On 10/20/09, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com:
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