William M Connolley wrote:
This would be a common scientific approach to dealing with critics, I believe. Instead of addressing their concerns, one adds lots of irrelevant, complicated details and hopes to confuse the heck out of them so that they shut up. ;)
A fair comment, as long as you delete "scientific" and replace it with "political"...
Eh, it's not uncommon in scientific circles either. The sort of paper that buries its reader in gratuitous and only-tangentially-relevant equations and data tables as a substitute for actually making a good argument is sadly altogether too common. Most do get caught by peer review (at least in good publications and conferences), but there are still a fair number that slip through...
But regardless, *we* don't want to do that. A few of the articles that get too citation-happy do seem to do this sometimes... when every single sentence ends with an external link (half of them broken, since the web is mostly ephemeral), and the writing style is "a bunch of gratuitous facts are asserted with no coherent explanation", something is wrong...
-Mark