Left a comment at Tor (used my painfully polite tone because, well, Tor) in reply to some of the nonsense Left Mouse Button is throwing around.

Reproducing here because, well, Tor + RF09 = save early and save often, as you know comments are eventually going to start disappearing like native americans in the hands of a sloppy writer.

146. Fridgepunk
Saturday May 09, 2009 11:14pm EDT

"I still have a profound problem with any argument that leaps from hearsay to condemnation without any intervening stop at “evidence”."

Is a tor writer suggesting people commit vile acts of piracy and illegally download this book via bittorrent?

Seriously though, why is the age old principle of relying on people's first hand accounts of a book they've read to decide whether or not you read it (previously known as "a review", but now apparently "hearsay"*) not good enough? A sensible and indeed logical approach would be to base the validity of reactions based on first accounts on how valid the first hand accounts were rather than pretending that reviews are now inherently misleading and wrong in all ways.

But then the obvious way to handle that discussion would be to provide proof and "evidence" that the criticisms were invalid in the form of some method of reproducing sections of the texts in question and conveying them to an audience.

alas, no method of doing something like that exists in this world, though I think I once read a sci-fi story which had something like that...

In that story, if I'm remembering correctly, a character's clear guilt was shown by their reluctance, despite claiming to have a means to prove themselves innocent of a crime, refusing to actually prove themselves innocnet and instead showing a clear preference for trying to use a series of unending circular arguements to shift the burden of evidence onto the people who lack the evidence the guilty character was known to have.

I think it was called: "Alien"...

* Is it a cognitive bias to feel slightly less well towards someone when they start playing very curious games with the english language like that?

Note that I'm note really an AH person so there's a limit to how well I feel abl to contribute to this whole thing - found things like Watcher On The Rhine and Man In the High Castle to be a bit mind numbingly stupid for my tastes, and so never really got drawn into that subsection of the community.

Give me rockets or give me cake is my motto.

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