A helpful tip to DU from the Geochemical Society and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

[eridani]

In the 70s, the Geochemical Society instituted a brand new protocol for the selection of abstracts of papers to be presented at their annual conference. They stripped all names from the abstracts, and linked names to abstracts by numerical codes. And voila! In a single year the number of women giving presentations tripled! Also, there were more presentations by post-docs and grad students who worked for head researchers with less well-established reputations.

Similarly, in the same era the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra instituted an auditions protocal requiring playing behind a curtain so that the evaluaters could not know your gender or skin color. Unsurprisingly, women and minorites won more positions after that practice was instituted.

I was just thinking that it would have been really great if the DU administrators could have figured out a way to strip all Famous Names from health care debate posts, so none of us would have had a clue if the quotations were from Hamsher, or Chomsky, or Krugman, or Obama, or Ed Schultz, or Boner, or whoever. Then we would have been stuck with the bare statements of facts or reasoning to evaluate.

Think that such a policy might have improved the level of discourse just a teensy little bit? Just sayin'.