Ad Hom vs Appeal to Authority
Because it's come up a lot recently...
When someone makes an appeal to authority or source to support a claim, they may accuse you of an ad hom fallacy when you demonstrate that their authority or source is not credible.
The first point to make here is that the appeal to authority itself is a fallacy, at least unless the reliability of the authority has been established or can reasonably be agreed upon.
"An argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate), also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam, is a form of defeasible argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument. It is well known as a fallacy, though some consider that it is used in a cogent form when all sides of a discussion agree on the reliability of the authority in the given context."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
In the case of using sources to back up claims, whether certain sources are generally considered to be reliable depends on the type of claim. For example, for medical claims, scientific evidence, should be required, such as the studies or supported statements of reputable scientists or medical professionals. Needless to say, scientists or medical professionals who are known to make pseudoscientific claims cannot be considered to be reputable and it is legitimate to dismiss their claims on this basis. Note that dismissing a claim is not the same as refuting a claim. You cannot refute a claim on the basis of its source. You need either a good argument of your own or counterbalancing evidence from a reputable source to do so. And it's this conflation of dismissing claims with refuting claims that those who would accuse you of an ad hom when you question the credibility of their authority play on in order to support their accusation.
To summarise, when you present a claim as credible based on an authority, you implicitly make the claim that the authority is credible. If the authority is found not to be credible, you need to find another way to add credibility to the claim. You cannot simply defend an accusation that a claim is not credible with a counter-accusation of an ad hom because it is you who are appealing to an authority and therefore you who need to establish grounds for the mutual acceptability of the authority.
Have I missed anything here?
When someone makes an appeal to authority or source to support a claim, they may accuse you of an ad hom fallacy when you demonstrate that their authority or source is not credible.
The first point to make here is that the appeal to authority itself is a fallacy, at least unless the reliability of the authority has been established or can reasonably be agreed upon.
"An argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate), also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam, is a form of defeasible argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument. It is well known as a fallacy, though some consider that it is used in a cogent form when all sides of a discussion agree on the reliability of the authority in the given context."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
In the case of using sources to back up claims, whether certain sources are generally considered to be reliable depends on the type of claim. For example, for medical claims, scientific evidence, should be required, such as the studies or supported statements of reputable scientists or medical professionals. Needless to say, scientists or medical professionals who are known to make pseudoscientific claims cannot be considered to be reputable and it is legitimate to dismiss their claims on this basis. Note that dismissing a claim is not the same as refuting a claim. You cannot refute a claim on the basis of its source. You need either a good argument of your own or counterbalancing evidence from a reputable source to do so. And it's this conflation of dismissing claims with refuting claims that those who would accuse you of an ad hom when you question the credibility of their authority play on in order to support their accusation.
To summarise, when you present a claim as credible based on an authority, you implicitly make the claim that the authority is credible. If the authority is found not to be credible, you need to find another way to add credibility to the claim. You cannot simply defend an accusation that a claim is not credible with a counter-accusation of an ad hom because it is you who are appealing to an authority and therefore you who need to establish grounds for the mutual acceptability of the authority.
Have I missed anything here?
Comments (41)
You do not claim the authority is credible, it is rather powerful or author-i-tious.
Is the law credible, or is it just the law? Otherwise I see a lot of criminals deserving freedom - perhaps even compensation.
Law is based on the desires of the public, it is pure fantasy. If one makes an appeal to the judge, they do not have the chance to argue towards 'credible' law.
In an ideal world the law would be credible, but an authority is assumed more than credible(otherwise it is not an authority).
Sometimes attacking the source is warranted.
Sometimes appealing to authority is appropriate.
So neither accusation rightly ends a discussion that is intended to approach agreement as opposed to measure genitals.
Yep.
I could be wrong 10,000 times but if I happen to be right about something, is it any less true? Perceptively, yes. Objectively...?
Trusting authority is a huge part of research. Have you or anyone reading ever seen an electron? A black hole? A tardigrade? Have an absolute, meticulous understanding of the carbon dating process ensuring its reliable? Probably not. And yet.
So on the basis of a long long history of officially sanctioned invented mental illnesses, (hysteria, Drapetomania, homosexuality, etc etc, along with a whole range of frankly sadistic and obviously highly damaging "treatments", no medical professionals can be regarded as deriving any authority at all from their professional qualifications. Do I have that about right?
Quoting Outlander
It is the only currency of culture. Trust, or start civilisation again from scratch and alone.
I've asked my doctor and he denies all knowledge of inventing Drapetomania, whatever the fuck that is. Of course, he might be one of the lizard people, in which case, he would, wouldn't he? :razz:
Quoting Baden
I asked my cat and she said you are not following your own guidelines.
Must be a black and white cat.
Someone's authority is contextual/domain specific. Even within discipline. That there are treatments that have been shown to be effective for some disorders in some situations, though usually not proved beyond some reasonable doubts, can coexist quite peacefully with the horrible histories; and sometimes the still horrible present; of mental health treatment. And those coexist peacefully with the borders of mental health diagnoses being fuzzy, and also mental health institutions being at times an organ of public discipline (or fronts for selling drugs too readily).
Well, not necessarily peacefully, but business as usual.
Not something you missed, but two things that I think are useful to keep in mind when dealing with the "named fallacies" are:
1. There is technically only a single logical fallacy, and it's non-sequitur. So if there is fallacious reasoning, you should be able to explain why it doesn't follow without using the name of a specific fallacy. If you can't, that suggests you're missaplying it.
2. All the fallacies are only fallacies in the context of strictly analytic deductive arguments. As soon as you leave that narrow field, they become guidelines that can no longer be strictly applied.
Appeals to authority tend to come up when we deal with questions that are at least partially about facts, and therefore aren't purely deductive exercises. Appealing to authority is a perfectly valid heuristic for determining the facts.
Yeah, thanks, probably the main take away here is just that accusations of an ad hom fallacy (or even, conversely, an argument from authority fallacy) should not be get-out-of-jail-free cards for lazy thinkers. But further to that, yes, they are concepts that should probably be used in far more limited circumstances than they are as they are too often set up as roadblocks rather than routes to reason.
It didn't work that way with the original example. A bad call on one illness undermined other advice on another illness.
Quoting Baden
I'm not calling out the hyperbole here, but making a serious point. The state of society is parlous because trust has been too often betrayed. Authority is institutional, and if the institutions are not trustworthy, there is no context in which they become trustworthy.
If a group of doctors who think homosexuality is an illness say chips make you fat, I say that's an excellent reason to eat more chips. Yes, no, maybe?
The law is a 'fact', the opinion of an 'expert' is an 'opinion'.
I'd say the law is subject to interpretation. Wo while the text of the law is a fact, the rules that the text establishes aren't
It wasn't just one bad call, the dudes are a nutty right-wing cult pontificating on a political issue that largely breaks down on right vs left-wing lines. Their position is as predictable as it is worthless.
Quoting unenlightened
The part you quoted wasn't just hyperbole, it was, as I've explained twice already, a joke. The answer is obviously, no. Justified scepticism of the source of position A is not evidence of opposing position Z. As for the rest, black and white thinking again. Authorities are trustworthy by degrees and trust is never absolute, but there's a certain point (e.g. when 99% of climate scientists say global warming is real) when objections are either tiresome posturing or irrational or both.
Hmmm. I suppose that's possible. I'd guess it's a matter of degree, and of expectations of basic competence. I'd say that knowing HIV causes AIDS is a matter of basic medical competence, and if there is any factor that would make a supposed authority not display basic competence in its supposed field of expertise, that is a good reason to mistrust the organisation. I think maybe that works for mistrusting that medical institution about medical stuff.
I'd be hesitant to say that historical examples of failure and lack of basic competence; eg regarding homosexuality being a pathology, and mental illness being used to make labour camps; are a sufficient reason to dismiss an entire field of study when there are other reasons for those failures; societal prejudice promoting it as a diagnosis and societal prejudice resulting in a way above average rate of mental illness on gays.
"Medicine is wrong because doctors used to prescribe bloodletting to get the humors circulating better" doesn't sound right to me. So "Mental health treatment is wrong because of its horrible history" seems wrong too.
Though I do think there's a few good points to be made about "basic competence in mental health treatment" not being well established yet, considering that the etiological structure and symptoms of mental health disorders are still debated.
Absolutely.
It is generally appropriate to appeal to authority to support one's position - it's a reasonable starting point. It becomes fallacious only when used to refute a contrary opinion (you must be wrong because expert X says so). The person arguing from authority then has the burden to dig into the expert's reasons for his opinion and to defend those.
Regarding genetic fallacies: there often are good reasons to be suspicious of a claim that comes from questionable sources (e.g. suppose I claim carbon dating is completely unreliable, and support this claim by linking to articles on the website of the Institute for Creation Research). But suspicion alone is not enough - you would need to dig into the basis for the claims.
If a philosophy is "proven" does it not graduate into the field of science?
If apealing to authority to support a position (presumably referencing a fact or at least a hypothesis vs. a random opinion) is not rubbish as in is "true", how exactly would doing the same thing to refute or throw into question an opposing idea be "false"?
I think I've more or less dealt with this, justified suspicion is not enough to refute the claim, but it is enough to dismiss the appeal to authority and if that is all the claim is based on, the claim itself as anything other than bare assertion. In other words, you're back to square one, how do we settle the claim? In the absence of direct methods to do this (in the case of scientific claims), more reliable authorities will need to be sought.
Quoting Relativist
Sure, and I don't want to get hung up on fallacies one way or the other. But if all you have is an appeal to an authority and the authority is compromised, unreliable, or inappropriate in some obvious way then you have nothing.
I think "direct methods" are the only hope of settling a disagreement - which means examining the basis of the expert opinion.
[Quote]If apealing to authority to support a position (presumably referencing a fact or at least a hypothesis vs. a random opinion) is not rubbish as in is "true", how exactly would doing the same thing to refute or throw into question an opposing idea be "false"?[/quote]It wouldn't. Dueling authorities results in no one's mind being changed. Not that minds get changed very often.
Quoting Baden
Isn't this a bit circular? How do we establish that the claims are psuedoscientific without appealing to the same authority we're trying to argue for? Say we're trying to appeal to a psychologist whose work is rejected as pseudoscience by the APA. We'd first need to demonstrate that the APA are not themselves espousers of pseudoscience (so that they're a valid authority). In order to justify that claim, we'd have to appeal to the fact that it is not judged to be so by the APA.
I think you're on safer ground sticking to the original citation, that the appeal is justified on the grounds that both parties agree on the status of the authority concerned. Even if two Jordan Peterson fans are arguing some point (perhaps on the value of Benzodiazepine!) each could appeal to what their authority pronounced and that would be a valid appeal for their argument regardless of what garbage they might referring to.
As you correctly pointed out, determining that an appeal to authority is invalid is not the same as refuting the associated claim. I think that has to apply to pseudoscience too. Demonstrating it to be nonsense is not the same as invalidating an appeal to authority.
It seems that you wouldn't need to do research if you trusted the authority.
Quoting frank
I love these assertions without any kind of examples to back them up.
Good points. Thanks.
The situations under which we should trust an authority on an issue are when we have no good reasons to doubt their competence on an issue. Reliably producing true, relevant and well contextualised statements regarding an issue is necessary for a source to be regarded as an authority on that issue.
Since we don't have access, or even time, to check a source's whole track record, we need heuristics to judge whether a source is an authority on an issue or not.
Moreover, considering that no one is a domain expert in all domains, we can't assume that our knowledge of the issue is sufficient to judge whether a source is an authority on the issue based off of our knowledge; we should not assume that we know what is true, relevant or well contextualised for the issue in question when dealing with a context in which appeal to authority is appropriate.
Because in the general case we are not domain experts in the domain the source is allegedly an authority in, and we do not know enough to comprehensively assess their authority, what seems efficient are heuristics based on indicators of whether a necessary condition for that source to be an authority holds.
Efficient in the sense that if indicators that a source is not an authority on an issue are present, they are grounds for dismissing the source as an authority on the issue. Logically, if a necessary condition for a source to be an authority does not hold, then the source cannot be an authority. The purpose of that is to block, defeat or dismiss an appeal to authority, not to disprove the claims being supported by that appeal to authority.
Therefore, an efficient indicator for whether a source is an authority on an issue is then a statement which the source must agree with if they are plausible to hold as an authority on the relevant issue. Rendering it implausible that the appeal to authority vouchsafes the truth of the claim( s ) it regards is as good as we can do.
Statements of the form "If they are an authoritative source on X, they must know Y" seem to be such indicators. The domain of expertise in X must be sufficiently similar to the domain of expertise in Y to count as a good indicator. Commonly believed truths in the domain of X are good candidates for Y, why?
It is much easier to assess whether someone has basic training in a domain than whether they are an expert in it; while no one is an expert on all domains, we can expect experts to know the low hanging fruit that even lay people have regarding the discipline.
An authoritative source must have basic training in the domain, if they make false statements which they are extremely unlikely to make if they have received basic training in the domain, they are very likely to be acting in disaccord with their basic training in it or simply have not done it. Which requires a good explanation from the person appealing to the authority why the authority they cite believes such a contradiction of lay knowledge and basic domain training when they are also being touted as an authority in that domain. Giving well justified reasons why the source is acting in disaccord with the claim (partisanship, motivated reasoning, funding conflicts etc) strengthens the argument that seeks to defeat the appeal to authority.
This shifts the burden of demonstration to the person making the appeal to authority in the first place; if they cannot provide a good explanation for why their cited authority demonstrably does not believe things they would believe if they had received basic training (which we have lay knowledge of), their argument should be dismissed.
There will be cases, many cases, where an assessment of basic competence using lay knowledge is highly flawed; an example might be criticising a dietician treating an iron deficiency in a patient but not prescribing the readily available spinach: "If they know their shit they'd be telling me to eat spinach!", despite the exemplary iron content of spinach ultimately being a myth with many supporting citations and (erroneous) common knowledge. (Edit: an interesting corollary; a commonly held falsehood can function as the death of trust in an authority)
If the failure of the source to function as an authority regarding the claim in question can be strengthened to a demonstration that the the source often makes such dubious claims, or that they have a representative agent which makes such dubious claims, by the above that is sufficient grounds for dismissing the source as an authority on the domain until very strong evidence otherwise is presented. Physicsists were in part right to dismiss Einstein's theory of relativity until Eddison gave extremely compelling evidence for it; why trust a patent clerk doing weird new math vs the weight of common knowledge buttressed by experiment?
Though. Won't there always be a difference between referencing a fact's evidence witnessed firsthand and one by what is legally hearsay? If not minutely or virtually inconsequentially?
Back to the focal point of the topic though. Ad hom meaning blindly attacking a source for a characteristic that does not explicitly undermine it's credibility in the specific field substantially. More or less right? Naturally depends on the topic. If we're talking about say hotwiring a car or how to rob a bank a criminal or jailbird would be very qualified. Sure, the source in this case may be a liar, a despicable murderer, and a whole bunch more other negative things. But. That doesn't undermine their credibility in the context of the aforementioned question.
Anyway. Science is about trial and error. So, a scientist or group of them, naturally would have many errors that can be looked into or referenced (not published of course but there all the same). More than successes even. No?
It's good to look into the reason a source is discredited and even better to understand how to be able to prove something as the process must have been referenced in order for an authority to state a fact.
:clap:
Does the opposite effect ever weaken the argument that seeks to validate the appeal to authority? An argument was posted on the coronavirus thread that the WHO (usually regarded as a valid authority, surely), were not justifiably appealed to on the matter of facemasks because they had some cause to be dishonest - they wanted, so the theory goes, to underplay the effectiveness of facemasks in order to preserve stocks for healthcare professionals. In this case the common knowledge that "of course masks have some effectiveness" was used against what it usually a valid authority and supported by the claim that the authority had some ulterior motive.
We know this does happen, Public Health England were, not to long ago, taken to task because their report claimed that any amount of alcohol was bad for your health despite there being no evidence at all to support this (most studies show a j-curve). They admitted their misstep but in their defence cited the fact that it fitted their purpose better, convincing people to drink less, if the message was clear and simple.
The problem is, once we open this particular route, who wouldn't fit in it? Medical researchers have pharmaceutical company ties, academic publishers have their citation rings, psychology has its replication crisis, what organisation doesn't have internal politics, economic pressures... And let's not forget, scientists are people too with in-group pressures, political biases and cultural prejudices.
I don't know what the answer is, just saying that if we allow factors regarding a source's motivation to strengthen a claim against their validity as an authority, we need to circumscribe the applicability of such factors to limit their use.
Doctor being paid by the tobacco industry claiming cigarettes are fine > not a valid authority; but Doctor who happens to be a Labour Party member claiming workplace stress is damaging > too tenuous a motive to undermine their authority?
Edit - I guess what I'm saying is, similar to the point I made to Baden, is this extra consideration at risk of muddying the water? Your "If they are an authoritative source on X, they must know Y" seems like a strong and sufficient measure of validity on its own. Does it need the additional consideration of motive, or could that be an argument tangential to the validity of their authority?
Quoting Isaac
This isn't a particularly systematic reply. I don't know how to address the problem in general, so it's scattered thoughts with a common theme.
Everyone probably fits in to some degree. If you gave an expert an introductory course exam for their domain, they might fail if they were having a bad day, and so there's some ground for doubting basic competence.
I imagine that "they might fail if they were having a bad day" is quite important; if there are explanatory circumstances that localise the failure; say the WHO on face masks in the pandemic; it would be hasty and uncharitable to weigh that heavily when considering their track record outside of that context.
I do agree that it's difficult to demarcate contexts like that; how far should doubt in a source based on a dubious claim be propagated into our belief networks regarding them? If the WHO made a similar statement regarding hand washing with ethanol gel, it could be used to further undermine their authority in that context given the consonance of plausible motives. But I don't think it's right to transfer that doubt to their role in stopping the Ebola crisis, SARS and their work on measuring neonatal mortality. They haven't failed to live up to high standards frequently enough or over enough domains to cease being an authority. So a reasonable conclusion if both of those things happened seems to me to be the imperative: "Trust the WHO's statements regarding the benefits of public use of vital transmission reducing resources commonly used by professionals less than before".
A decent reason to block that transmission of doubt from face masks to other domains the WHO is an authority on strikes me as: the motive that plausibly explains their failure of authority regarding mask advice (acting to mitigate mask shortages for professionals) doesn't apply in Ebola or SARS or their neonatal mortality studies. If the motive can't be plausibly established to apply in a new domain, it should be dismissed. I realise how much work "plausibly" is doing there. It remains that the WHO's (alleged) use of motivated reasoning is a (possible) scandal for them precisely because they have a well earned reputation as a good source in their domains of expertise.
Another reason is a source endorsing a clam performatively or for rhetorical purposes, like say "You have nothing to lose but your chains!" in the Communist Manifesto, shouldn't be judged solely on its declarative content. That statement should not be judged based on the fact that in any plausible revolution, someone may lose something which is not a chain; they might drop their keys. The extent to which a source uses facts in that way probably scales with how much motivated reasoning it does. So we can easily dismiss politicians using racist tropes instead of data; when the performative aspects of the claim dominate its content; but we shouldn't dismiss a paper studying the effects of immigration on crime and the lowest income brackets for the same reasons we'd dismiss the politician.
If the source tends to only endorse claims or state facts in a domain when also doing motivated reasoning regarding it, that seems stronger ground to dismiss their authority in that domain. Like what we'd expect from the highly partisan sources on immigration in the UK of The Sun or The Mirror, but not from the UK's Office of National Statistics and the Oxford Migration Observatory.
I don't think it's fair to dismiss a source for using motivated reasoning regarding something if they've otherwise done work to establish the facts regarding it. If it really were true that immigration to the UK had caused the immiseration of low income workers in the UK, motivated reasoning regarding that makes a lot of sense.
If we're already at a stage where we can't in practice distinguish motivated reasoning using badly interpreted, overstated or false claims from well interpreted, well contextualised and well justified ones, public knowledge is in bad shape.
Appeals to authority are arguments that heavily depend on the testimonies of experts in a relevant field, these testimonies then serving as premises for further argumentation.
If one is to rebut an argumentum ad verecundiam then it's permissible to cast aspersions on the authority for the simple reason that the character of the authority in question decidedly affects the nature of the words the authority writes/speaks.
I'm somewhat reluctant to say it, but I think this was something like where I was going. Not to say the public in general are that bad, but that the very people who need to be persuaded about the validity of certain sources, are.
It kind of repeats what I was trying (but ultimately failing, I think) to communicate in the conflict resolution thread. For any given list of rules/factors/thresholds we might dictate, I think we'd get almost 100% agreement on them from our interlocutors, maybe some tweaking at the edges (and that might turn out to be really important - don't know yet), but general agreement would be the order of the day.
Accompanying this ruleset are always a list of graduated measures (just how contrary to lay knowledge is enough to worry about, just how much ulterior gain is enough to cast doubt, just how much leeway with 'simple vs true' can we allow...). And these are all judgement calls, which is fine - we wouldn't expect it to be simple, but... If the ability to make judgement calls is itself being used to (in)validate an authority in order to win an argument (rather than to genuinely judge the authority) then we've no recourse to dispute that by stating the rules, they were agreed anyway, the issue was the degree of some particular judgement call, and we don't have a rule for that (that's the whole point of a judgement call).
Take for example, the rule "the source should not regularly conflict, or appear unknowledgable about facts in their field which even lay people know (except cases like spinach where lay knowledge is generally wrong)". I don't think many would disagree with that rule. Where they'd make their case would be to claim "this is my 'spinach' exception".
We can do the same for a motivated reasoning rule "a source is invalid if they have some strong ulterior motive to make the claim they do (except where that motive is well-reasoned or exceptional or set against a sufficient background of quality output)". Again, you'll get very little complaints about the rule itself, but when it comes to an actual dispute, the argument dissolves to whether the ulterior motive really is 'well-reasoned', just how exceptional it is, whether such and such level of previous quality output is enough or not.
It's possible that you can ignore all of this as it might be quite specific to my experience. I recognise we probably do have people here quoting sources so beyond the pale that we don't need to entertain any dispute over judgement. We've probably also got people who actually would disagree with even the most basic rules.
I also wouldn't want you to get the impression I'm dismissing discussion of the actual rules as pointless, far from it. I'm just bringing up the dimension of the whole issue which I find most interesting.
Quoting fdrake
Ha, yes. Pesky revolutions. I lost my reading glasses during the Easter Uprising, quite spoit the day for me.
What is the distinction you wish to draw between the two other than "refutation" entails offering a meaningful and detailed response and a "dismissal" means offering a cursory and summary response? In either event, your objective is to defeat the claim, and the latter doesn't seem a way to defeat the claim. It's just a way to express your disdain for it and to wash your hands of it.
If the way you attempt to defeat a claim is by attacking the legitimacy of the speaker, you have committed an ad hom fallacy, regardless of whether you describe your attempt as a "refutation" or a "dismissal."
So, if 600 surgeons sign a petition indicating the response to covid-19 is more harmful than helpful to the health of the nation, that claim can only be defeated by actually looking at the outcomes of differing types of responses to the pandemic. If, on the other hand, you summarily dismiss the claim because those surgeons are found to be part of a conservative group that holds various disproved pseudoscientific claims, then you have committed an ad hom fallacy.
I will concede that if a doctor tells me that the covid response has been detrimental and I then learn that same doctor believes the world to be flat, I will be naturally skeptical of his claims about covid, but that skepticism isn't logically supported by the fact that the doctor is a nut case.
The weighing of credibility, I'd submit, becomes relevant when the speaker is offering information that is dependent upon his credibility. A case of that would be if I told you that I saw Bob murder Joe, and it is then learned that I am schizophrenic, that I hate Bob, or that I have claimed to witness thousands of murders in the past week. Those things would rightly cause someone to question what I said based upon who I am. That would not be an ad hom fallacy.
But, when you have a bunch of doctors whose claims are independently provable, there's no reason to insert ad hom objections into the mix. It is true that those doctors attempted to bolster their claims by alerting us to the fact they were bona fide doctors, which is a form of the ad hom fallacy in reverse. However, it is very possible that their use of the reverse ad hom (i.e. bolstering based upon who the speaker is) had some value to the extent it made those who relied upon speaker credentials alone to now start questioning those opinions..
In the post in question, you appealed to the authority of this organization in support of the idea that the lockdown causes more harm than good. There was nothing in your post except that appeal. Your appeal didn't work because your source was demonstrated to lack credibility. That means you're left with no evidence and your post (containing nothing else) can be dismissed. If you want to make the argument that lockdown causes more harm then good, (an open question), you'll need to provide evidence from a credible source.
By the way, not only have this organization promoted the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, other pet causes include anti-vaccination, climate change denialism and the idea that abortion causes breast cancer*. All pseudoscience, all politically motivated. I don't know how to put this any simpler than your "authority" is absolute garbage. Considering their record, no reasonable interlocutor would consider their statements as evidence for anything (amusingly, they're against evidence-based medicine anyway, so they probably wouldn't care.)
"AAPS .... [pushes] fringe views that most mainstream conservatives do not endorse, such as the belief that mandatory vaccination is “equivalent to human experimentation” and that Medicare is “evil.” ... It’s the most curious of medical organizations: a doctors’ interest group that seems more invested in the interests of doctors, rather than public health."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/aaps-make-health-care-great-again/607015/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-ideology-trumps-science-based-medicine/
Edit: Dismissal here is like "So what?" directed at the empty appeal to authority in your post. You tried to lend the organization weight by pointing out they are "doctors". I undermined that weight by pointing out they are a politically orientated group that promote pseudoscience. So, we're back to square one. Refutation would be me claiming to have proved you wrong about the lockdown. I didn't do that. I've given plenty of previous evidence why I think the original lockdown was effective, but the degree of further effectiveness is debatable seeing as the population is "trained" in social distancing already. If you want to take part in that debate, you'll need to come up with evidence from a credible source.
I've said all I'm going to say on this by the way. If you don't get it now, so be it.
You draw no distinction here between refutation and dismissal, but you instead are just pointing out that in my original link to some quackery group of doctors they provided no basis for their position, so you are not in a position to refute that which was never properly presented.
That then should be your response, not the long winded path you took. You should simply have stated that my link was lacking in substance and therefore not something worthy of discussion. Instead, you presented an ad hom attack, which remains a fallacy. Contrariwise, if my link was to the world's most renowned doctors, it still would have been of no value because the opinions asserted were without basis.
Now I offer you two challenges: (1) to fight off your OCD tendencies and actually not speak additionally on the subject as you've said you wouldn't, and (2) to find a better use of the word "contrariwise," which I have now introduced in the discussion and which will likely become a staple word in my vocabulary from here on out.