On 10/20/09, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney
<ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com>om>:
This is an important point. A proper application
of IAR should go unnoticed
-- at least, by everyone except the "rules are rules" folks who memorize the
laws and are ready to deliver citations for all your transgressions whenever
you step a quarter inch out of line.
In an ideal world, that is how things would work. We don't live in an
ideal world. What actually happens is people complain that you having
followed the rules and never get as far as reading your explanation.
What I gather just from a glance is that its not so much an IAR
argument as it is a VIE (voting is evil) argument, and he evokes IAR
just as a procedural justification.
He's right - not that voting itself is evil, but in our context we
need and want to make intelligent editorial decisions. That means
making qualitative discernements about the voting arguments - not just
quantifying votes into a running count.
Formally, we don't currently discern according to editor "quality" -
we just don't have the means to do so. But we also don't formally make
efforts to discern the quality of arguments, and that's why - in spite
of it being "evil" - the formal method is still just basic
quantification.
So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that
we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid,
arguments, from those that aren't? Other than "IAR" that is?
-Steven