Celebrity advice (was: Advice to a Junior in High School?)

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Terry Reedy (tjreedy at udel.edu):
> (disconnected from CS).  Quite aside from my disagreement about the
> 'dangerous' characterization, is the boycott suggestion sensible and
> legitimate, or just flamebait?

I think you could fairly consider that flamebait, if the situation
were as you characterized it. This situation is specifically when a
given author writes scholarship -- or invective, whatever -- into two
totally separate and readily distinguishable fields.

The key in my mind is distinguishable. You can draw the line between
Knuth's CS writings and religious writings. In some cases, it's more
challenging: polemic and scholarship blend freely within articles that
waver between analytic description and propaganda.

I don't think it makes sense to avoid (say) ESR entirely; I do think
that his work should be approached with some care and some capacity
for critical analysis. It usually takes a year or two of college
(often more!) for a student to acquire enough domain-specific
knowledge to be able to evaluate a text and sort opinion from fact.

As such, some writers (particularly the sort who love to speculate on
fields they have no training in, or who get sloppy with their facts)
are best left for when you can tell when they're talking out their
ass, and when they actually know what they're talking about. Maybe ESR
belongs to this category of writer?

--G.

-- 
Geoff Gerrietts             "Don't get suckered in by the comments-- 
<geoff at gerrietts net>     they can be terribly misleading.
www.gerrietts.net/geoff/     Debug only code." --Dave Storer