Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Dear Bora;
I know, I know, like many people I didn’t think it was possible for Scientific American magazine to sink any lower. I loved Scientific American as a kid, the “Amateur Scientist” column was a godsend on the ranch. But then, slowly your magazine morphed, first into less-science, then non-science, then non-sense, and then finally anti-science. I (like many people) quit reading the magazine years ago. Your hatchet job on Bjorn Lomborg, for example, was disgraceful. For me these days Scientific American is known by its shortened name, ScAm.
But now, it’s even worse. You, Bora Zivkovic, write a blog titled A Blog Around The Clock: Rhythms of Life in Meatspace and Cyberland. And who are you when you are at home? Your mini-bio on ScAm says:
Bora Zivkovic is the Blog Editor at Scientific American, chronobiologist, biology teacher, organizer of ScienceOnline conferences and editor of Open Laboratory anthologies of best science writing on the Web.
There’s more there, you’re not just a blogger, you’re the Blog Editor, and you teach introductory biology, not the advanced kind, at Wesleyan College. Got it.
And on the 28th of January, you took all of us low-lifes to task on your blog. You say some commenters are a problem, and your solution to the problem of inconsiderate people asking scientific questions on a ScAm blog is quite simple:
Automatic Computer-model-based Censorship.
I can only bow my head in awe. I mean, what better way is there to keep you from answering people from WUWT and other sites who might want answers to actual scientific questions, than not allowing them to speak at all? Let me give other readers a glimpse into the future of scientific discussion, your brilliant plan for hands-off blog censorship … here it is, and as you explained, it involves computer models (emphasis mine)
If I write about a wonderful weekend mountain trek, and note I saw some flowers blooming earlier than they used to bloom years ago, then a comment denying climate change is trolling. I am a biologist, so I don’t write specifically about climate science as I do not feel I am expert enough for that. So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts. A comment that contains any of those is, by definition, not posted in good faith. By definition, it does not provide additional information relevant to the post. By definition, it is off-topic. By definition, it contains erroneous information. By definition, it is ideologically motivated, thus not scientific. By definition, it is polarizing to the silent audience. It will go to spam as fast I can make it happen.
See, Bora, the beauty of your plan is, you don’t even have to think about censorship once you do that. The computer does the hard work for you, rooting out and destroying evil thoughtcrimes coming from … from … well, from anyone associated with Watts Up With That, or with Steven McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit, or anyone that you might disagree with, or who is concerned about “alarmists”, you just put them on the list and Presto!
No more inconvenient questions!
The beauty part is, censorship in that manner isn’t personal or based on prejudices, it’s gotta be 100% scientific—because hey, it’s based on a computer model, and the modelers constantly assure us that model-based science is the real deal. For example, a noted advocate of computer models and transparency in science posted this insightful comment in support of your fascinating proposal for secret hidden computer-model-based censorship of unwelcome views …
Astroturf pay-4-trolling outfits? I gotta say, Mann has lost the plot entirely. He’s sounding like one of those goofy ads on the insides of matchbook covers, “DON’T MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY—Make Money With Your Computer At Home While You’re Trolling!!! Call 1-800-ASTROTURF now!”
I swear, there’s no way to parody this stuff, Bora. You and Mike, you’ve truly outdone yourselves, your idea of computer-model-based censorship is worthy of the modern ScAm you work for.
The sight of a so called “scientific” magazine advocating for hidden censorship based on where someone might comment or their saying the word “alarmist” or where they might find some particular fact, well, that is an abomination, Bora. It makes me fear for the students at Wesleyan College. Do you turn people away from your classes as well for disagreeing with your revealed wisdom, or because they may have read my biology piece about extinctions on WUWT?
Unlike your pathologically computer-censored blog, here at WUWT we just ignore the jerks, or I metaphorically beat them severely about the head and shoulders for bad behavior … but we don’t censor them for reading or citing your or any other web site, ever.
So how about you have the stones to do the same, my friend, and you stop hiding behind your pathological computer models from folks who read or cite this web site?
Finally, Bora, you are (of course) free to comment below on my open letter and defend your position. Unlike your site, where I could invisibly be made a non-person and my ideas prevented from ever seeing the light, here at WUWT we actually DO preach and practice science of the old-fashioned, transparent kind, where even the advocates of hidden, under-the-table censorship like yourself and Michael Mann are free to comment. And if we do snip someone’s particular comment for being a jerkwagon, we note that fact, we don’t just sweep them under the rug like you do.
I won’t be surprised if you don’t show up to defend the indefensible, however. I’d be a fool to expect that kind of honesty and forthrightness from a man who secretly destroys unwanted questions from his scientific opponents …
But I invite you to surprise me, my friend, I’m always overjoyed to see a man moving to become an actual scientist, one who listens to and answers inconvenient questions from his scientific opponents … heck, who knows, you might just learn something.
Of course, I am aware that no one will be able to cite this open letter on your blog, you’ve erased that possibility already … gosh, that’s science at its finest, Bora.
How do you justify this to yourself?
Has noble cause corruption really affected your moral compass to that extent, that you not only invisibly censor people whose scientific views differ from your own, but you actually attempt, not just a pathetic justification of that underhanded action, but an even more pathetic and anti-scientific celebration and and advocacy of such hidden censorship? These questions and more, I invite your answers.
My regards to you, Bora … and I’m totally serious about your sneaky, invisible trashing of people’s comments based on where people post and what they might cite—your kind of cowardly hidden censorship is absolutely antithetical to science, as is conclusively proven by Michael Mann’s approval of your plan.
w.
Just another indication the Genocidal Warmistas are losing the content battle.
Little do they realize that implementing a blanket policy of censorship is like playing Russian roulette with a semi-automatic–they deny the devastating eventuality even while pulling the trigger. Stupidity is such a self-fulfilling condition.
RIP, ScAm–a magazine I once thoroughly enjoyed, but now simply ignore.
James Allison says:
March 6, 2013 at 12:49 am
“That’s one pissed off rant.”
You have got to be kidding. Willis pulled every punch. We have learned that Wesleyan employs a professor of biology who is so emotionally committed to what he sees as the truth or the cause that he refuses to read any remark that might conflict with it That professor believes that only his own views are worthy of rational consideration. If the course that he teaches involves only rote learning then he is fine as a teacher. If the course includes rational criticism then he has published the fact that he is emotionally incapable of doing the job.
He should be careful about what he asks his spam filter to do.
For example: The funniest form of self parody that the BBC has managed (so far) is when a reader’s comment is selected as an “Editors Pick”, and then moderated into oblivion by an automaton of some sort (human or electronic).
For me Discover magazine goes into the same category as ScAm and the others. Walking by the magazine rack I am sadly reduced to scanning the car crap (full of anti carbon BS as well), the cycling and running rags and then buying nothing but the occasional paper to start the fireplace with. Oh well….
MangoTree says:
March 6, 2013 at 3:42 am
I like your plan, Mango.
Now you just have to teach your computer model how to tell a troll from someone who is asking an honest but poorly phrased question … oh, and how to tell a fact from something which we believe to be a fact but isn’t, and how to tell both of those from a hotly-disputed claim that might be true but might not.
Be sure to let ScAm know when your computer model can do that, because it sounds like a wonderful idea, and one we all desperately need …
w.
PS—I suppose some people require a [sarc] tag with this, perhaps your program could identify them as well …
@ur momisugly Anthony per http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/inventors/i/Wrights/library/WrightSiAm1.html
The Wright Brothers developed four irrevolkable patents that the banking elite needed to steal. Yesterday the Google ‘this day in history’ mentioned George Westinghouse patent of railroad air brakes in 1872. Westinghouse was 22 year old son of a machinist and not part of the protected ruling class. The Rockefeller-Morgan-Carnige-Melon crime syndicate ordered massive quantities of brakes, requiring massive coal and steel to be provided by the banking cartel members, who then defaulted, forcing Westinghouse bankruptacy. This same pump and dump cycle was used to steal all one thousand of the Edison patents and the hundreds of Westinghouse and Tesla patents. See “I’ll Take Some Epluribus….but HOLD the Unum” at Canada Free Press archive.
Well, I sadly followed the link to Bora Zivkovic’s original article. Damn, the man needs a good editor or, at a minimum, to take take a few writing classes. His prose can be as cumbersome and obscure as some of Mosh’s offerings (though I believe Mosh is a lit grad, so maybe the classes won’t help). Apart from the general rant, it was eye-opening how brazenly he flaunts his political views. Just look at all the blogs he cites: Daily Kos, Atrios, Talking Points Memo, Daily Dish. Every one of them well left of center (yes, even the Daily Dish has had a liberal slant for a number of years). He does not even make a pretense of objectivity. You will look in vain for references to the Corner, Powerline, Best of The Web or any other counterpoints on the conservative side. He clearly likes to live in an echo chamber and I think this helps explain his desire for censorship.
As a long time manufacturer of water powered water pumps, I was appalled to see an article in Mother Earth describing how to make one out of string and baling wire, in their usual manner. What SciAm has become is a Mother Earth News with a similarly focussed market – urban cliff-dwellers who fantasize that they could make out like a pioneer in the forests of Appalachia. SciAm was about science and the endless path of discovery. That it scoffs at this wonderful site and its collection of opinions and supporting reference pages is testimony to how things can and do change.
It was from magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American that I first learned that things can and do change. What was unexpected is that both of them would, to such a extent, eschew the very principles of enquiry and evidence they used to hold dear.
Willis, Bora’s tweet in reply says it all: he read your letter and he has literally nothing of substance to say in reply. Another one bites the dust.
Les Johnson posts Bora’s wonderful reply, thanks, Les …
This is absolutely hilarious. After banning any mention of Watts on his site, the beauty of his reply is, think of all of the folks who follow his tweet … where is he telling all of his acolytes to go spend their next few minutes—the ScAm blog site, or WUWT?
Man, I just gotta admire folks who go out of their way to publicize my work. What’s not to like?
(Well, I don’t like the personal insults about my mental capacity … but then considering the source, I suppose I should take it as a compliment.)
w.
Annie says: “I rather think, in the context, you meant ‘complIment’, not ‘complement’. Willis: They are running scared, aren’t they?!”
I dont know about scared, but the running part is correct…traveling day and Chicago didnt help.
I started reading ScAm around 1957 in high school and kept my subscription going for many years after that. But, as someone stated here several months ago, ‘all institutions (maybe with only a very few exceptions) become more liberal over time’. And this then leads to the groupthink and strong confirmation bias necessary to close off debate and relieve them from (at least what they consider) the undesirable and uncomfortable requirement of having to think for themselves. I guess they would rather just believe strongly in any cause than have to continuously reason things out.
Anyway, I would guess that is what has happened to both ScAm and NatGeo. I’m just afraid it is also happening to science in general. If this continues, and with society becoming more polarized, the next ‘Dark Ages’ just might not be that far away.
The scienctific method is to Scientific American’s method as professional scientific integrity is to Mann’s and Gleick’s integrity.
John
So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts.
This should not pose a problem to people who read WUWT: Anthony Watt and collaborators always link to primary sources. I grant you that his links exclusively to left-wing blogs is a disgrace to a “scientific” magazine, but WUWT writers should have no trouble passing the “spam” filter.
Greg Roane says:
March 6, 2013 at 6:40 am
Quite the contrary. As I predicted yesterday, he has read it and responded to it already, within 24 hours of its publication.
I tried to tell you about the power and reach of WUWT …
w.
“Astroturf pay-4-trolling outfits? I gotta say, Mann has lost the plot entirely.”
Sorry have to disagree. This looks like a simple case of projection in combination with their delusional belief that everyone who disagrees with them does so because of Big Oil money.
Think about it. What do you think that the very well funded green activist organizations do with all that money they have? What do you think the left’s “great community organizers” are organizing?
Astroturf pay-4-trolling outfits? Well the community organizers have to organize the useful idiots to do something, and we know that the green groups are so flush with cash they are handing it out to any and every thing they can to attack any signs of rejection of their dogma.
When I hear Mann say things like that, I interpret his thinking to be that we must be doing this (with our imagined big oil money) because that is their own strategy (with their big Marxism money from groups like Tides et.al). In other words, since they are doing it, by their logic so must we.
Gave up reading ScAm a couple decades ago and NatGeo about the same time. Founders of both magazines would be horrified at what they have become.
Andy Wehrle says:
March 6, 2013 at 7:10 am
And writing civilly somehow gets us past a filter for “Watts”?
You probably should re-read my article, and his article, before posting again, my friend. You seem to have totally misunderstood the issues. Protip—civility is not among them.
w.
Just to be clear, I liked your letter Willis.
David L. Hagen says:
March 6, 2013 at 7:03 am
Forrest M. Mims III
As a reader, I would welcome reading any posts you could contribute on WUWT topics.
________________________________________________________________
Please search on “Mims” here at WUWT to see my posts. Much of the content on the WUWT site and the entire http://www.surfacestations.org site has more scientific value than most of what has been published in Scientific American during the past decade. The findings reported at http://www.surfacestations.org by Anthony Watts and his team of volunteers represent an ideal example of the high quality amateur/citizen science advocated in “The Amateur Scientist” column.
Thomas O. McGill says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:49 am
@Forrest M. Mims III As much as any other human, you influenced my early life for the better. Poor, in Georgia, I didn’t have a lot of educated influences. I spent a lot of time reproducing your circuits. I graduated from Ga Tech and went on to retire from a large National Laboratory, In my early career as a circuit designer, and later, as the rich adventure that has been my life developed, I credit my discovery of my enduring love of science and technology to your little books. Thank you.
———-
I’ve been fighting my impulse to post something like this as well, but since Thomas mentions it:
Thanks from me as well Mr. Mims – your circuit books were my bibles as a teenager, and were instrumental in getting me to view digital electronics as something to play with and enjoy instead of an impenetrable mystery to be avoided.
Stephen Mosher: 1. I have had a comment snipped at WUWT for pointing out that a chart was produced by a model.
At Climate Etc you characterized your WUWT post this way:
1. Skeptics have claimed they doubt the NOAA temperature products.
2. Skpetics have claimed they doubt radiative physics.
3. Skeptics have called GCMS Junk.
(http://judithcurry.com/2013/02/24/open-thread-weekend-9/#comments)
No particular “skeptic”, or “skpetic” was named, and no particular “claim” was quoted.
When you rewrote your comment so that it was on point, then the moderator let it through.
Climate is not my speciality, thus I seldom get in on the higher debates of such, but I’m truly interested in the topic. However, just because I don’t specialize in climate does not mean I do not specialize in other topics and love good ol’ hard debate. I’ve personally been snipped by Anthony, and it burned me for a time, but eventually I had to accept the fact that the snipped portion of my comment was indeed off topic and was meant to incite off topic memes. My bad. I guess what I really want to say in response to this open letter is this: if I considered myself an expert on the science of climate I WOULD CLAMOR TO DEBATE ALL COMERS! Period.
This is exactly what I see in throngs at WUWT. It is what has formed my opinions on climate and what’s truly going on with climate. Not Anthony Watts. Not Willis Eschenbach or any of the other big names at this blog. It’s been the ongoing debates within the comment sections, more so than the articles themselves. If you got a nugget you believe in – prove it! Or as they say in my Mama’s home state: “Show Me.” Argue your point to the point of nausea. Then argue some more. Debate. Spend hours presenting your position, then spend a few more days honing it and perfecting, changing where necessary, then present it again. Equate, relate, debate. It is the only way. Informed and formal debate is not trolling. It is part of the scientific method. Question everything, surely, but also one must question one’s self. Perhaps that is the most important of the human/science equation.
Is WUWT perfect? Heck no. Does it inspire honest debate? Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself. And let the panties alone in their own drawer. Stop throwing pearls before swine. Throw the pearls where they’ll be picked over, discussed and valued. Or maybe thrown at at the last, found unworthy of the name of pearl. Bottom line: One side is absolutely funded by special interests, and that side discourages debate. The other side is not funded… and they want debate. Say no more. Say no more.
Sadly, I no longer read Scientific American. It has become “Sciency” American. It has become less about the investigation about the nature of things and more about indoctrination on the “correct view” of things. It is basically like one great big “appeal to authority” exercise.
And to Forrest M. Mims III, I say a truly heartfelt “thank you” . Your “Notebooks”, “Mini-notebooks” Handbooks and project books published in the 1970’s and 1980’s directly influenced my career choice in electronics and were the source of many hours of independent experimentation and learning outside of formal training. I owe my current living in no small portion to the publication of those books. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us and being a mentor to probably thousands like me with an interest in that field. In many ways you were my tutor.
Ummm … ahhhh … I thought I had made it clear that was (in effect) the process I had used … (to wit, I used a 2nd PC that has _never_ been logged into, only _visited_ YouTube. Maybe that was not crystal clear. The 2nd PC saw comments later marked as “spam” ONLY ONCE the show “All Comments” link was clicked, otherwise, the comment was effectively *gone* to a casual viewer. Just verified it is still working this way just moments ago too.)
This is reminiscent of what (was it) MSNBC (on their website?) did some years back, where disagreeing comments were ‘blotted out’ from general readership and those logged-in YET the original commenter could still see his/her comment! (I’m sure there is a term for this too.)
BTW, still in the dark since no new light has been shed on the issue – but keep those cards and letters coming!
PS. YouTube: now owned by GOOGLE (I should add).
.
@ur momisugly P Sharrow http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/05/the-scam-gets-worse-an-open-letter-to-bora-zivkovic/#comment-1240087
Tell me about it, even Hollywood get’s that part . . . . Just saw the repeat of The Dead Code on Broadcast, they have put their two cents in . . . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames:_The_Dead_Code.
and then there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_Man_(film)
All certainly good visual disertation of the subject . . . . . in my opinion, of course!