Re: Recommendations for effective online scientific discussion

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

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?


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

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