Hi Ryan,
I respect your honest comments, which I know you intended to be both accurate and useful. Last night I woke up to loud voices from your side of the hall at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have walked next door and asked to hear you talk about my paper too.

You're right to notice that my paper is self-serving, but I'm surprised that you limit your observation to the "extent" to which I comment my senate loss. A paper "about the Senate election" has to be a paper about how people view me, because any election has to be:

• a referendum on the candidate's entire public persona, not just his Statement
• a referendum on how much individuals liked, and/or trusted for a job, the entire persona attempted by the Candidate statement
  

I think this is what you were doing when you mentioned that I list the phonetic pronunciation of my name, on Lawnet,

I also appreciate your attempting to translate the binary "yes/no" of the referendum -- or social experiment, as William James would call it. By itself it was so ambiguous

don't know if you read the previous draft, the sort of paper a person writes when a quarter o

There are a lot of people who know me better than you do (I'm assuming you didn't read previous drafts of my second paper, and I know you haven't spoken with me since Orienation I'm glad you noticed that this paper was about the senate elections. These are not the sort of comments I was looking for, but I won't turn down an opportunity to hear what people don't like about me. Thi

I'd like you to be more specific about a few things, since it's possible you

I'm glad that you find my paper "monumentally ... self-serving," and I'm not at all even if I find it a bit strange that you regard [my decision to / the manner in which I] write a self-serving paper But I do appreciate that I've finally written a I'll respect that we're probably facing asymmetric information about which parts of my paper, since according to Greenwich Mean Time you posted this comment at 3:30am the morning after Dean's Cup.

This experiment could be interesting. But what's your hypothesis, and what's your method? One shouldn't start gathering data until he has convinced his AUDIENCE that he's properly associated [a hypothesis and a method], i.e. [properly associated "X" and "ZERO"], given that

* HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say ZERO, i.e. NOT say that Q is not true" and * METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. certain data from the following poll ..."

It doesn't matter that you've defined them in your mind, or that you plan to share them with us after collecting your data. Given that OUR mandate as fellow-scientists is to disprove your conclusions with zeal , we are obliged to zealously exploit any lack of [proof that you wrote hypothesis and method before gathering data]. If you share your hypothesis and method after gathering the data, you oblige us to accuse you of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

Eben's grading style is just an exemplary demonstration of how scientists should undertake that mandate. I also witnessed this, growing up in a family of engineers, at the dinner table. Thankfully I was not the target. -- AndrewGradman? - 30 Mar 2008

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