Frank writes:
"Which notorious person went to which university? Why?" It’s a question of fairness and consistency relative to values, not a question of correct vs. incorrect. Here are two more personal experiences which I doubt I really need to give but I will for completeness. 1. A disruptive technology is reported in a peer-reviewed journal which I argue is worth considering. I provide background (cited papers), and my colleague skims over the affiliations over the authors of those papers rather than reading the abstracts. 2. Our team arranges a meeting with a possible funding source and have a pitch prepared with preliminary results and working prototype code. First thing the person does is flip to the section with the staff bios to see which universities they attended. I could give many more examples of this kind of authority-based selection that I see every day. I'm not arguing that there is nothing to this approach, or that it is complete ineffectual. It depends on what the deciders are optimizing for. One thing they could be optimizing is to ensure their collaborators are presentable and demonstrate a baseline of intelligence, and certain breadth and depth of knowledge. However, when such a person that otherwise would passes muster, puts out a document that starts from fairly common premises to surprising conclusions, that chain of reasoning might be subject to consideration. Sure, if there is more context, like knowing in retrospect that the person was guilty of murder, then that may or may not cause them to discard consideration of the argument. For me, it makes me more interested in understanding the motives and reasoning and to make sure I convince myself I have an idea of where they lost it. Marcus
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