Re: Recommendations for effective online scientific discussion

On Jul 24, 8:14 am, "Juan R." González-Álvarez
<juanREM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
PD wrote on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:24:58 -0700:

(\newsgroups
 sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,sci.bio.misc,sci.chem,sci.math
)



On Jul 23, 9:43 am, "Juan R." González-Álvarez
<juanREM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
PD wrote on Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:53:36 -0700:

On Jul 22, 4:22 am, "Juan R." González-Álvarez
<juanREM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This set of recommendations was first prepared after noticing some
nasty behaviors on the USENET. Initially, I embraced the usual
recommendation to ignore trolls, crackpots, liars, flamers, and
other nasty posters.

It depends on how you measure efficacy of online scientific
discussion. What is it you hope gets accomplished on a newsgroup?

I think it is more effective to notice lies, ad honimen, and nonsenses
but without participating in further discussion, maintaining noise to
acceptable 'minimum'.

That doesn't answer what I asked you.

It did. It gives a meaning to I mean by more effective discussion.

You just gave me some examples of
tactics you use to deal with examples of what you consider to be bad
behavior.

I gave below some examples of what I consider to be bad behavior for the
sake of illustration.

Of course, I am aware that I consider bad content the continued
nonsenses, the straw man the lies, the falsification of archives or
ratings for promoting ad hominem.

Others are much more worried about some minor technological topics such
as a 441 error in the followup-to header.

One folk (I don't remember who) worried a lot of about changing the
subject title. It seems to me a good idea. Actually your personal non-
scientific discussion with Tom Potter is labeled in a separated thread
which I can easily filter by title and further ignore your mutual
accusations.

I find that rather effective when reading entire threads.

Again, if you disagree, just follows your own rules or that you want.



I asked you what you think would be a measurable indicator of
*effective* online scientific discussion? If *effective* online
scientific discussion is occurring, what gets accomplished?

Can you please answer the above question, since this is the one I'm
interested in getting your read on?


This may be qualitatively understood as follow.

The thread about massive and massless photons started fine with several
people posting interesting stuff. E.g. Igor did the more important post
to help to understand why Hamiltonian (2) would be just (1).

But the whole thread got full of noise, once Eric, Dono and others
nasty posters participated here with their usual ad hominem lies and
nonsenses.

In the past, if Eric had wrote the nonsense

"No. The special relativistic Hamiltonian is H = L = -mc^2 * [1 - v^2/
c^2 ]."

I had simply ignored because I recommended to ignore nonsense. But I
don't see now reason for which I may ignore nonsense as that of above
without warning to novices, non-physicists, and the like.

Today I would still notice how wrong Eric was, but I had not
participated in subsequent discussion and the whole thread had been
rather free of noise and nasty content, also from mine :-(

Another reason is

http://www.canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.html

"Forget that nasty people. When you correct some of their mistakes,
they often reply by making more mistakes, which you also feel obligated
to correct. Avoid this trap also! It fills the network with useless
noise in some exponential way as has been proven recently."

After several postings for justifying his mistake about relativity Eric
wrote another nonsense

"But since you are pitching a shitfit over it, here: v = p/m --> H = -
mc^2 [1 - p^2 / (mc)^2 ]^1/2"

which contains new mistakes to be added to the large list of mistakes
Eric was doing before.

If then I had the guidelines ready and operative like now, that mistake
from Eric had never been posted, because once noticed his initial
nonsense I had not continued to correct him.

I consider to maintain noise to a minimum and enclosed being more
effective that leaving noise and mistakes to spread freely from
threads.

That was my MISTAKE when I recommended to completely ignore lies, ad
hominem, and nonsense. They had the feeling they could post anything
they want because I would never reply.

If you don't like guidelines don't use. If you prefer previous version,
use previous version. If you think may be improved say me how. If you
don't care then...

[#] To say one poster who I have also corrected in the past.

--
Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)  http://canonicalscience.org

--http://www.canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.html

.