I have a great deal of knowledge and experience on a variety of topics. Many do. But, most of my knowledge I have learned over decades of schooling and experience. When teaching (rare these days), I work from a text, but for posting on the 'net most of the time I am doing it off-the-cuff, frequently while a test is running or I am at lunch at work, or in the comfort of my home media room. I do not have references close by and am posting for fun, to learn, and to share, but I am rarely rigorous in my posts. I have to do that 12 hours a day at work and I want to relax when I get home. College is easy -- I can tell the students to go do their own research and look it up. Here, the challenge is to support a position when the audience is either incapable or is uninterested in digging up those references and expects me to provide them.
That is not a slam; nobody knows everything, and not having expertise in a field makes things very hard to follow. I am tempted to call it the "JJ Issue" based on one of Amir's recent posts, but it is a problem for any expert -- it is all too easy to assume knowledge base higher than your audience. And, if I make an assertion, I should be able to back it up with hard data or theory, but I am frankly often too lazy to do so. And at times, stuff I "know" may be hard for me to find. It may be in a reference I don't have on the shelf, it may be something I remember but do not remember where it came from, or it may be in a paper either in a box buried someplace in the shed or no longer available to me (e.g. JAES papers). When AJ and others question my source, and/or fundamental knowledge, the trick is to not take it as a personal attack, realize they have every right to ask, and either look it up or simply state I do not have the reference.
The catch for them is now they would have to do the legwork, accept it, or dismiss it as unsupported. The problem with the latter is that, whether I provide the reference or not, I may be right... When I read things I tend to weigh the author as well as the data. Dilbert comic aside, if a trashman proposes a quantum physics hypothesis, I am less likely to consider it than if it came from Stephen Hawkings. Please, do not take that as an insult to trashmen (or trashwomen) everywhere...
I have the same issue in something like psychoacoustics, a subject I'd love to know more about, but simply don't have time to learn and follow up on all the papers, and as a result get in trouble whenever I try to make an assertion.
Random thoughts - Don