Aardvaarkman said:
EvilRoy said:
They don't need to be careful of their words, they need to have a backlog against which we can qualify future opinions. They can be as biased or rude as they want, but having a face and a name guarantees that those things stay on the record rather than dying with each avatar and handle.
You're doing it wrong.
A person's writing should be judged on the content of that writing, not their track record or their status. You should judge things on their facts and merits, or in the case of opinion, how well thought-out and supported the opinion is, not who is comes from. It is entirely possible for person with status and a good track record to write something stupid and wrong, just as it is for someone antonymous to come out of nowhere and write something brilliant and true.
Got busy last week so I couldn't even log on until now. I wasn't going to respond since the conversation was left behind some time ago, but since the thread is apparently still alive I decided to go ahead anyway.
I think you're misunderstanding what I mean when I say "qualification". A better way for me to put it would be "the basis on which the work is judged." You've said that a work needs to be judged on its own merits rather than the character of the author - which is fine, and not necessarily contrary to my claims - but the question becomes, on what basis is that content judged?
So starting with your first example, we have a technical paper having been written on, say, the resulting impact loads from sudden column removal on standard connections. So lets assume that you don't know much about this topic, how are you able to determine if what is written in this paper falls under "stupid and wrong" or "brilliant and true?" As a person with no expert knowledge on the topic, you can't reasonably confirm the validity of the statements within. You might defer to the review board that OKed the paper for publishing, but how do you know those guys can be trusted?
Popping over to your second example, we have an opinion piece reviewing a very popular and much enjoyed game, Annoying Stick, on a technical and personal level. Assuming again that you have yet to play this game, how might you determine if the review is a good one? As a player of games you may be better suited to confirming the technical information conveyed in the review from an outside perspective, but how do you determine if the ultimate recommendation and authors praise of the game aligns with your personal taste? Can you, without having actually played the game, determine if the opinions are well thought out, or supported at all?
In both cases you can depend only on a knowledge of the writers and editors past work to determine if you would find the conclusions reached to be comparable to those you would reach yourself given the necessary background in each field.
In the case of the technical paper you are depending on both the author and the review board to have the necessary experience and good judgement to produce a valid final product. You essentially assume that, based on their current position in life, the review board is qualified through experience to judge the validity of the authors work, and both the author and review board are kept honest only by the threat to reputation that having a face and name provides. You can't be sued for drawing a bad conclusion in a technical paper, no matter how many people it ends up killing.
In the case of the game review, you can only base a decision on whether or not the authors recommendation applies to you on their track record of having preferences that do or do not align with your own. Bar playing the game there is no other way to determine whether the opinions presented in the work are in any way valid from your own perspective. You may be tempted to aggregate a consensus on the game by polling various works on the same topic, but in addition to not always being an option, this typically produces results that are only useful on a technical level as individual opinions are too varied to collect and categorize in such a manner.
If the author and editor/review board of each of those works was anonymous, there would be no way for you to reasonably determine their quality, bar performing the experiments or playing the game yourself. One might produce excellent arguments or well formed opinions, but if they are based on false axioms or backed by false evidence then they are still wrong. Without the threat to reputation in either case there isn't even a reason for the authors to ensure the quality of their work beyond "looking good" or "seeming about right."
