Your response would have been a lot stronger if you had answered his main question - do you have an interest? This is a question it is reasonable to ask any bl

Your response would have been a lot stronger if you had answered his main question - do you have an interest? This is a question it is reasonable to ask any blogger endorsing a product. It is also a question any blogger should clearly and explicitly answer, if asked. >The relationship between the speaker and the statement has no bearing on the truth of the statement. It has no bearing on the objective truth of the statement. However, we have no Oracle we can check for objective truths. So with incomplete information, we reason subjectively and probabilistically. Books that stand the test of time, and are still popular in our community, are more likely to be good than an arbitrary new unknown book. We apply a different prior, and there's nothing wrong with that. P(Book_good|classicInCommunity) > P(Book_good) When we see three books endorsed, two respected classics, and one new to the market, its natural to wonder whether there's a great new book on the topic that has just come out. But we must ask ourselves, how often does this happen? And how often do people shill on blogs? There's nothing wrong with reasoning about these relative probabilities, from our perspective of incomplete information - and it'd be foolish not too. Anyway; I also believe: P(shill|HNreader) < P(shill), so I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. Theres nothing wrong with applying such a belief, even though it obviously doesn't change whether you ARE a shill or not. But it'd be nice if you answered bugsy's question. Because P(book_good|endorsed,interest) < P(book_good|endorsed)