How to tell a good from a bad reviewer, by Chris Langan, developer of the CTMU, IQ 195-210 (I am not providing strict guidelines but I think incompetent reviewers cause distress to authors and are a waste of precious time, so as authors strive to be competent, reviewers should do the same).
"The competency criteria for distinguishing among evaluators, e.g. Mark, are equally obvious:
(1) Comprehension: The evaluator makes sure he fully understands the ideas he evaluates and refrains from attaching extraneous constructions, speculative interpretations, or inappropriate conceptual models (even in the face of uncertainty regarding the proper interpretation).
(2) Discernment: The evaluator possesses the willingness, the knowledge, and the intelligence to properly and thoroughly apply value criteria 1-3.
(3) Neutrality: The evaluator limits his judgments to value criteria 1-3, and withholds final judgment on ideas to which he is unable to apply criteria 1-3 with reasonable certainty (e.g., in fields outside his areas of expertise, or where he bumps up against his intellectual ceiling).
In scholarly discourse, evaluators are required to justify their judgments. Those who display inadequate comprehension, discernment, or neutrality in their judgments, having failed one or more competency criteria, are by definition incompetent. Among incompetent evaluators, the worst-of-breed are obviously those who chronically fail all three competency criteria.
With regard to my essay, Mark fails all three competency criteria. Indeed, he readily admits to it. This renders Mark incompetent, by his own admission, to do what he's trying to do here. Accordingly, he fails to qualify as a legitimate "debunker", "crank fighter" or whatever it is that he likes to call himself, instead constituting a mere pain in the neck and leaving me nothing sufficiently coherent to “defend” against.
In fact, it's a bit worse than that. This is because Mark sometimes seems to choose the ideas he attacks *because* he fails to comprehend them. In other words, it's not just that Mark randomly encounters ideas he's unfit to evaluate, and then does so anyway just to be a pain in the neck; it's that for Mark, personal incomprehension almost seems to be an irresistible evaluation-stimulus.
Of course, in keeping with his overall incompetence as an evaluator, Mark doesn't understand this. Instead, he pulls a cognitive switcheroo of which he is seemingly not consciously aware, automatically confusing his own incomprehension with incomprehensibility. In fact, "incomprehensibility" seems to be his main critique of my essay.
In other words, Mark has switched a judgment on his own subjective mental state (incomprehension) for a purportedly objective attribute of the idea he's trying to evaluate (incomprehensibility), thus making the distinction "good math | bad math" effectively equivalent to "math that Mark is capable of understanding, and therefore likes | math-like content that Mark is incapable of understanding, and therefore hates!”
Now, if Mark were as smart as he evidently thinks he is, he'd be less aggressive. He wouldn't immediately stick his neck out to upchuck all over ideas he doesn't understand. Instead, finding himself unable to locate obvious falsehoods in the target of his derision, he'd wait until he has more data on what's really going on with it. After all, that's what reasonable people do.
But Mark isn't always reasonable, or all that smart either, at least when he lets his characteristic irascibility get the better of him. In fact, as we've already established, he can be an incompetent little pain in the neck. In fact, he often appears to wallow in irrationality with what appears to be near-demonic relish.
Remember, the value and competency criteria listed above are objective in nature. This isn’t just an opinion; it’s a rock-solid indictment of Mark’s incompetence as an evaluator of ideas that he considers sufficiently “mathematical” to merit his special attention, but about which he actually can’t tell his ass from his elbow.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing Mark says makes sense; some of what he says obviously does make sense. But some does not, and that’s where Mark tumbles into incompetency. Obviously, as the very first order of business here, Mark needs to mend his incompetent ways.
(I hope we’ve managed to avoid any problems with English comprehension this time around.)"