<p>We should all agree in abstraction that good answers (and good comments) should be correct and relevant, but who is the judge of either? Even in a community defined by overlapping technical interests, there can be marked disagreements about principles or good practice. (Supposedly, R.A. Fisher defined <em>variance</em> informally as the attitude of one statistician to another.)</p>
<p>I see no policy issue here.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>If existing answers or comments are inaccurate or irrelevant, that means <strong>there is always scope for posting better answers or comments</strong>.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Further, <strong>it can be in order to answer or comment that a question is misguided and that there is a better way to proceed or a better way to pose the analysis</strong>. As in teaching, sometimes a poster needs an explanation that they would be better off backing up and seeing what they are doing differently. CV is not a help line with an absolute commitment to try to adopt the poster's point of view; it is a forum with freedom to express other points of view.</p>
</li>
<li><p>In addition to answers, <strong>comments can be used to broaden the discussion or even to make wry or witty asides</strong>. If a comment strays too far from the main topic, it can always be flagged for deletion.</p>
</li>
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<p>In the question the examples given are some distance from my usual territory so I won't attempt any judgment on what in particular threads is relevant or irrelevant or fair comment or not.</p>
<p>However, <strong>calling such answers <em>spam</em> is unhelpful</strong> (if not offensive, as my impression is that almost all contributions to CV are made in good faith). StackExchange has a specific definition of spam: &quot;Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.&quot; Other way round, we have a clear policy that whatever is spam should just be flagged for deletion by moderators. So, again, if anything really is spam there is no policy issue to be discussed here.</p>
<p>There are some strong generalisations here and [in the original post] just one example by way of a particular thread. I guess that you don't want to single out particular people but the difficulty remains that <strong>strong claims require strong evidence</strong>.</p>
