How can you tell if someone here actually knows something about a subject?

Question

I often see a pattern on ELU where someone asks a fairly innocuous question and then many people pile on with answers that seem like just opinions based on what they think, backed up by no real argument or proof, no evidence of usage from the broader corpus, no reference to known, accepted, or respected authorities.

How do you sort the good from the bad?

How can you tell if someone here actually knows something about a subject? It sometimes feels like people just weigh in on whatever takes their fancy, irrespective of their credentials, knowledge, or understanding.

Answer 1

You bring up a good point about the reliability of answers and author reputation.

Sometimes I see answers that sound authoritative but offer no supporting evidence, or, as you are deftly not putting into these words, sound like they're pulling stuff out of their ass.

Sometimes I do that. In my (partial) defense, some questions are not covered by dictionaries or style guides or corpus searches. Sometimes all there is is personal introspection (and linguistic science tries to build up beyond that). Other times...now I'm just being defensive.

ELU ain't Stack Overflow. You can't compile a sentence to see if it works. A sentence sounds good or not at all or somewhere in between. Also, as a native speaker, you don't have to have a lot of linguistic or self knowledge to tell if some grammar is weird or to come up with a vocab item but you certainly need both to explain well why the grammar or vocab might be appropriate. That is, non-experts can have something useful to add, they just may not be good at backing it up.

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But your real question is about how you can trust what people say, or maybe where you're leaning is how you can trust a particular individual.

The structure of the SE software is intended to capture what the community (all the other visitors to the site) think about the questions and answers. Reputation is a numerical device that is simply the weight of votes for and against each individual's answers (and questions).

Reputation is a proxy for reliability. As a proxy, it is not perfect. People vote for things they like, how they're said, if the match what they already believe (confirmation bias), if they sound fancy (appeal to bombast), if they've said smart things before (appeal to authority, which may be a fallacy or not), etc, etc).

There are lots of visitors to ELU. Most just read. Some stay and ask questions. Some stay and answer. There's no guarantee of authority, just interest. There is a small handful of experts, actual professors of linguistics, people who are writers/editors. But for the most part, it's just regular people.

Sometimes people give their opinion stated as fact. Some people just cut and paste from Wiktionary or some site they googled, both of which have their own difficulties with reliability.

Surely having a high rep is no guarantee of authoritative knowledge. There are a handful of non-native speakers here who have gained a lot of rep points purely because their questions are so interesting. They are self-acknowledged learners of English and don't consider themselves reliable about English patterns. But they have a high rep. (there are also some non-native speakers who I would trust about their intuition on English, well, maybe almost as much as my own).

There are some suggested guidelines for writing answers which can make things more reliable. Citations from authoritative dictionaries (like OED or MW), examples of text found, corpus searches (from COCA or NGrams), all having their own qualifications and difficulties.

Yeah, I often see answers that seem like they pulled them out of nowhere or made up as plausible but there is no basis in fact. I find that annoying, and downvote if it is egregious or comment to ask for elaboration. The SE software is set up to deal with this kind of problem. That is, sure, don't trust the first thing you see and question the answer. This ain't as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it also isn't as bad as Yahoo Answers (actually you can rely on YA to be not expert advice).

Of course, I usually fail to notice problems if I agree with the answer.

I realize that this is not a very satisfying answer. I'm not really saying either here are the desiderata for a user or a particular answer (because the reason you're asking this question is because rep is not very reliable), or on the other side that there are no good measures and it's the wild west and anything goes. Probably the best is a little experience here, seeing which persons write well, the form of which kinds of answers are trustworthy. Reputation points are a reasonable quick first approximation.

I think the moral is that ELU is an attempt to be as reliable as possible given that it is crowd-sourced by a number of people with varying levels of knowledge.

Answer 2

Yes, many users here are expert linguists or professors of English. I would recommend looking at the bios of some of our top users. However, as with every stack exchange site on the network, there is no rule prohibiting any person from creating an account and participating by asking questions or answering questions, and potentially accruing high reputation if their answers are consistently upvoted.

The main two ways to determine whether an answer has veracity, besides using your own judgment, are to observe the reputation of the user who posted the answer and to note the number of up- or down-votes they receive.

There will undoubtedly be cases where a non-expert or poorly-researched answer gets many upvotes. There are also many excellent expert answers that get little attention and few up-votes. This is an unavoidable aspect of the Stack Exchange model, and other sites on the network are no different in that regard.

If you believe an answer is not useful, lacks research effort, or is unclear, you can help our community by downvoting those answers and upvoting answers that you believe are high-quality.

Answer 3

I would like to raise an issue (often raised in the Academia) of authority versus fact. Not only clashes may occur between those who would "prefer to err with Galen than be right with Harvey" (e.g. sticking with classic grammarians versus modern usage) not to mention that grammar is not a hard science and facts are more difficult to establish.

What disturbs me sometimes in those discussions, is that academic degree, place of birth, etc., seem to matter more than fact and a system of snobism could surreptitiously establish itself, with a ruling class. In that system, people who do not have "credentials" would have to bring more burden of proof than others. In other words, the argument ad personam would still seem to have currency.

In the extreme, consulting the reputation of a person instead of the facts pointed out in an answer (with or without learned references), is still argument ad personam and, from a strict scientific perspective, a fallacy.

The social mechanism of reputation does have its use however, which (as the word clearly states), tells about social acceptance. It is used as a proxy for truth for lack of better, but let's not forget that it is a very imperfect mechanism, just as "peer-review" in Academia. The system has some degree of validity, but we have to live with the risk that some invalid answers may have high rating because they match common opinion, while some good factual ones may be "downgraded" because they don't match that opinion.

As physicist Feynman said:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

For my part, I will lend my full unreserved respect to the answer of any "maverick" born in a non-English speaking town, even with no degree or reputation at all, who can bring about facts in an answer that appeal to my curiosity and which I can endeavour to verify. Otherwise, how could anyone acquire reputation?

But even beyond this, this tells a lot about the attitude of modern society toward facts. Facts are what is observable, not what authorities, commissions, boards and even academics and teachers tell us to observe.

Of course, it is not always easy to discern facts from opinion and many people are asking for guidance.

But that's where the problem is. The value that we should all cultivate on this forum, is that defined by Immanuel Kant as Enlightnement, which is:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

And that is my answer to the question:

How do you sort the good from the bad?

Have a look at reputation, citations and whatnot.

But dare to know! Use your own observation and understanding! Liberate yourself from the self-imposed nonage of social acceptance and intellectual authority!

Stack Exchange is a fairly workable mechanism for a forum. It is far from perfect and I would like to commend those who are behind it because they are fully aware of that and permanently trying to improve it.

But to give credence to the myth that truth will somehow emerge fully formed from a system of social metrics such as reputation and degrees, etc., would reduce these forums (as Feynman would put it) into cargo cult science: a series of rituals devoid of substance.

Oh well, I am sure that my words are going to raise discomfort and anger and rebukes as "who do you think you are to think you can think"? But isn't that the lot of any person who wants to trust fact rather than opinion, even authoritative opinion?

Answer 4

Wow, what happened? I write responses to questions when I feel like it. I'm always on point. My responses are casual and targeted. I respond differently if the person posting is an ESL user or a native speaker trying to write a job cover letter. I've noticed some people who write responses here are pedantic and ostentatious for no reason.

I say, go with your gut feeling. If a response seems condescending, then screw it. I received negative votes for pointing out that "waker" is not a noun (as in a person), but if said out loud sounds like "wanker" - British slang for jerkin' off. You can't please everyone.