Suppose you are writing a referee report and you are recommending that the paper be rejected. You have a long list of reasons. How many should you put in your report? If you put only your few strongest arguments you run the risk that the author (or editor) finds a response to those and accepts the paper.
You will have lost the chance to use your next few strongest arguments to their full effect, even if there is a second round. The reason has to do with a basic friction of rhetoric. Nobody really knows what’s true or false, but the more you’ve thought about it the better informed you are. So there is always a signaling aspect to rhetoric. Even if the opponent can’t find a counterargument, when it is known that you rank your argument low in terms of persuasiveness, your argument will as a result be in fact less persuasive. Your ranking reveals that you believe that the probability is high that a counterargument could be found, even if by chance this time it wasn’t.
On the other hand you also don’t want to put all of your arguments down. The risk here is that the author refutes all but your strongest one or two arguments. Then the editor may conclude that your decision to reject was made on the basis of that long list of considerations and now that a large percentage of them have been refuted this seals the case in favor. Had you left out all the weak arguments your case would look stronger.
It may even be optimal to pick a non-interval subset of arguments. That is you might give your strongest argument, leave out the second strongest but include the third strongest. The reason is that you care not just about the probability that any single one of your arguments is refuted but the probability that a large subset of your arguments survive. And here correlation matters. It may be that a refutation of the strongest argument is likely also to partially weaken the second-strongest. You pick the third because it is orthogonal to the first.
Cheap Talk 
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October 1, 2013 at 1:00 am
rani
If my memory serves me well, the 10th century Arabic-Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon once wrote about strategic sequencing of arguments in a debate. He claimed that if you’re the first mover, you should present your arguments in an increasing order of strength, whereas if you’re the responder, you should do the reverse. I don’t think he gave a justification for this strategy (but he had a lot of practical experience to draw on). Regarding the first mover’s considerations, I think this may be what he had in mind: when you start presenting your case, the audience or your opponent (or the editor, in your story) can interject with counter-arguments, in which case it’s rhetorically powerful if you can reply to this counter-argument with an even stronger argument.
In any case, I think that strategic sequencing of arguments (as well as omissions) is a great topic for research. Not sure that a conventional strategic-information-transmission modeling approach won’t miss a lot of interesting aspects.
October 1, 2013 at 2:06 am
anonymus
I hope you’re not reviewing one of my papers…
October 1, 2013 at 7:48 am
Anonymous
I’m not…but it would have been a nice change: anonymous author, public referee
October 3, 2013 at 12:00 am
Frank
I guess reviewing isn’t the best example. You don’t (or shouldn’t) want to win — by getting the paper rejected — at all costs. You want (or should want) it to be rejected if and only if it should be rejected, as does the editor. In this case, there should be an equilibrium with full disclosure.
February 11, 2014 at 5:15 am
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December 5, 2018 at 8:43 am
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