wlawvere@buffalo.edu wrote:
Dear Jim
Your question "Should it not be sufficient to acknowledge good work whoever does it ? " would I think receive the obvious answer YES from all participants in the list.
Yet it lies it the heart of most of the 200 messages, public and private, that I have received since Marta opened the discussion. For as I concluded in III, the problem is, How can we know ?
I have been raised to believe that the answer to this is peer-review, not public-trial-by-mailing-list. One problem with the latter method is that, since nobody wants to discuss particular cases, the discussion tends to center on generalities, innuendo and "I have heard it repeated many times"-type arguments, and not on evidence or actual facts that could be verified. Such evidence and facts, on the other hand, are available to editors and referees, who are also largely independent of public opinion. As I see it, this is exactly as it should be. -- Peter