Thanks for bringing this discussion here. I honestly think it's important (and picking one person/post is only good; it provides something tangible to discuss). Let me present my opinions:
As much as I hate to pick on one person/post, this isn't information, it's entertainment. It's mindless, populist drivel clearly written with one purpose: to provoke an emotional response and farm upvotes.
But these sites aren't strictly about information. If you want strict information, you can go to Wikipedia, IEEE magazines, scientific papers. The world is full of official and dull information. This site is, like the guideline tells, largely about the stuff between objective and subjective. About stuff that one thinks is correct, but can't prove. Such stuff would go to /dev/null without sites like this.
My answer, surely, leans towards the subjective side. As for being "mindless, populist drivel", that's your personal opinion, not information. I certainly did not craft it to farm upvotes. I wrote my opinion, that's all.
But who is correct, him or me? Do we/should we have no standards whatsoever for evidence, or are answers here supposed to be more than just statements of opinion?
I think this largely depends on the question. Take these questions:
- Is there a point at which the process gets in the way and becomes an end unto itself? Is that even engineering?
- How to create an edit profile page like Google+?
The second one is about technology how-to. The first one is about opinion. Opinions grow from experiences and they vary with time. Answers to such questions are unavoidably quite subjective. How much evidence did you seen in the other answers to the same question?
My answer obviously does provoke emotional responses, and even if it were completely incorrect, wrong, false, at least it reveals something about the question itself: the right answer, whatever it is, is not clear. Therefore, there is no objective answer. Therefore, the answer must be subjective. And subjective answers are based on personal experiences - something that nobody can call incorrect.
