Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me rationality is a pretty important normativity, not that I am after it for power. But since you seem to precisely know what I think, exactly how powerful should I feel about it?
I'm sure you are using it in the pursuit of rationality, but I think it's holding you back. It's good to know common fallacies because it helps you understand the trappings that you and others may fall into, but it's not a silver bullet, mainly because some logical fallacies are a direct result of shortcuts that we must make for human society to operate at its current scale. Common thought biases (such as confirmatio…
Appeal to authority is exactly as valid as the authority. The way "appeal to authority" is a fallacy is usually something like "Y says X", where Y is not actually an expert on X. Y may be a politician or a pundit, or even a scientist outside their area of expertise. (Scientists should be less eager to opine on subjects outside their expertise, but hey, we're here on HN, and we do it all the time, so...)
The other way it happens is "Y says X", and Y is an expert on X, but Y has a fringe view on X (or we could be charitable and call it a highly minority view on X). This is harder, because you can't detect that just by examining Y's credentials.
But if you disallow all appeals to authority, then you're left with just each person's own arguments and knowledge. And why do we think that's better? Why do we think that the personal opinion of amateurs is more valid than the considered opinion of experts? So we have to allow appeals to authority (as you said).
The trick is to only flag the fallacious ones. I say "the trick", because it is not easy...