Apparently, the science was too popular, so what do these fools do? Alienate their readers of course:
Starting today, PopularScience.com will no longer accept comments on new articles. Here’s why.
Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
The stupid, it burns like a magnesium flare.
The go on to quote some study as the reason, and blame climate change discussions:
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.
Read it all here: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments
The link did not show in the first comment….http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/apparent-recovery-of-arctic-sea-ice-this-year-is-illusory-say-experts/#comment-1057958448
FWIW, since 2007 PopSci is owned by Swedes. Swedes on average are about as fanatically green and PC as Germans; maybe more. (see e.g. the rampant importation of Somali Muslims by their president)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnier_Group
Maybe the typical European neo Stalinist Lysenkoism-style approach to science is now pushed through at PopSci.
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.
It is a hallmark of psychosis that divergent data must be shut out from the echo chamber of self-affirmation of the untenable. I am not surprised, it is a recurring theme from warmist blogs to The Guardian’s comment section that they are either closed or moderated to death by the acolytes.
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.
Maybe PopSci should rename itself to KorrektSci.
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
Pop Sci joining Sci Am and so many others on the dung heap of history.
How unsurprising and how sad.
I too enjoyed PS when it was my birthday present at age 13 in the 60s. So much so that I resubscribed via a recent ad. Now it is a very light weight carrier system for ads.
HOWEVER go to
http://www.popsci.com/announcements/article/2010-03/new-browse-137-years-popsci-archive-free
and discover that it has always been the same. I was astonished. It has not changed, we have.
CodeTech – interesting comment. It is certainly true that the quality of comments on some sites is very low – it’s just Facebook writ large. It’s also true that some sites become venues for a small group of people to enact their version of a bad marriage by having the same arguments again and again without any resolution – Judy Curry’s suffers from that.
But, it’s the price of engagement. A friend of mine was the Letters editor for a large newspaper (back when they mattered a lot more) for a while, and she says it was the same there, except that the volume was lower, and her job was to moderate out the crap. Sometimes, it left her with not much to publish.
A sensible moderation policy at PopSci (assuming that it published anything worth commenting on) would probably produce interesting and informative material, just as it does here.
As for TV stations, it is not all bad news. Sky in Australia is now the most prestigious political broadcaster. During the last election, for the first time ever, the ABC was rejected by both major parties as the host for leaders’ debates – they preferred Sky and its political editor. This was an earth-shaking event in the media world.
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
The most commented on article on PopSci is this: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/republicans-block-proposal-national-science-laureate-fearingscience
In it the writer excoriates House Republicans for refusing to endorse a “Science Laureate” position. The article is illustrated with a Rockwell picture of a confused hick wondering why his perpetual motion machine doesn’t work.
Now I am not politically conservative, but I recognize that that article was a partisan political statement.
Whether or not there should be a “Science Laureate” appointed by Congress or the President (will there be hearings?) is a political question. Quite what this has to do with whether House Republicans support “Science” eludes me.
The question of whether or not Michael Mann committed scientific fraud in producing the Hockey Stick might have political ramifications but it is, at heart, a scientific question that has yet to be properly investigated, let alone answered. It is not a question of left or right, liberal or conservative, theist or atheist, belief in AGW or non-belief in AGW.
That it has been presented as some sort of touchstone of political belief or religious conviction is one of the great tragedies of our times.
A prediction: PopSci will return with a moderated comment system (a la ‘RealClimate’) when its traffic hits the floor.
“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.
“[Watts] has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer”
IIRC, Watts does have some climate credentials–and he certainly has a lot of uncredentialed knowledge he’s picked up.
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?
Let the bitter enders document with their tears the slow death of the biggest science establishment blunder since the 16th century. The world is not warming, get over it.
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.
Me says:
September 24, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Popular Science doesn’t want to be popular anymore. 😆
—-
I guess that’s appropriate, they stopped being science a long time ago.
Don’t ask questions, Big Brother doesn’t like it.
“Scientists liken certainty of global warming to deadliness of smoking”
Right, one “way of knowing” is subjective and the other way is objective. And begging the question doesn’t count against the argument from analogy: therefore, “The gibberish is settled!”
Goodbye, Popular Science. We wish you well in your new alternate reality.
I left years ago when the “Popular” became more important than the “Science”.
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.
“If it’s a good script I’ll do it. And if it’s a bad script, and they pay me enough, I’ll do it.”
George Burns
The cult of AGW must pay very well.
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.