Popular Science Is Getting Rid of Comments

Daniel_Stuckey writes "From an article announcing the sites' decision to do away with comments: 'It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. ... even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. ... A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.'" This comes alongside news that Google is trying to clean up YouTube comments by adding integration with Google+. "You’ll see posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles."

Comments

Re:Sour grapes

[diamondmagic]

Erm, it kind of is. Yeah, we know that CO2 is opaque at certain wavelengths, we get that. But trying to model the effects on the climate? Science implies reproducibility. You can't repeat the climate. Can you find me just one model that's been reasonably correct more than a few years out?

And even where the science does have it right, that doesn't mean a particular public policy makes economic sense. There's nothing like the thrill of finding out you, the taxpayers, just spent $500B on delaying global flooding by only seven years - more than enough money to re-engineer the world's food infrastructure multiple times over. Yes, that's the actual numbers we're looking at, and that's just taking the current publications at face value.