Slashdot Mirror
Do Comments On Web Pages Ruin Science?
GregLaden writes "Last week Popular Science shut down comments on their web pages citing the damage being done to the public perception of science as their reason. Earlier research suggested this might be a good idea because trollish, negative comments can color the perception by readers of a news story. However, some have taken Popular Science's move to be anti-science, implying that science itself is positively affected by web and blog comments, as though these comments contributed to the science being done itself. Here, I take exception to this and suggest that while comments are important in relation to the public perception of science (which itself is important) blog and web commentary never, or only rarely, influences the process of scientific inquiry itself."
Nope, no room for that, even in the "science" community.
Conform or be squelched.
Could you point out a scientific study for your hypothesis?
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
it's clear to me that the issue isn't with science itself, or how it's "done" in some sort of ontological sense. the issue is with how people perceive science, and how they perceive others' perceptions of science to be. These meta-perceptions are really what the whole issue is about.
For a comment to further scientific discourse, not only does it have to contribute a constructive thought, but others need to perceive it as constructive and build further on it. Web comments are often exactly the opposite - people make a mental impression of your comment without fully trying to comprehend (or even read!) it, and respond based on that. So you get what we have here today. Trolls, shills, pedants, and grammar nazis.
Actually, my favorite comments are at the right-wing rag Daily Caller. Every single comment thread devolves into one party accusing the other party of being closet democrats.
Maybe instead of shutting down commentary, they should have implemented the kind of half-decent moderation system that the only usable comment sites have adopted.
Since when do random websites have the moral obligation to provide comment sections?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I don't think that open comments systems can survive the onslaught of paid comments. If "winning" means having more comments (say) opposing global climate change than supporting it, that is very cheap to arrange if you have a modest amount of cash (or a suitable number of committed followers). Such tactics render the comments section value subtracting, and it is no surprise if they get turned off over time.
That is especially true if there is not a strong community present on the site. Slashdot has that, and so it is doing better than most sites.
Is that if some scientist decides they've discovered X through Y, some dude across the world who's already gone down that path and found a flaw with Y can chime in. And then another one who found a fix to the flaw can also chime in. Thus science wins.
Probability that this actually occurs on a popular website and that the original scientist reads it? I'd assume slim to none. Still, you're taking away the most globally significant feature of the internet by limiting communication.
I'd guess the practical benefit to comments is that kids too young to decide their future might be able to get excited and participate in a discussion here. Nurturing excitement in STEM is always a good thing.
Nope, no room for that, even in the "science" community.
Conform or be squelched.
Scientists, in my experience, typically respect dissident thought. (I am not going to say that good dissident ideas are always embraced, but they are generally listened to if there is serious thought behind them.) Dissident speech devoid of thought, on the other hand, is generally ignored in science. (It is, after all, not a democracy.)
It has nothing to do with dissident speech. It has nothing to do with squelching actual scientific discussion.
Read the damn study.
There is no such thing as dissident speech in science. Ignorant, fallacious, and incorrect speech is another thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry, they have no obligation to let you post on their site. It's their site, and they can do with it what they think is best. Fortunately, you can start a blog and rant away all you want.
Incidentally, I heard most scientific journals won't let just anyone publish articles. Talk about squelching dissent!
I found the comment section on Popular Science to be worse than worthless. Good riddance, I say.
Comments don't do any harm. It's idiots believing comments that does.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... The main purpose of the Slashdot beta design seems to be to make the comment system unusable?
I used to think that the web comments on science articles tended to consist of an over-representation of people with one or two personal pet ideas (eg: Dark matter is the ether of the 21st century, etc....) but then I discovered that it really was possible to make over $7000 dollars a month working from home on the internet.
This isn't about squelching dissident speech in science ... not among scientists.
It's when trolls, shills, and other many others with personal or idealogical agendas start posting lies, half-truths, propaganda or other questionable facts *as science* on these public forums. The public gets more content from the comments than they do the articles and/or studies. Pollute the comments and you pollute the facts & science the readers take away from the articles.
The common man may indeed have a scientifically useful thought to contribute to scientists. However the venue for expressing that thought to scientists is not the forum of a magazine's website. Scientific colloquiums are open to the public and always have QA sessions. Journal articles always have email addresses of the authors. There are many ways to contribute and communicate to/with science, but a comment section is not one of them - no matter how well moderated.
...actually doesn't say what Popular Science claims it does.
What it DOES say is that, when confronted by rude or over-the-top comments, most people's views don't change - but the people at the "edges" get slightly more dogmatic about their opinions. We're talking about a very small percentage of comments overall which show any influence at all.
That's it.
No, contrary comments do not turn people off of the stories, keep them from commenting on-topic, or anything drastic.
What the study does end up doing is give journalists (with second-rate or nonexistent science backgrounds) a good excuse to ignore people who notice that they wrote a bad or scientifically incorrect story - or a completely overblown one. Like the meta-story about comments on science stories.
"Only a few of us can actually decipher the bullshit enough to know that both sides are out to screw the American Public."
Which itself is bullshit, because each side believes earnestly they are in the right. Neither side believes that in the long run it's position is worse for America, but is instead better. One or both sides may be incorrect in this belief...but each side believes in the truth of their fundamental principles.
"blog and web commentary never, or only rarely, influences the process of scientific inquiry itself"
If so, then what does it matter whether or not commentary is allowed ?
What almost certainly happens is a bunch of pseudo- or anti-science gets posted. People then read this stuff and see it as legitimized by being on Popular Science, when they forget - or fail to see the distinction - that the dubious claims are on in a comments section.
Honestly, I believe that the Internet is modern science's biggest boon, and it's biggest threat. When know-nothings have a voice that can be as heard by as many people as experts, we're in trouble, and the Internet has brought that to us in spades.
It's one thing for people of near equal knowledge and ability to have a debate, even a heated one, but when we're talking about every one from credentialed experts to netkooks to astroturfers all posting in a format that seems to give equal weight to everyone, the results are anything but productive or useful.
One of my favorite blogs is by Professor Matt Strassler, a physicist at CERN, and also a damned fine writer, but frankly I ignore the comments to his blog entries because for every legitimate question or observation, there's some bloody nutjob who thinks because they use the word "quantum" in a sentence, that somehow makes what they're saying a legitimate critique.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What also gets very irritating is someone whose last maths was when they were 15 sitting there, at 46, shouting repeatedly on a website that they have disproved Einstein (not really stating what that means; I normally assume they mean disproving E=mc^2), and then refusing to listen to any response. What is *also* irritating are well-intentioned people who equally are 31 years from their last maths lesson trying to quell that line of thought with something that is simply wrong (and frequently, alas, condescendingly wrong) and then the two sides get in a flame war, and we end up feeling we'd have been better off skipping a comment section entirely.
People with no education in maths or physics claiming without support that Einstein was "wrong" (a word which takes careful definition; no professional physicist would deny, in well-defined boundaries, that predictions of Einstein's theories are incorrect, but that doesn't mean they're "wrong" in the way that is often bandied around) are surprisingly common. About six years back I started compiling a database of emails that I was sent and books my department was sent that argued Einstein was wrong in manifold, creative, naive, inaccurate -- and yet frequently different -- ways. After a few months I got bored of it because they began repeating themselves and the volume was huge.
This was before comments threads. If I'd done it when comments threads were set up I may never have gained my PhD thanks to time spent arguing with people online who refused to learn anything about the topic they were stubbornly opposing - even topics the details of which they stated were inaccurate. Of course, me not getting my PhD probably wouldn't have been much of a loss to science, but I've enjoyed venting anyway.
Particularly as in many cases - and I do it myself, shamefully - people are normally very good at skipping the article to read the comments. Of course, Slashdot would never succumb to that kind of thing.
I'm pretty sure it's science that ruins lots of comments on web pages.
"If a collection of scientists and on-line media professionals can't figure out how to put together a working comment section on a website, then I can only wonder at their ability to perform the rest of their duties with any integrity."
Yes, because a professor in loop quantum gravity is an expert in building comment sections and designing and implementing a robust and working moderation system.
Jesus Christ.
We all know who/what the culprit is. Why are we so afraid to name it?
It's right wing paid manipulation of social media. Either primary by paid shills, or secondary by brainwashed followers of right-wing media. There are rich people out to manipulate the public for their own means and they are grossly in one camp. If you believe the "Dems" or the "Left" are equally culpable you have a severely warped sense of perspective and scale, probably induced by exposure to said propaganda outlets. (Or as a coping mechanism to rationalize your pre-existing world view. Nobody wants to believe that their heros are evil.)
It's a systematic attack on the public mind. Ranging from the sabotage of public education, the positioning of public debate, the capturing of media outlets, and the dissemination of propaganda through churches and other religious organizations.
You are being assaulted. The time for compromise and discourse is over. We are being brutalized by mindeless savages that have their morals and rationality removed. It's time to stop being polite.
By definition, no. Rational debate is part of the scientific process. The hallmark and definition of a troll is not about rational debate. A troll doesn't even play a good devil's advocate, they're just there to irritate people. That's part of why so many people get sucked into a troll debate - they're expecting a rational debate and the person they are debating is just there to irritate people.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Scientists, in my experience, typically respect dissident thought. (I am not going to say that good dissident ideas are always embraced, but they are generally listened to if there is serious thought behind them.) Dissident speech devoid of thought, on the other hand, is generally ignored in science. (It is, after all, not a democracy.)
My mileage varies. If your "dissident thought" would negatively impact funding, like the study of AGW, scientists neither respect "good dissident ideas" nor do they ignore them. They are, in fact, quite abrasive about it. I've seen this is the local papers especially. Someone writes a letter to the editor about AGW that the scientists don't like and there are immediate public responses shouting them down.
Stop being silly.
Scientists getting grumpy about anti climate change letters to the editor have nothing to do about funding. They have everything to do about the fact that no serious scientific discussion goes on in letters to the editor. You get random gripes, political diatribes, and rants there. You aren't exactly getting novel scientific ideas in letters to the editor in your local paper.
If somebody writes a letter to the editor questioning evolution or gravity or whatever, scientists will get grumpy about that too. But that random letter to the editor will have no effect on their funding.
Scientists just don't like being called out as incompetent at their job by people who generally have no idea of what they are talking about, which is generally what you have with letters to the editor on climate change. I don't think that this is an unreasonable reaction to be honest.
This is a brilliant example of how comments don't work. It's emotional, obscene and grammatically incorrect. Comment sections don't foster debate, they tend to foster name calling and repetition of the same damned arguments over and over again.
When it comes to AGW or evolution, the two topics I've paid the most attention to so far as comments from non-scientists, the bulk of the "skeptics" information seems to come from a very small number of organizations whose sole purpose is to spread anti-science FUD. Whether it's the Koch Brothers and their various shills or Answers in Genesis, it's all the same strategy; muddy the waters by making it look as if there is still huge debate on the scientific theory they're attacking. Throw in a bit of "consensus is evil, only believe dissenters" nonsense, they can give the appearance of a theory being total dreck, without ever having to bother actually publishing a single article in a journal to support the claim. Of course, it helps they have nasty little shills like Michael Behe and Roy Spencer who happily cash the cheques and publish anti-science material with their PhDs prominently displayed, but when you look at their actual publishing history in the journals, never publish anything to support the claims they so eagerly make on blogs, editorial sections or comment sections.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science isn't a democracy. There are no scientific dissidents. There are jackasses who are too stupid to understand science, and they yell loudly about how it must be wrong. If you think that a conclusion made by scientists is wrong, we would absolutely love it if you could prove them wrong. People being wrong is how science moves forward. Going into the comments section and telling people that the earth isn't really getting warmer does not count as proving anyone wrong.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I'm amused by the ironic juxtaposition of your post and your sig.
Uh, no. *Some* of the people on each side believe they're right. I'm pretty sure that John Boehner is just trying to protect his job (position as Speaker of the House) and wishes the Tea Party never made the demands in the first place.
And what gives you such deep insight into the minds of others, to accurately judge who is sincere or not? Remember, no one sees themself as the villain of their own story; most people have layers upon layers of rationalizations, justifications, and excuses, which combine to form a 'moral code'. It's entirely possible, even probable, for someone's motivations to be completely consistent with an earnest belief that they are in the right, even when observers see their actions as corrupt and self-serving. Even serial killers and child molesters typically have worldviews that frame themselves in a positive light. It takes an unusually honest disposition to admit to flaws in one's own character, even to oneself... and politicians are not generally known for such honesty.
Lastly, can I be the first to point out that Popular science has very little to do with science and hasn't in well over 50 years? They are to Science what the Enquirer is to hard news sites. ... which makes people that care about Popular Science's move sound even more out of touch. People making a big deal out of this mystify me.
"Old man yells at systemd"
You don't solve the problem by squelching all discourse and then giving certain people the right to 'broadcast', unchallenged, based on title alone.
They do not, but any scientist does have a scientific obligation to not try to repress dissent. Science thrives on dissent.
There is a big difference between legitimate dissent, and useless argument. If a scientist posts a discovery of a newly discovered fossil, is it the scientist's duty to answer every one of the hundreds of claims of the Earth being created in 4004 b.c.e.? How about the person who wants to argue about Phlogiston theory when people are trying to discuss the large hadron collider? Some things just aren't open to debate any more
I've worked with many scientists, and just about universally, they welcome challenges and problems. But real challenges, not someone telling them they are going to hell because they don't believe in things that the accuser does.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Respond with your best reasons, rationally, unemotionally. Don't let yourself get caught in the flame war, instead go on with your life. Why do we need to suppress speech again?
When someone is trolling in disagreement, you simply ignore it.
Arguing with creationists, tobacco industry lawyers, birthers and deniers is pointless. You'll never change their mind, and their only purpose is to disrupt you.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ok, here's my take. Consider the voters. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable republicans. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable democrats. Almost nothing can make these people change their position. These are in almost perfect balance, because they're not making decisions rationally; they're making decisions based upon a random distribution of single party planks or other factors (like, that's how my wife votes, or that's how the family votes.)
In between are the swing voters who actually decide things. Arguments on web sites don't make them swing. They are thinkers. Arguments on web sites don't make either of the dedicated voter groups change their mind either. They're just talking to hear themselves talk and get a rah-rah from like minded types.
How does this relate to science? I think we have a very similar breakdown. There's a group of people who aren't science oriented, even if they know a few facts. They're influenced by things like religion, "dad told me", the enticement of rumors, etc. These people are not going to change their minds. Then there's a group who knows science is... well, science, and they're aware that it's a process that, in large part, delivers new and reliable knowledge, as well as new and interesting paths where knowledge may be found. They're not going to change their minds either.
Swing science types? Not so many. That would be people who aren't sciency, as it were, and could be convinced (but if someone wasn't convinced by their science classes, I don't hold out much hope for them, unless their science classes were truly awful.) Or, it would be people who are aware of science and its wonderful track record, who are currently going along with yes, science is the bomb, but who would easily be convinced that science is consistently wrong. Know anyone like that? I don't.
Bottom line? The comments... they do nothing. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The comments of Pop Science sites isn't "Science". Science is a *process*. Its not just an anarchic room of people screaming at each other and accusing the socially awkward dudes with pocket protectors and labcoats of being secret communists or whatever. Its about following a process and has nothing to do with opinions.
The scientific process involves doing studies that confirm or contradict in a disinterested manner a hypothesis, publishing it in a respectable journal (or in the case of thesis, submitting it to a respectable academic [ie not a think tank] institution), where noted and accepted academics (not a websites penut gallery) then either find flaws in the study and reject it, or later down the track perform their own studies and publish them.
At no point does any of this involve shouting at scientists about being part of some vast left wing conspiracy, citing popular crank-science guys with such poor grasp of statistics its a wonder they can even tie their own shoelaces right, or in fact any of this.
In other words, if your not an expert in the specific field with a doctorate and a publication history to back that up, your not engaging in peer review, your just another joe shmoe web jock yelling at the nerds for saying things that contradict your political religion.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I'd like to believe you, but the reality is that the majority of people on this planet do not believe in evolution or AGW. Even in the most educated nations, a very large percentage (though minority) of people are young earth creationists. So what can you expect from online comments but a representation of public beliefs? (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_change_opinion_cause_is_human_by_country_2008-2009.png / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#Public_support )
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Apparently a certain influential Dr. Eddington didn't love to be proven wrong, especially by an Indian. And his influence was strong enough for Chandrasekhar to seek greener pastures in a different country.
I grew up reading Popular Science and felt no need then to comment on any of the articles then, and feel no need to do so now. Our obsession with commenting is just crazy, and here I am commenting on commenting, on a site made for doing one thing: commenting. What happened to the world?
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
That's almost exactly the reply I'd like to have made, except that I don't think a lot of these people are acting just to disrupt. They normally seem to passionately believe that they're correct, and their purpose is to convince you - not to enter into a debate. A friend of mine once took up one of these people who had challenged physicists to find a flaw in his "disproof of relativity" (special, of course, since you don't need much beyond high school maths to follow it), and was offering a million pounds to be disproven. So my friend - a professor in cosmology - took him up on it and a couple of months later said "This is pointless; you spend two pages explaining why a particular statement of his is wrong and he replies 'No, you're wrong.' " It would be impossible to win that man's million pounds (a promise allegedly witnessed by a solicitor with funds that can be checked with his accountant), because it's impossible to convince him that he doesn't understand high school maths.
Absolutely pointless getting into the discussion, since certainly the net result is that you'll have been disrupted.
Perhaps it's different in other disciplines, but I've never seen an idea that could negatively affect my funding, and if there were one it would not be a dissident idea, quite the reverse. Grants aren't to prove that X is true, they are to explore the factors relating to X. If someone has an idea that is disruptive to an entire field (everything you were doing is wrong) then that produces more funding, not less, because now there are a whole new range of avenues of investigation. The things that negatively affect funding are (repeatable) results that show something so conclusively that there is no point in ever investigating it again, and those are very rare.
The AGW example is particularly silly, because fields where there is deep division in the scientific community are the ones where it is easiest to get funding, as everyone wants to know which competing theory is correct (or that they're both wrong). Most climate scientists I've met would love for there to be some strong, evidence-backed, scientific theories countering their work, because then their next grant application practically writes itself.
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