[Prestidigitweeze]

My apologies for the tardiness of my response. In a world in which books and stories have yet to be written and edited, I haven't felt terribly enthusiastic about the tedium of replying. The rather testy fisking in the last response to me suggests the next might be no more friendly or perceptive, hence the fruitlessness of this exercise.

Clearly, Andrew's last fisk makes a series of assertions about a post that hasn't been understood and a playful tone that hasn't been heard.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Perhaps you should avoid MR is you are unable to tolerate people who have a different point of view from yours.

Thanks so much for the warm reception, Andrew! I hope your time on MR will be pleasant for you as well!

Using insulting language like "rectal hook" and denigrating people's opinions you don't like as "ululations" (i.e., meaningless noises) is not the most productive way to engage in a conversation.

To avoid the likelihood of contentious interactions, most of my response will now address Andrew's post in the third person.

The term "rectal hook" was never applied to Andrew. It was applied to the imaginary respondent who continues to make the case that "might and some do not mean will and all." If Andrew considers himself to be that imaginary respondent, to whom reasoned argument means nothing, then it is he and not I who chooses to place the hook in that delicate position.

Let the record show, Your Honors, that my learnéd colleague's pejorative interpretation of ululation is one that no one else on this thread inferred and which I myself did not intend. Frequently, I refer to my own comments and those of my friends as ululations because the comparison is meant to be humorous and not — again — mean-spirited.

While I understand what those words mean, I also understand that you are constructing a strawman argument.

With all due respect, Your Horrors, I'm not certain my learnéd colleague did understand what those words meant in that particular context. Otherwise, he might not have taken them so personally (see above).

Here is the specific comment I responded to

Let the record show, your Honchos, that I'd repasted the exact same comment in my previous post, then repasted Andrew's previous comment beforehand. If I were responding to a different comment, Andrew's tirade about being taken out of context might have made sense.

One more thing, Your Highnesses: In all of his responses to me and others on this thread, Andrew has relied rather heavily on charging us with using rhetorical fallacies — specifically, that of the straw man argument. As we shall see, it seems fairly clear that Andrew is using the term so broadly as to suggest he might need to review its usage.

It is not "hyperbolic distortion" to interpret that as meaning that you are suggesting that Amazon will lose authors, some (I never claimed "all") of whom are going to be better reviewers than non-authors.

The distinction which Andrew made applied to "many" authors, not "some." He even suggested that a glance at authors' reviews might suggest that such Amazon denizens were universally worse critics than non-authors:

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

While I'm sure that many authors believe that they are better reviewers than non-writers, I don't believe that at all. In fact, if you take a random look at reviews published by self-pubbed authors on Amazon, you'll begin to suspect that authors are worse reviewers than ordinanry readers.

So, to sum: I'm not talking about "many" or even a large number of Amazon reviewers who will be excluded unfairly. I'm talking about some as in a few, and when it comes to formulating rules and laws, that few should matter when their contribution is important. One could just as easily talk about excluding a few voters based on the tendency of some group to which they belong to commit fraud.

If this *isn't* what you meant, why did you describe authors as being "some of the very experts book review digests court?"

See above. If I myself were unclear about using the term straw man, I might suggest Andrew had resorted to it here. What seems likelier is that he's misunderstood the argument I did make (as opposed to constructing an entirely different argument and attributing it to me).

While I realize that "you've misinterpreted me" lacks the sound of punitive authority which straw man seems to hold for Andrew, accusing someone else of misinterpretation is more accurate in most cases (such as this one). Andrew might also wish to consider that misinterpret is less didactic.

Originally Posted by Andrew

[Y]ou are constructing a strawman argument. . . . It is not "hyperbolic distortion" to interpret that as meaning that you are suggesting that Amazon will lose authors, some (I never claimed "all") of whom are going to be better reviewers than non-authors. . . . In fact, there is no distortion, much less hyperbolic distortion at all. I simply disagree with you. I do not believe, categorically, that Amazon will lose "expert" reviewers by barring authors from posting reviews.

Here we reach a point of self-contradiction which makes further discussion difficult. In Andrew's previous statements, he's stated that "many" (and later "some") "but not all" authors are inexpert reviewers. In his last statement, he says that he disbelieves "categorically" that Amazon will lose "'expert' reviewers by barring authors from posting reviews."

Yet I've consistently spoken of only some reviewers. I've even gone so far as to suggest the hypothetical example of Virginia Woolf writing an Amazon review, which winnows the idea of some down to few. My argument is not one which places all or many or some writers on pedestals. It acknowledges that, by banning all authors' reviews, Amazon bars the possibility of preventing readers from benefiting from Virginia Woolf's review. Exceptional reviews by anyone — authors or otherwise — are still worth fighting for.

Note Andrew's use of quotes around the word expert, which could be construed to mean that no such expert authors exist. Andrew could say he was simply quoting my use of the word expert, but he is also in his own words making a statement about what he does not believe "categorically." In the hypothetical realm, why would anyone assert that no expert reviewers actually exist?

In my opinion, the reviews posted on Amazon by authors are generally *worse* than reviews posted by non-authors.

Let the record show, Your Nibs, that Andrew has gone from "many" to "some" to "categorical" disbelief in any and back to "generally" (which suggests the "many" bad reviewers he mentioned at first).

Despite these statistical vacillations, I maintain that exceptions are still worth fighting for, whether their numbers are best expressed by "some," "a few" or even very few.

Sure, I've read some great book reviews by authors in, say, the NY Review of Books. Reviews that, I'm sure, took a month or more to write. But you don't see these reviews on Amazon. What you see are a bunch of crappy reviews like the example I posted.

Let the record show that Andrew has again changed the number of authors to whom he refers from "generally" to none.

I can think of a lot of reasons why our theoretical Virginia Woolf wouldn't post a review on Amazon, mostly having to do with some variation of casting pearls before swine. But regardless of motive, it appears that the theoretical Virginia Woolfs have, in fact, not been posting on Amazon.

Let the record show that Andrew has again stated categorically that author reviewers of a certain level of quality have never posted on Amazon at all, which reinforces the previous assertion they do not exist.

It does seem that Andrew's responding to an argument I didn't make by suggesting our theoretical Woolf wouldn't want to "cast pearls before swine" (and thank you, A.H., for that open-minded characterization of Amazon's customers) — as if I'd made the argument that our disenfranchised theoretical Woolf had better places to publish — but again, I don't think that necessitates anyone's wagging their finger and chanting, "straw man, straw man!" That would be netiquette's equivalent of complaining about his punctuation.

I don't assume that they do or do not have an agenda. But I know that there is a conflict of interest.

That same conflict of interest is present for anyone who likes or dislikes the author as a person. If you've ever had stalkers (and, sadly, they're easy to collect), you'll know what I mean.

Besides which, the sort of conflict of interest Andrew's talking about is deeply embedded in the publishing and academic industries — it simply occurs at a higher level. That level of conflict is far more difficult to ignore than Amazon's because the rewards are significant, real and pervasive rather than largely theoretical. I don't know anyone who buys self-published ebooks based on badly written raves from author-reviewers on Amazon, and few self-published authors who make any money, but I do know academics and editors who literally publish, promote and assign one another's papers, essays and books. No one seems to call that nepotism or a conflict of interests (though I do), and while the alternative might seem more ethical, the end result would be to take away yet another advantage of being a lowly academic in a corporate post-academic world, penalize teachers yet again, and allot more power to corporate interests that have far greater conflicts of interest (see (early) Reagan's and Goldwater's former education rep., who used to warn that free access to higher education was in danger of creating "an educated proletariat").

What does "genetic predisposition" have to do with anything?

(Here, Prestidigitweeze violates the third wall and points at people)

For the love of Oscar Levant, it was a joke, Andrew! If your last few posts are any indication, you might want to readjust your frivolity filter!

[I]nstead of tendentiously throwing out near ad-homs, why not post an example of a great review on Amazon by an author? I posted an example of a bad one, and of course it's easy to find more where that came from.

Have we really descended to the realm of "near-ad-homs," in which Andrew can't actually accuse me of resorting to ad hominem and so infers the possibility? Read the quote he's responding to again:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

In eradicating all said cliques, you also erase the possibility of more informed reviews by professional writers who simply like to talk about what they read. The world is full of whipsmart writers who used to be mainstream and are now without work; who, lacking their old forum, are now drawn to Facebook and user reviews.

The statement to which Andrew referred does not resort to ad hominem at all. The most charitable conclusion I can draw is that he's thinking of ad populum, not ad hominem, which would again be incorrect, but could at least involve the reference to the world as possibly being connected falsely to the audience's sense of common values.

There is not any ad hominem whatsoever in my calling Andrew's idea unreliable because it eradicates the possibility of excellence in an attempt to prevent a conflict of interests — an attempt which I consider ineffective as well.

To respond ad hominem would suggest I attacked the man as opposed to the argument, and the irony is that the very first lines of Andrew's response to my last post are closer to the definition of ad hominem insofar as they accuse me of posting for reasons I haven't expressed involving motives I don't possess:

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Perhaps you should avoid MR is you are unable to tolerate people who have a different point of view from yours. . . . [D]enigrating people's opinions you don't like as "ululations" (i.e., meaningless noises) is not the most productive way to engage in a conversation.

No one is saying that authors can't publish reviews. No one is saying *anything close* to that. This is only about Amazon.

This is, again, a response to an argument I haven't made. To imply the argument is suddenly about all publishing as opposed to the publishing of Amazon reviews is to ignore the obvious fact we've talking about Amazon specifically! One reason that lesser-known Woolfs and Thompsons might publish on Amazon is because the world around us has changed, therefore the interest in Amazon.

Perhaps someday, an Amazon reviewer's name will no longer be anonymous after a fixed number of years following said reviewer's death.

If that ever happens, I think we'll be amazed at the number of famous Amazon reviewers -- especially the occasional and not the prolific.

It seems (anecdotally, at least) more difficult for writers to be recognized and supported than once they were. High-profile writers might be relatively unaffected, but the ones who have published steadily until recently are often in a different situation. Writers who have hated the idea of blogs for all this time, dismissing public journals as self-indulgent or giving too much away that isn't in the books, are now writing them out of desperation. And that is only counting writers who are published and known already. What exactly would a Virginia Woolf growing up in our multimedia-driven briefly attentive culture feel compelled to do? I don't think it's far-fetched to posit her writing a dozen Amazon reviews as she pursues other modes and methods of publishing. I can also see her taking down and wishing to reuse the reviews at a later time if publishing her reviews elsewhere became viable. It's a mistake to see even famous writers as the completed and elevated literary edifices they became postmortem when they were often not seen that way in their own time. No accident that Leonard and Virginia Woolf happened to run their own press.

That good writers who are ignored will sometimes write reviews for Amazon seems evident to me, not only in the ways in which writers are now rejected by publishers, but because the ones who have been published in the past — even for decades — seem unable to find a publisher now.

That is almost impossible to police. That's the point of conflict of interest rules - they make it so you don't have to police.

Actually, the rule helps Amazon appear to be doing something about conflicts of interest without having to police spurious reviews on a user-by-user basis. It doesn't prevent conflicts of interest from taking place — especially conflicts which are not stated outright but become clear in patterns exhibited by reviewers.

Mobile Read has a handle on this. They don't prevent authors from reviewing other writers' books, they simply prevent them from promoting their own books dishonestly. And if a pattern of animosity and defamation exists (which is far more harmful than mindlessly effusive reviews), they track that pattern and act where necessary.

Um, no. Do you really not understand the concept of conflict of interest?

Let the record show we've reached another low point in our discussion: One in which it is assumed that a common phrase which hasn't actually been used by one's opponent has been somehow inferred incorrectly. Therefore one's opponent needs to be chastised and lectured for ill-phrased telepathy even as their point remains unanswered.

The original comment:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Confusing a person's essence for their job is a bit like mistaking their skin color for their culture.

In other words, it is a form of prejudice to assume that most authors write reviews in order to pimp their friends. Likewise, it is placing the motives of readers who aren't authors on a pedestal to presume their motives for writing a review will be any more pure than those of authors.

We live in a time in which attention is at least as important to people as financial gain, and that is often true on Amazon when it comes to self-publishing.

It is also true on MR and many other internet forums, where people love to insult virtually anything which seems held in high regard. No one would ever suggest that such comments be banned, but they still exhibit a conflict of interest involving the desire for attention as opposed to mere financial gain. Just because conflict of interest cases tend to focus on the financial and professional implications does not mean that other examples of corrupting secondary influences fail to fall under the same definition. Secondary influence is the primary issue in general with Amazon reviews, one which is unanswerable in terms of blanket automated enforcement. The only way to control it fairly is to track individual user trends and to take user reports and complaints seriously, as MR does here.

The issue is with Amazon's systematic and historic avoidance of certain kinds of customer/user interaction. Everyone knows that they've only made direct customer service possible because they were notorious once upon a time for hiding their phone number and contact info — for years, you couldn't find their phone number on site. This is simply another way for Amazon to automate interaction and impose a boolean rule instead of having to hire enough people to monitor human behavior in a human way.