Subject: categories: RE: cracks and pots 93

From: [email-masked] (Peter Selinger)
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 13:15:23 -0300 (ADT)

[email-masked] wrote:
>
> Dear Jim
>
> Your question "Should it not be sufficient to acknowledge good work
> whoever does it ? " would I think receive the obvious answer YES
> from all participants in the list.
>
> Yet it lies it the heart of most of the 200 messages, public and
> private, that I have received since Marta opened the discussion. For
> as I concluded in III, the problem is, How can we know ?

I have been raised to believe that the answer to this is peer-review,
not public-trial-by-mailing-list. One problem with the latter method
is that, since nobody wants to discuss particular cases, the
discussion tends to center on generalities, innuendo and "I have heard
it repeated many times"-type arguments, and not on evidence or actual
facts that could be verified. Such evidence and facts, on the other
hand, are available to editors and referees, who are also largely
independent of public opinion. As I see it, this is exactly as it
should be.

-- Peter