Popsci.com, the site of Popular Science magazine, is shutting off comments, because “even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests.”
Though most Popsci.com commenters were great, the salt of the earth, spambots and trolls were present as well, and, darn it, this Interweb thing is too unruly to govern with, like, technology.
The Popsci.com editors grieve, “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.”
A war on expertise is being waged by spambots?
In other news: “In other words, the scientific consensus is that GMOs do not pose risks to our health or the environment that are any different from the risks posed by the non-GM crops created with modern breeding programs.
“The discrepancy between the public debate over GM foods and the debate within the scientific community has left many scientists puzzling over the question: What evidence will it take to convince the public that GM foods are as safe as non-GM foods?”
But those darn commenters…
Amazing how exclusivity leads to circular reasoning. All of the scientists in the approved journals agree, so it must be right. Yet to become accepted into the approved journals one must agree.
Shows the value of fellowship with those who disagree with you.