Maurice Barnhill  wrote or quoted:
> Tim Tyler wrote:
> > Maurice Barnhill  wrote or quoted:

> >>There is no point in going through the effort of writing up your 
> >>ideas understandably unless you want to convince someone that the 
> >>idea is correct or at least clever.  Who do you want to convince? 
> >>  The logical ultimate target is the people who have thought most 
> >>carefully about the general area of knowledge your idea 
> >>addresses.  These people are in current times mostly (although 
> >>not entirely) professionals, and professionals are very, very 
> >>unlikely to pay attention to anything not in the refereed 
> >>literature.
> > 
> > In my experience, this is completely untrue.  I can think of
> > numerous highly talented individuals in their fields who have
> > participated in usenet in their time.
> 
> There are a few here, but how many?  Compare that to the number 
> who read any decent journal on evolution.

You seem to be comparing readers with authors.  Surely not a fair
comparison: the readers generally outnumber the authors.

Also, s.b.e. may not be the idea group for this comparison.  It
is moderated - and has a substantial posting delay - and thus it
is difficult to hold a conversation in real time here.  Other groups 
attract greater proportions of experts.  sci.crypt and
comp.compression spring to mind.

> > I don't think professionals as a class are blind to these advantages -
> > and I don't think its correct to say that they fail to take advantage
> > of them.
> 
> They are also not blind to the low signal to noise ratio.  It is 
> much easier to overcome that elsewhere.

Often, I find it harder to find things I'm interested in in
conventional journals.  They typically lack decent search facilities -
and searching for what you are interested in is often critical.

> > Even before the internet, much interaction between scientists was
> > *not* in the peer reviewed literature.  Check the letters of
> > Charles Darwin - for example.
> 
> The corresponding medium is EMail, not usenet.  EMail has been 
> used a lot since even before there was an internet proper.

If I want feedback about a theory, I use usenet - not email.

With email, I have to mail everybody I want feedback from -
and emails which request responses can be a bit intrusive.

Usenet is much better for that sort of thing - nobody is
obliged to reply, and many people get to look at your theory.

> >>If nothing else, they don't have time to read 
> >>everything and the refereeing processes weeds out most of the 
> >>nonsense while losing very little of the valuable stuff.  Very 
> >>rarely some valuable stuff is lost, but the amount of work 
> >>required to find it elsewhere when it doesn't reach the standard 
> >>literature is impossible to undertake.
> > 
> > Fortunately, filtering out irrelevant chaff can be done passably well 
> > dynamically by computer programs - which can track references to the
> > document in question.
> 
> But computers cannot filter nearly as well as referees can. 
> Referees can even filter out weak contributions from normally 
> sensible people, or even better can induce people to do a better 
> job on their writeup than they would do otherwise.  The 
> refereeing process wastes the time of 1-3 people, not hundreds.

Material is reviewed on usenet as well.  You get to see who
is critical of the theory - and often their reasoning about why
it is wrong.

Reviewers can't suppress publication of the original messages though.
That's a very positive thing - it means nobody gets censored.
-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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