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