Quote of the week – the death of 'Popular Science' commentary

http://www.dailytech.com/PopSci+Kills+Comments+Blames+Criticism+of+Global+Warming+Evolution/article33437.htm

In other words…..they were losing the comments war and couldn’t back up their “science”

Hear no evil… speak no evil… see no evil. See? Everything’s OK now. Trust me.

So…leaving comments can change the way a story is read? Good heavens! Um, isn’t that why people leave comments? To effect the way people see the story?
The real problem appears to be that they aren’t successfully defending their beliefs, maybe because the evidence isn’t on their side!
…and I don’t for a second buy that evolution is being undermined by vigorous debate. That’s a baloney straw man.

Doctrine as in religious doctrine is about right.

“Comments can be bad for science.” Huh? Bad? For science??? How? The only thing bad for science is censorship.
I think what they mean is, “Comments can be bad for the idiots who pretend they are talking about science and trigger a reaction from those who actually know science.”
I guess their readership number will go down now. Oh well, long may they live and learn.

They just wrote their obituary!

So now it’s PopDogma?

“I’m not winning so I’m going to take my ball and go home” (Exit stage right pouting and stomping his feet.)

When I looked at the site, they provided a link to this cutting-edge article (along with the afore-mentioned poop/period piece):
“Why Dudes Who Can’t Smell Never Get Laid”
Somehow I don’t think my grandfather would have shared his PopSci with me when I was 8 with such important “science” as those articles between the covers!

I’ve posted this before:
Why did I stop reading Popular Science – Editors who brag about their sons homicidal fantasies about killing SUV drivers:
The Editor of Popular Science Wrote:
“DURING A RECENT FAMILY DRIVE out of town, my 13-year-old son,
Rex, launched into a diatribe from the backseat, blasting the environ-
mental myopia of every lone driver spewing unnecessary CO2 behind
the wheel of a hulking SUV. (He actually wanted me to bump them off
the road, thus ensuring that he won’t join their ranks until long after he
turns 16.) “Don’t they realize that if this keeps up, Manhattan is going to be
under water before long?” he demanded”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37904427/Popular-Science-2010-10

Let’s start posting Pop Sci articles here, and comment….

I suppose its embarrassing for them when they are claiming 70% or more of the general public believe that man is causing global warming, when the majority of readers in the comments section disagree.

What they are really saying is that they do not consider their reader’s and subscriber’s opinions as having any importance or worth. Telling your customers such, is a sure way to guarantee, that one will not have to worry about the inconvenience, of the annoying public long. R.I.P.

Some clever spin over here (that will make folks here mighty angry):
“Scientists liken certainty of global warming to deadliness of smoking”
http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/scientists-liken-certainty-of-global-warming-to-deadliness-of-smoking-1.1468879
“They say they are more certain about climate change than they are that vitamins make you healthy […] 99 per cent certain […] But the role of nature and all sorts of other factors bring the number down to 95 per cent when you want to say that the majority of the warming is human-caused”

Note that: ALL other factors combined including nature = 4% (WTF???)

When I was younger I read Popular Science every month. But about 15-20 years ago it changed into something blander and dumber. No thanks.

Weatherzone, a commercial weather forecaster here in Australia had a weather and Climate forum running for many years.
The global warming trolls worked their asses off to try and get the Climate forum part of the whole Weatherzone forum shut down.
The skeptics had just about every post one of their posts reported and were consequently regularly put in the sin bin until the principals of Weatherzone, instead of just throwing the alarmists out, sin binned the entire skeptical brigade and then in a fit of political and biased political and environmental and alarmist bigoted correctness, a few months ago shut the Climate forum section down and threatened anybody who brought up any climate related posts with immediate banning from the entire forum.
The global warming cultists involved, openly boasted about the forum shut down on another alarmist skeptic hating forum
In doing so the WZ principals have derived a considerable section of the weather interested population of a source of alternative and skeptical information to the completely bigoted and biased alarmist cult supporting ABC and large sections of the media here in Australia.
And all this just when a whole gamut of skeptically orientated papers are finally being published that bring into question and destroying so many of the formerly hard held and suposedly unchallengeable nostrums from the global warming alarmist faith and the greasy climate pole dancing IPCC.
Consequently quite a lot, ie ; most WZ skeptic commenters who were well versed in climate and weather matters and the technical components of those subjects have up and left. The Weatherzone forum is much the poorer for it and the public much less informed and with less information and material at their fingertips which would enable them to make up their own minds
When the principals of that Forum buckled to the onslaughts of the alarmist trolls there went my respect for them.
I have not been back to comment since and don’t intend to.

Janice.. Love the Monty Python clip… The oppressed pheasants… been a while..
LOL

rogerknights, yes, I gave that magazine up long ago, even before SciAm. in the 90’s.

Blog god Instapundit recently added comments, and today also covered this story:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/176556/#respond
Glenn Reynolds was instrumental in the last few years in getting the skeptical message out there in competent fashion. His site has a donation button.

For my great amusement, when some of the shorter CAGW scare articles at Popular Science used the term “climate change” without even once explicitly specifying “global warming” or even warming (since a falsifiable hypothesis would be closer to real science and thus anathema), I sometimes noted and linked to the recent predictions of Dr. Abdussamatov (in charge of Russian solar observations on the International Space Station) for the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years developing by the middle of this century. (Such isn’t proven going to happen, but it as “climate change” compares favorably to CAGW in likelihood and honesty of research efforts behind it).
Anyway, having been one of the several most inconvenient commentators on some of their CAGW articles … I’m flattered. They know what their article writers can deliver can’t stand up to some of us.
I didn’t have http://img176.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=81829_expanded_overview_122_424lo.jpg originally, but even the utter mismatch of CO2 vs temperature in http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/gisp220temperaturesince1070020bp20with20co220from20epica20domec1.gif?w=578&h=396 was fun to highlight (when inconveniently zooming in on the centuries rather than the standard misleading trick of keeping zoomed out beyond ocean lag scales).

I love the study… “hey when people debate and are giving more facts this leaders many to changing their minds out the propaganda line in the story”.
Really? Took you a study to figure that one out huh? Bet that study was tax payer funded as well.

Looking at the content of the current PS, I can only conclude that it has joined the likes of New Scientist and Scientific American that I consigned to the trash-can years back.
On a wider point, it seems to me that these types of publications now employ journalists rather than scientists for whom a story is not a story without a catchy headline – preferably doom ridden! Who cares about the content?
This is also true of other media, for example broadcasters such as the good ole BBC where the presenters are so lacking in basic science, business and mathematical knowledge that they let interviewees get away with the most stupid tosh.

They are protecting their religion, not science. Science is about scrutiny, religion is not.
As a teenager I began questioning my family’s religious faith. So many things just didn’t make sense to me. My father was devout and scolded me and said “that’s our religion, don’t question it.”
Later in life I became a scientist and chucked the religion.

There you go.
“public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded”
Can’t we build a scientific consensus on the idea whatever political system hurts science, it should be eradicated ruthlessly? Now, here is this weird system, in which public opinion is supposed to shape public policy, what was it called? Escapes me. Anyway, one thing is sure, we need no stinking Constitution with its silly Checks and Balances, Elections, Freedom of Speech and the like. Give us our strong &. wise King back, led by His qualified Advisors and supported by a mighty Secret Police. That’s it.

I’ve learned something via the internet, and especially from some web sites I’ve developed: If you give everyone a voice, you find out that not many people have anything to say.
Consider this: I built a site for a bar. It allowed customers to review the performance of a live band, Out of over 100 comments, this is typical content:
1-10 – “first comment”
several “band sucked”
several “band was awesome”
two in-depth reviews that actually provided relevant and useful information
an argument between two customers that took up about 30 posts
over 400 attempts to spam the comment section with ads and irrelevant links, mostly from Russia and India, taken care of automatically
one post telling people they should go to a different bar (ip address matched that bar’s website)
So relevant posts were two percent, or if you include the spam, 0.4%
I’ve lately been commenting on articles at my local newspaper. Out of a city of over a million, with the largest circulation newspaper, there seem to be maybe a dozen regular commenters. Often the same arguments and battles are waged across many different articles. As expected, some seem to be stuck on stupid and want to trash the Prime Minister or Mayor on virtually every topic, whether it’s relevant or not (although trashing our Mayor is perfectly acceptable IMO).
Lately a lot of places are using Disqus to handle comments, and it’s fascinating because you can go in and read the variety of articles that a person comments on, from various sources. You can see that some people apparently have no life and just yap on and on at dozens of different sites.
To be honest, PopSci’s decision to stop allowing comments makes sense from a website management perspective, but their reasoning behind it is nothing short of insane. Going public with their realization that reality is intruding on their fantasy world should be the death of their magazine, but it won’t be.
PopSci is a tissue thin magazine these days, with essentially zero content. As far as I can tell the only people subscribing signed up on Publisher’s Clearing House decades ago and just never got around to cancelling. I have NEVER heard anyone say, “Hey, did you see that article in PopSci this month?”, but in the old days it was a common thing. My co-workers and I used to discuss SciAm articles in depth at work. Those days are done.
We are witnessing the end of an era as traditional print media vanishes down the tubes. Their death throes are painful to watch, but oddly amusing too. They seem to still think they’re relevant. They think they’re shaping public opinion. They are not.
That task is being undertaken by those with the financial muscle to own an HDTV channel, especially one that’s on basic cable. There’s the big influence, there’s the big ads, money, power, prestige, and a direct link to the minds of their captive audience. You know who I mean – NatGeo, Discovery, PBS, and a bunch more that are all doom, all the time

The interesting and common feature about the contentious sciences is that they all deal with chaotic systems that were oversold far too early and often as Truth despite repeated failures and complete rewrites of the theories. And all used as a vehicle for government school curriculum of the One True Truth. That these sciences in particular are hotly contested by the layman that only pay partial attention to things is both understandable and an obvious consequence of what has been happening in those disciplines as well as in the practice of Science generally.
Nor should any Scientist care. “Don’t believe me? My paper has everything you need to know to replicate it. Have fun, and trust your lying eyes or don’t.”
There’s a regularly used aphorism that runs along the lines that Empiricism is a Sin in Religion and a Virtue in Science. It ought be a regular notion as well that Appeals to Authority are a Virtue in Politics and a Sin in Science. Or, in far better words:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman

“Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again.”
This is astonishing behavior from PopSci. Every scientific topic MUST be continually debated and questioned. The great science theories like Evolution will survive, the lesser theories like Anthropogenic Climate Change not so much.

Wow. They actually say the words “scientific doctrine”. Doctrine? Yeesh, just what we need, more fuel for the “science is really a religion and it’s taught in schools so schools should teach my religion too” folks. And yet, those folks have a point: clearly, some people — like the PopSci editors, apparently — do make a religion of current theories even though, scientifically, theories are not to be carved in stone and worshipped as The Truth but to be overturned in later ages when we’ve learned (as I hope we do) something surprising and new from what is, today, just an odd little niggle.
The retrograde motion of 3/three little starlike objects was once an annoying little niggle, too, until one day we realized the Earth-moving (if not earthshaking) significance of it. What odd little inconsistency, today, will one day overturn which currently-reigning theory, I wonder?

She could have saved 95% of her effort and simply written that they shut off the comments because they don’t like people disagreeing with and directly countering their (Popular Science’s) efforts to direct public opinion and policy.
And you can be 100% sure that this change in comment policy is directly related to the climate debate- all the other items were put in there to obscure this motivation.

Don’t ask questions, Big Brother doesn’t like it.

Goodbye, Popular Science. We wish you well in your new alternate reality.

Wow. I just went to Popsci.com and looked at some of the older articles, ones that preceded the comment cutoff. Reading the lists of comments I’d have to say, “Bravo, and thank you, Popular Science, for closing the mouths of the ignorant upon your site.” I’m serious. Go have a look at the strangeness that once was their comments sections. No wonder they closed it down. Embarrassing.

Ric Werme says:
September 24, 2013 at 6:25 pm
They just need a moderation team as good as WUWT’s.
I think they probably made a business decision, rather than relying upon the scientific justification they used in their article. I also think Ric Werme is correct. If they could afford a moderation team as good as the one here, they’d have more intelligent commentary on a regular basis. Regular “snipping” is very effective, as is troll management (real trolls now, not just those who disagree).
If you don’t have the quality of WUWT’s moderating team, then you do get some awful commentary and I think Popular Science then has a point. In fact, here’s one of the observations from the study they used for supporting their new position:
Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.
Ad hominem attacks work, which is no doubt why the Left cannot say anything about Sarah Palin without including the word “stupid.” (Not trying to divert the thread here; just pointing out an example that is quite apparent in every article about her that allows comments without effective moderation.)
The moderation team here at WUWT deserves tremendous credit for the site becoming what it has become, an excellent source for keeping up with the twists and turns of the global warming debate. Thank you.

We should generate a new “Orwell 1984 Truth Award” just to allocate it to these leftist religious drones that are of the opinion that everything they believe is beyond question. It does appear to be their general mindset across the board. One quick check in the White House, CAGW and Feminism all confirms their severe case of cognitive dissonance, unfortunately.

So…POPSCI is now taking the position that the Catholic Church had on Galileo.
They didn’t want any competing opinions either.

So then, when the “popular consensus” says that the Earth is Warming, everything’s OK, but when that same “popular consensus” turns against them, it’s clearly the work of Deniers and Heretics/

In mid-1903, the popular scientific consensus was that Man could not fly, too…

i have to take issue with Wmasaw. its got nothing to do with left and right. due to the amount of money required to gain an elite “education” in the western world these days,most of these “climate “scientists.particularly the younger ones are silver spoon daddies girls and mummies boys that would probably have gone into the social sciences if not for the cAGW meme.
despite the education many will not be clever enough to work in the private sector, a bit like uk NGO,s being filled with the thicker kids of british societal elite,and their parents will be monied voters of the right persuasion.they have absolute faith in their peers and the system that has indoctrinated them .
they like to think what they do is for the poor ordinary people,and they hope to go down in history as being someone who mattered .they see themselves as saving the world,and due to the media attention believe they have some kind of rock star quality.
i doubt you could find a real lefty lentil eater amongst them,though it may be the image some project.

Popular Science shutting off comments reminds me of the Pope silencing Galileo on the sun-centered — not Earth-centered — solar system. If it does not back up what they believe, they don’t want to hear it and they don’t want anyone else to, either.

I went over to leave a comment but it looks like they have been disabled.

I think this sentence in the Popular Science statement is very telling:
If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch.
So shutting down comments is really not about science, it’s about money. Why am I not surprised.

To be fair (though it isn’t really necessary), Pop Sci isn’t a magazine written by scientists – the way Scientific American used to be, and American Scientist is. It was once a magazine to bring news of science and technology to the masses. I have a couple of P.S. from the 50s and 60s. (The “flying car” they wrote of hasn’t quite got here yet.) I haven’t read it since then.
However, Pippen gives the writers too much credit. They’re writers about science, and their job is to try to make high-technology understandable by the average reader.
It’s the editors at PopSci who are suffering from extreme close-mindedness.
Scientists are good at science. Only a few of them – like E. O. Wilson, among others – are good writers.

As someone who is fully convinced of the general truth of modern evolutionary theory (with plenty of room for new understandings and discoveries), the idea of silencing creationists and Intelligent Design proponents (beyond controlling spam and flame wars) is repugnant to me. So this offends be in both ways–as one being silenced and as one watching my opponents silenced on my side’s “behalf”.