I disagree, legitimacy by proxy is a very useful initial signal. Someone who works on the gRPC team at a large API distributor is more likely to have better advice on best practices for protobufs, than someone who works on optimizing ray-tracers for TempleOS. Relying on proxies, and likelihoods, is crucial for the timely processing of information. We heavily rely on at least some level of trust - otherwise we would have to completely verify every single thing that anyone says, before we can begin to do anything with the information.
Trust comes from the meat of the talk minus the charisma of the speaker. If what is being said is important enough to perhaps impact your work, you need to verify what is being said anyway.
Association alone isn't very convincing. If people really feel they need to establish credentials they should talk about what they do. It is almost like at a job interview. I don't need to know that you worked for X - I want to know what you did at X.
Introductions should be no more than what you can fit into one breath. After that it is just some person going on about themselves, and that isn't very attractive. Get to the meat first, and then we can talk.
Exactly what I thought. Exceptions are always possible, but more people need to channel their inner baysian and assign appropriate prior probabilities. Someone with impressive and relevant credentials gets a higher prior from me that their talk will be worthwhile. Doesn't mean that prior is 100% or that some nobody's prior is 0%.
I disagree, legitimacy by proxy is a very useful initial signal. Someone who works on the gRPC team at a large API distributor is more likely to have better advice on best practices for protobufs, than someone who works on optimizing ray-tracers for TempleOS. Relying on proxies, and likelihoods, is crucial for the timely processing of information. We heavily rely on at least some level of trust - otherwise we would have to completely verify every single thing that anyone says, before we can begin to do anything with the information.