What is the mechanism that should convince authors to avoid reading comments on their work, except for those they solicit from specified persons for whom they have intellectual respect? The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. This applies, of course, to matters of judgment. A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself. This mechanism I
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