“Popular Science” is completely ending comments because they were determned to be counterproductive to the mission of the magazine: “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.”
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments
How does this reconcile with the suggestions that the blogosphere is a means to make science more democratic? Is the blogosphere as a means of (popular - and sometimes not so popular) scientific discussion merely a transitory 'post-normal' misconception?
Where else but on the internet is there open "debate"--even if it is largely talking past one another, and everyone including the "experts" hobbled by ignorance, and smug dismissal, of the definitive evidence? Discussion on the "blogosphere" is not a "misconception", but a symptom of the crisis across all of science today, because false scientific dogmas have been too-long nurtured, and scientific thought has degenerated because of this. The true situation is a crisis of general incompetence among scientists, and a revolution in the making. I do not write on the internet to debate science, but to inform of new scientific knowledge that will demand complete rethinking of the central and most hotly defended of scientific theories (undirected evolution, and plate tectonics, especially). The "guardians of science" today are not "reclaiming science", they are clinging to worn out dogmas--and in their mass delusion they are as foolish, and as evil, as any inquisitors of old.
ReplyDeleteMy unprecedented discoveries are literally the key to the next scientific paradigm, but in this time, there are too many divided and divisive opinions, and no respect among the many who are bedazzled by their own pet theories, including the consensus itself. Aggressive confrontation is the order of the day, and arguing is fruitless. Too many will not be satisfied with anything less than war, intellectual or otherwise. You all have hard lessons to confront in honest truthseeking.