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so who looks at the other posts before they post?

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 6 October 2012, at 11:38 p.m.

In Response To: so who looks at the other posts before they post? (Caryl Stephanson)

Welcome back, Caryl.

My guess is that most people look at other posts before they post. I usually do. A few people here make a point of not looking—ah_clem and Chuck Bower I believe. For the OLM, Jason strongly recommends not looking at other posts first. (He expressed his preference strongly enough that I decided to drop out of the OLM as a result.) So in that context, perhaps most players don't look at other posts before posting.

I get plenty of practice elsewhere making plays without knowledge of anyone else's opinion. For me, one of the purposes of a forum is to see what other people think. Being able to come to a conclusion in the presence of possibly dissenting opinions, profiting from their wisdom while not being unduly swayed by prejudice, is a useful backgammon skill in a consulting chouette. Approaching it that way, you're learning something by reading other posts first that you couldn't learn otherwise.

A more interesting question is how many people look at bots before they post, without saying so. Probably most don't, but I feel pretty sure that some people do. For example, I think the following scenario is probably pretty common: Someone looks at a position, comes to a decision, then looks at a bot. If their play is wrong, then they don't post. If their play is right, then they give the reasoning they used to arrive at their decision. Some people, like Chuck Bower, think that this kind of behavior is dishonest. I don't think that it's dishonest, though I don't do it myself (at least, not any more; in the early days when I started reading this forum and had little idea about what I was or wasn't supposed to do, I did it occasionally). It does have the effect of making you look smarter than you really are, so I can see that if someone is doing it as part of a premeditated campaign to make themselves look good, then it's not particularly admirable behavior, but I still wouldn't quite call it dishonest.

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