a novice pundit or prognosticator may have nothing to gain by saying anything like what other people are saying, and much to gain, in taking some wild extravagant position or prediction if it happens to attract an audience others have ignored, or if the predictions happens to be right.
The Narcissistic Contrarian is much like the Intellectual Hipster, but more extreme. The Intellectual Hipster usually stakes out a few unusual or incongruous positions, to create an identity that stands out from the crowd. The Narcissistic Contrarian is constantly dazzling her fans. Something written by Camille Paglia made me think of the idea in the first place. Nicholas Taleb is another suspect although I think he started out with some good ideas. If she/he manages to get a fan-base, they are apt to be pretty worshipful -- they can't imagine being able to come up with such a wild set of insights. The contrarianism is for its own sake rather than an attempt to find and settle on some previously undiscovered thing, so it particularly likely to lead people astray, into unproductive avenues of thought.
Does anyone else think this is a real and useful distinction?