I’m significantly torn on whether to enable this. I understand the downsides of seeing authors (and am confident that I’m engaging in at least some of them), but I have one issue with it. Knowing authors can improve my ability to rapidly and effectively process posts. There’s at least one author who makes very good points, but sometimes glosses over issues that turn out to be either quite complicated or openings to criticism of the post. I’ve found these omissions both important and quite hard to find—at the moment, its worth it to me to leave author names active just to be aware that I need to read these posts with a different style of criticism than I normally engage in.
In short, there are sometimes positive outcomes of knowing authors, if only for general efficiency increases.
I have my anti-kibitzer on, I’ve had it on for two days. I too, read certain posters more carefully than others, but now, rather than deciding who to read carefully by status, I decide who to read carefully by over-viewing the contents of their posts. Of course, you want to give more resources and time to a great master of the art, than to a moderate master. But deciding who is who by status, or letting status weight in as much as it does in humans, is almost as bad as not having any time management at all. It’s like time managing, where you also falsely think that some independent variable has something to do with the content.
I’m significantly torn on whether to enable this. I understand the downsides of seeing authors (and am confident that I’m engaging in at least some of them), but I have one issue with it. Knowing authors can improve my ability to rapidly and effectively process posts. There’s at least one author who makes very good points, but sometimes glosses over issues that turn out to be either quite complicated or openings to criticism of the post. I’ve found these omissions both important and quite hard to find—at the moment, its worth it to me to leave author names active just to be aware that I need to read these posts with a different style of criticism than I normally engage in.
In short, there are sometimes positive outcomes of knowing authors, if only for general efficiency increases.
I have my anti-kibitzer on, I’ve had it on for two days. I too, read certain posters more carefully than others, but now, rather than deciding who to read carefully by status, I decide who to read carefully by over-viewing the contents of their posts. Of course, you want to give more resources and time to a great master of the art, than to a moderate master. But deciding who is who by status, or letting status weight in as much as it does in humans, is almost as bad as not having any time management at all. It’s like time managing, where you also falsely think that some independent variable has something to do with the content.