>'Just figuring it out' seems pretty difficult. Bad papers often have facially bad bookkeeping. Things like tiny sample sizes, no blinding, insignificant p-val

>'Just figuring it out' seems pretty difficult. Bad papers often have facially bad bookkeeping. Things like tiny sample sizes, no blinding, insignificant p-values held up as definitive, unlabeled graphs, conclusions that merely repeat the abstract... red flags that can be caught in a minute or two by anyone who knows how to interpret an academic paper, not necessarily a domain expert in the field. Rather, people go to great pains to explain and rationalize away their lack of interest, rather than investing that same or less amount of time in actually looking at the paper (and probably learning something as a result - even if that "something" is better bullshit-detection skills) It's reasonable to "discuss", sure, so long as all parties involved understand that the discussion is something unrelated to the thing being put forward. But that is usually not the case. Instead, those meta arguments are used to dance around pointing at any kind of concrete issues. >Are you literally demanding that everyone either (a) refute an argument logically; or (b) refrain from commenting at all? In a perfect world? Yes. "Authority" arguments are only one step removed from the bottom of the hierarchy [1] because they don't even attempt to touch on the central point. A serious, healthy discussion should never go any lower than the top three tiers, and discussion as a whole would be better for it if people strived to do that rather than reaching for the easy dismissal. "This is crap because the author's conclusion has a sample size of one" is completely reasonable and logical. "This is crap because of the author's credentials" may or may not be true (unsubstantiated conclusion! red flags going off!), but at that point, you've ceased talking about "this" and started talking about the author. Hence, fallacious ad hominem. Diversion. Excuses. Whatever word you'd use to describe willful avoidance of the central point. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...