Michael Orthofer: belief

Transcript context

…You did. The original idea behind the site was to be able to link to other reviews. And also I have the review quotes from the major review publications, where there are review quotes available, which I actually did sort of as a countermeasure. I was so irritated by the blurbs you find on the back of the paperback editions, which are not at all representative of the reviews of the book. I wanted to give the honest blurbs of the reviews. It’s always been important to me that my opinion is my opinion. You really should seek out as many different ones as possible. To be able to give access to all these different reviews to point readers to — because some readers rely on a certain reviewer — if I can give them the link to that for this book so that they will get an opinion which, perhaps, is more informative to them than mine can be because they don’t see eye to eye with me, I think that’s a very important thing. Having as many different opinions as possible — to me that always seems beneficial. I realize now we have this issue of whether the wisdom of crowds really is wisdom and whether it doesn’t overcomplicate matters as well. But it’s always been important to me that I have very strongly held opinions, but please also consider the other opinions. Other reviews — and here I mean media, not bloggers — how corrupt are they?…

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