From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jul 27 2002 - 12:09:38 MDT
louisnews@comcast.net wrote:
>>Lee wrote:
>>Actually, when
>>I'm first reading something---most of the time---I definitely
>>don't want to know the authoritativeness of the writer precisely
>>because I'm afraid that I'll give him or her too much credit.
>
> Funny. That's exactly the reason I DO want to know the authority of the
> writer, so I DON'T give them too much credit to someone who has no
> knowledge of the field they are talking about.
I come down heavily on Lee's side in this. Trust content, not speakers.
Although: I was recently very surprised when, after arguing briefly with
a novice about evolutionary psychology, that person looked me up online
and then complained about my having NOT said who I was! I was raised to
think of that as intellectual bullying - if the argument can't carry
itself, it shouldn't be carried by authority. But apparently for some
people it's not bullying and they genuinely do want to know who you are.
I'm not sure whether to chalk this up to "personal differences" or to
regard it as actively destructive of the ability to judge inherent
support, but so far my experience leans toward the latter. I think that
if you can't judge the content of the discussion without knowing
anything about the speakers, you don't know enough to decide which
speaker to trust.
Maybe I should anonymize (not just pseudonymize, but anonymize) all
posts to SL4...
Incidentally, Louisnews, what's your opinion on the relative veracity of
newsprint journals versus Google?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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