No it was Bill Davidsen's statement to this effect: " It helps to have a style book handy before offering an opinion, I think some people rate a beer purely on how they like it, without considering that it may be supposed to taste like that."
Which to me means that you shouldn't offer an opinion on beer if you don't understand its stylistic intention. I call bullshit. What Joris clipped out of my reply was this "It doesn't matter if its supposed to taste like shit, it still tastes like shit". Even if you don't understand or like the style, it still doesn't disqualify your opinion.
And thats right. It helps to hang around there a long enough time to figure that out (assuming you're motivated to do so). I think ratebeer had a feature at one point to give you a list of raters who've rated the beers you've rated similar to how you've rated them. Then of course you could look at their ratings of other beers you've yet to try and perhaps have some confidence you'd like what they liked. That feature is gone now it seems, but one thing I do, rather than look at the big Top50 list (which is dominated by, as Iwerks said, the huge and trendy beers) but look at best by styles. That way, even if helles suffers a style bias so that no helles would ever make the ratebeer Top 50, you can still find out what the best ones within that style are, and you probably won't be disappointed when directed to try this one:
For me though, I've long since stopped reading the "best of" lists and other raters ratings on ratebeer. I'll try any beer I haven't tried before. The only effect ratebeer has on my purchases is when I found myself out of town and visiting the GoodBeer store that has a vastly different selection than what I get locally, I'm likely to at least grab a few beers that have received some hype at RB. When there's 300 guys popping boners over Barrel Aged Alesmith Speedway stout, I'm at least going to be curious about it.