I don’t fault you for not having known all of this, but this information was a few Google searches away. Your advice is clearly inapplicable in this case.
You have, as has been pointed out, failed to understand the purpose of my comment. You will notice I never stated anything about this paper merely some basic guidelines to follow for determining if the paper is worth the effort to read, if one doesn’t have significant knowledge of the field within which the paper was written.
I apologize if my purpose was not clear, but your comment is completely irrelevant and misguided.
EDIT: This is not an evaluation of the particular paper in question merely some general evaluation guidelines which are useful.
Drop dead easy way to evaluate the paper without reading it: (Not a standard to live by but it works)
1.) look up the authors if they are professors or experts great if its a nobody or a student ignore and discard or take with a grain of salt
2.) was the paper published and where (if on arxiv BEWARE it takes really no skill to get your work posted there anyone can do it)
Criteria: If paper written by respectable authorities or ones who’s opinion can be trusted or where you have enough knowledge to filter for mistakes
If the paper was published in a quality journal or you have enough knowledge to filter
Then if both conditions are met, I find you can do a good job filtering the papers not worth reading.
Apologies for being blunt, but your comment is nigh on useless: Andrew Gelman is a stats professor at Columbia who co-authored a book on Bayesian statistics (incidentally, he was also interviewed a while back by Eliezer on BHTV), while Cosma Shalizi is a stats professor at Carnegie Mellon who is somewhat well-known for his excellent Notebooks.
I don’t fault you for not having known all of this, but this information was a few Google searches away. Your advice is clearly inapplicable in this case.
You’re missing the point, which was not to evaluate that specific paper, but to provide some general heuristics for quickly evaluating a paper.
You have, as has been pointed out, failed to understand the purpose of my comment. You will notice I never stated anything about this paper merely some basic guidelines to follow for determining if the paper is worth the effort to read, if one doesn’t have significant knowledge of the field within which the paper was written.
I apologize if my purpose was not clear, but your comment is completely irrelevant and misguided.
Also:
3) Check for grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.