What I find is that arguments in the comments are held to a lower standard. There's no way an original article can get away with the kind of hand-waviness we in the peanut gallery can. If someone writes an article whose primary assertion was unsupported by evidence or credible source, it's probably going to get flagged.

Do it in the comments, and the hive-mind takes over. Which, now that I think about it, could be a good thing in a sense. As article authors, we write to a larger audience, indicating what they're probably going read is researched and edited. As comment readers and writers, we put down the quill-and-ink and offer insights and opinions more directly from our own experience and intuition.

Quick, unadulterated thinking yields different results than the more grueling, task-oriented process of essay writing. And there's little reason to believe that these styles should be appraised one-dimensionally. Are some techniques not better suited to different circumstances?

Gladwell comes to mind, as well as Kahneman in support of less calculated approaches, however I am unfamiliar with the literature (beyond the layman-acclaimed NYT bestsellers). Is there a way to test the success of on-the-fly human heuristics against their slower and more deliberate procedures? Maybe one-size-does not fit all, but surely a skilled problem-solver would choose the right instrument for the gig.