I think I’m going to make myself unpopular.
Over at Popsci, Henry advocates the murder of a reasonable percentage of the population. Elsewhere on the web this week I have read how over a million Londoners are quite obviously stupid for voting in Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. And just about everywhere we see nasturtians cast at the mental prowess of millions of people who — often through no fault of their own — fail to accept evolutionary theory as a mechanistic explanation for the immense beauty and variety of life around us.
This is a disturbing trend.
The biggest failure of (shudder) the blogosphere is the people behind it.
If you think Boris Johnson is bad for London or Gordon (is a moron) Brown is the worse thing since France, then calling people who voted for them stupid, or taxi-drivers, or Daily Mail readers, or pinko lefty commies is not actually going to win you many converts.
Equally, I seriously doubt for example that sciencey weblogs, especially those over at a certain place , are doing the perception of science and scientists any good at all when their major message seems to be “Creationists are stupid, and I’m a scientist, so you’d better shut up and believe me.”
Leave name-calling to the tabloids. We scientists are people, and we get things wrong — gloriously so with any luck. We are not intrinsically better than anyone else — maybe blessed with more neurons or lucky enough to get the right teachers at the right time — but not better, not more worthy of not being put up against a wall and shot. Those with whom we disagree, even if they are demonstrably wrong in some areas, are as worthy of respect as we are.
The sooner those of us who have this opportunity to spout off in public realize the immense harm we do in so many ways, maybe the sooner we’ll be able to have meaningful arguments — ones that actually persuade rather than beat down (and I am by no means holding myself guiltess).
Please excuse the rant. Maybe it’s just the excellent homebrew , and I’m feeling more expansive and loving today. Except towards hairy-footed, croc-wearing, male Nature editors, of course. (I’m sorry if I seem to be picking on you, Henry. This attitude has been niggling me for a while and your comments have merely lowered the activation barrier. You’re curmudgeonly but I love you.)
No argument here. And that’s without homebrew. Its just too easy to frame a conversation in terms of them and us, and then it becomes an argument, or rather, a rant. And the blogosphere just makes it worse by allowing little cliques to evolve and reinforce themselves (I guess I should say ourselves).
Richard, I think you’re railing against what Jenny has elsewhere called ‘recreational outrage’, akin to Kenneth Williams’ apparently spontaneous (but rigorously scripted) outbursts on Round The Horne. Of course, in the steamy little clique of NN bloggers, what we say between each other should never really be taken that seriously. So whereas
I get on very well on a personal level (and have worked with) avowed atheists such as Bora, PZ and Eugenie Scott; I did once meet Dawkins, who seemed very decent, and I was not immediately compelled to throw up – and I don’t really have a tape of kittens being impaled on red-hot skewers. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Why should I respect anyone who insists on being wrong? (wink, nudge)
Seriously though, my wife and I had a rather vigorous discussion last night when I brought up, again, the fact that the take-home stories my 7yo son has to read every night for homework almost always have one and sometimes two glaring errors. Sometimes they are mere typos, other times the wrong word is used.
So I said to my wife, the former teacher (first mistake), if these people are supposed to be teaching my son to read, they should work on their own reading skills, first. After all, any error a first-grader can catch his teacher should be able to catch first, and then correct. Were I his teacher, I would make sure, at least by Tuesday, that every copy of the take-home story had been corrected, but not only are they never corrected, I could count on one hand the number of reading assignments that didn’t have at least one error.
My wife pointed out that if I went into a parent-teacher conference with that attitude, not only would it be extremely rude, the teacher would get defensive and the problem would be less likely to be corrected.
All too true, I admit. At the same time, why should I be nice to someone who is supposed to be teaching my son to read but can’t seem to send home a properly proofed reading assignment?
So, while the blogosphere is filled with boatloads of needless venom and bile (and the lastest issue of Hub Magazine has an excellent essay on this subject as it pertains to the science fiction blogosphere), at the same time a good many people (raises hand) are sick to death of kid-gloving the delicate sensibilities of blithering idiots.
By the way, this is abuse. Arguments are down the hall.
Watching American news and commentary is a good example of this. They bring on two individuals from the extreme opposite ends of an issue (gotta have balance!), and let them rant at each other. There’s no debate, there’s absolutely no chance of either of them changing the other’s viewpoint with an astounding piece of logic, and the majority who stand in the middle don’t learn anything of value except that this is apparently yet another black and white issue.
The most effective way to bring attention and reaction from blog readers (and others) is to create polemic, be rude, or “kick the bucket”, or “the tent’s pole” as we say in Portuguese. (Perhaps “kick out the jams”?) It is an effective rhetorical tool to seduce listeners, and is so important and fundamental that is discovered soon by children, those who like to do nasty things to call their parents attention.
That’s life… Nice, well-behavioured articles about beautiful things might be a pleasure to write, but are just not interesting, get few readers and less comments. It’s a bit like a film about Orchids, as in the film Adaptation. Conflict is essential for the media circus.
My advice for all is: watch out for the hubris, or it will get you. Just don’t complain later!...
I have noticed that one of the biggest mistakes that scientists make in debate is assuming common philosophical ground with no evidence. For example, over on my home turf, there seems to be a presumption that everyone is politically liberal, and comments are couched accordingly. Whereas I think it is more prudent to assume that your audience is as diverse as the day is long.
Knowing your audience – or at least accurately predicting it – is key to a good debate.
The most effective way to bring attention and reaction from blog readers (and others) is to create polemic,
well-behavioured articles about beautiful things might be a pleasure to write, but are just not interesting
It depends what you’re trying to achieve. If you crave attention, and traffic, and comments – well, it’s easy. We say that the Portuguese all beat their wives.
I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in effective communication. I like to have a debate, too, but not one that is based on your personal predilections. Go to Jeff at Abuse for that.
Jenny’s right about the audience. But with a blog… you wonder just who is reading it, and whether you really want to engage with them all.
I agree with Richard’s post. I find polemics all too readily in the blogosphere, and have been enjoying Nature Network so much in the past weeks precisely because there isn’t a culture of outrage, but a culture of conversation. I hope that this spirit will continue. I couldn’t agree more that one does not need to rant and rail to make a good, readable and/or witty point. And I find all the adversarial slanging matches on some blogs a real turn-off, especially to new users who aren’t in the “club”.
Richard, you write above: “with a blog… you wonder just who is reading it, and whether you really want to engage with them all.”
On Nature Network, one can assume that readers are scientists or science-sympathetic, surely? Which provides some common ground with which a community can grow.
I very much like the discourses that have grown up recently on the network, in a style analagous with the coffee-houses of Dr Johnson’s day.
On Nature Network, one can assume that readers are scientists or science-sympathetic, surely? Which provides some common ground with which a community can grow.
Well yes, obviously. NN is pretty sane (OK, comparing with the rest of the shudder blogosphere, it’s not difficult) and actually a lovely place to say these sorts of things.
In my heart, I’ve always been
gaya womana member of an oppressed minoritysomeone who likes crocsa conservative. I’ve tried to hide it, to go along with the majority, just for a quiet life, telling jokes againstgayswomenminoritiespenguinsconservatives because whenever I show signs of Coming Out, the people who I thought were my friends, and who just assume everyone is a Guardian-reader, like they are, do the blogospheric equivalent of taking me round the back of the bike sheds and giving me a good kicking.Someone once said (I can’t remember who it was, but it was in the Daily Telegraph) that members of the liberal intelligentsia are quite happy for people to follow whatever political ideology they want – provided it’s theirs. Never a truer word was spoken.
I’m sorry, but I’m no longer willing to play this game any more.
I’m sorry, but I’m no longer willing to play this game any more.
That’s understandable Henry. But when we treat others with the contempt with which they treat us then we lose. Big time.
Come on man. We’re looking to the likes of you for example and leadership.
Some of us meanie liberals are mature enough to agree to disagree with you or anyone else who is willing to debate, as long as we are reasonably polite to one another.
I remember thinking at college that it was refreshing to be in a left-leaning majority (contrary to most of the rest of American society) but that it was not easy in that context to be practicing religion, abstinent from sex, voting right-wing, a teetotaler or what have you. Moral: it’s never easy to be in the minority, even when you know that in other contexts you are part of the majority.
Members of any group think they have it best and a monopoly on being right. A little empathy is what’s needed on all sides, generally.
nods Oh yes indeedy Heather.
One of the interesting things about www.scienceblogs.com (and I don’t bring this up as a positive or a negative thing, just a thing) is its similarity to the progressive website Daily Kos. One of the interesting things about DK is that it isn’t organized around political debate per se, but is meant to serve as an organizing point for education, fundraising, and intra-communal argument for liberals (U.S. sense of the word) interested in building a movement based on some shared political ideals. Scienceblogs.com has taken on some of the same overtones. That doesn’t mean they’re WRONG, and it doesn’t mean the writing isn’t usually pretty good, informative, and that good debate doesn’t happen over there. But the goal seems to be to discuss and refine positions within a community of (largely) scientific atheism. Whether that’s an inevitability of online communities, I’m not sure.
Oh God. I just went the entire day without accepting “evolutionary theory as a mechanistic explanation for the immense beauty and variety of life around us.” How remiss. And now, just before turning in, I am to believe that scientists will be mutating into nasturtians? What about the rest of us, will we become dandy lions or something because we don’t have ScDs?
If I am to accept evolutionary theory, when will the mutation take place? And, if such a transfiguration is to happen, should we kill the new species if it seems superior to us and there is both a male and female?
Yours,
Rus
I will offer a hearty Hear! Hear! on the side of civility.
GEEK ALERT
Years ago I went to a RPG convention in Chicago. I brought a D&D adventure that I had written for the convention, and once there, I posted a notice for players.
Saturday night the game began with five volunteers, plus one player’s nephew and another player’s girlfriend observing. The girlfriend, by the way, wasn’t feeling well as the game commenced.
By the first hour, it became obvious that the boyfriend player had only signed up so he could ruin the game for everyone else. While the others wanted to play the adventure and see where it led, he wanted to go off on wild asides “to earn experience points” for a character that he would never play again. Actually, he wanted to see if he could destroy the plot. When the adventure party arrived at the friendly jungle village, where a vital clue was hidden, his character murdered the chief. Meanwhile, his girlfriend sat there begging him to please take her home, she was really sick. He would have none of it, and I was not an experienced enough Dungeon Master to shut him down. I wanted to play fair. Sure, I tried to punish his character to let him know he was disrupting the game, but I tried to do it with random encounters and honest dice rolls, when I should have had the earth crack open and swallow his character, deus ex machina. I didn’t do that because I couldn’t believe a human being could be that fundamentally dishonest and, to borrow from D&D terminology, chaotic. The way he treated his girlfriend was certainly evil.
I never thought I’d meet another person like him until I began commenting and blogging. Then I met loads of people just like him and worse.
Well, what do you expect from an RPG convention… ?
Rus, how can you be certain the mutation hasn’t already begun?
Personally, I don’t believe in evolution any more than I believe in the moon. It’s simply there. It exists. The moon moves the oceans whether I believe it is the result of an ancient collision between earth and another planet-sized body (a theory), or it is the result of industrous stellar cheesemakers (may they be blessed, for they are special). E pur si muove.
And if Galileo were a cat, he’d have said E purr si meow. Apocryphally, of course.
Come to think of it, Richard, he may have been an arms dealer.
groan
HAHA! OK, this is appropriate, here.
Hi Jeff,
My DNA is human. I share 99% with scientists. How about you, you still human, or has your genetic make-up changed recently?
You can tell when someone mutates, btw, because of the groan.
Yours,
Rus
Ah, but it’s that 1% that makes the difference.
For all I know you could be a highly-trained chimpanzee.
And here I was thinking I was a werewolf. Hopefully this wears off by morning.
Naw. On the internet, everyone is a chimp until proven otherwise.
To be fair, we share 60% of our DNA with dandelions (and Daily Telegraph readers).
To cross-post to a certain extent, I had to look up what a nasturtian was. I always called them nasturtiums myself (and more recently have had to learn to call them capucines). And when I was trying to figure out why someone would cast them, I found out they were related to watercress, which explains their taste. But I’d love some enlightenment as to why they are preferable to ripe tomatoes (toe-may-toes) as a projectile.
And yes, I do know the plural of ”-um” is ”-a”. It never crossed my mind to call them nasturtia.
heheh. I hope you found the link about Tolkien’s gardener (check Henry’s excellent blog for details).
“Casting nasturtians” (or ‘nasturtiums’ if you’re unedjamucated) was a deliberate Grant family malapropism for “casting aspersions”.
You probably had to be there ;)
Heather, I have always called them nasturtiums, (not even “a”), too. Oh well.
Rus, you define yourself on your profile as a car salesman and poet, and provide no futher details. This provides me, personally, while reading this debate, an indication of how seriously to judge your contribution to it, and to take the necessary mental action (without needing to write anything about what that process is).
Henry: if I am cast in your mind as a liberal, intelligensia Guardian-reader (whatever that is!), it is not on the basis of anything I’ve written. And I haven’t a clue whether other contributors to this and other comment threads fit that category: I’ve not thought about it, or had occasion to, based on what has been written. It just isn’t relevant to me, compared with the topic under debate, whatever that happens to be. By analogy, it doesn’t matter how rude a submitting author is when I read their article, it does not make a difference to the editorial decision about publication. Charm offensive is as nasty as plain rudeness.
I could ramble on about my views on liberals, Guardian readers and intelligensia (it would be a ramble I’m afraid, knowing me), but I don’t because I’m not interested in having online discussions on those kinds of topics. Otherwise I’d be on a political-style blog. I’m also not personally interested in discussing my religion or race, or lack thereof, online, though I am happy for others to do it. I certainly don’t like prejudice when I read it, and if it is anti-women, I sometimes “write out” (the online equivalent of “speak up”), if I think there is any point in the particular context in which the prejudicial (in my view) comment is made. But on the whole, online discussions about topics such as religion or one’s preferred newspaper don’t go anywhere, that I’ve seen.
Personally, I don’t believe in evolution any more than I believe in the moon. It’s simply there. It exists.
Good morning. I just woke up here in Lowell MA, after being overseas and clouds in Dreamland. While there, there was a second moon in the sky called “Evolutionary Theory”. When I started questioning it, all the tides went screwy and the dream was nearly destroyed. As soon as I accepted it, though, everything went back to normal, including all my hair, and I bayed.
Yours,
Rus
um. waves mod stick
Just be careful.
Waves adult-to-adult communication wand: careful of what?
If you are not understanding, I am using a different type of thinking that you might be used to. It would be obvious to some.
It would be very intersting to se a ban take place because I did not rill over and agree with a “mod”.
Do try and make some sense, there’s a good chap.
Hi Richard,
What’s a good chap.
Here’s some sense. When someone, like you’re doing here, reverts to the comfort of an authority figure, in transactional analysis that’s called communicating from your parent.
I do not accept you this way. I am here answering you as an adult. So your assertion that I am not making sense, really means you either refuse to see the sense I am making, or you cannot, at least at present. To the say, “there’s a good chap” is to then be condescending from you vulnerable position.
Please, and I say this adult-to-adult, trying to appeal to your better side, please refrain from being condescending. I am not here to threaten you personally. I saw some pat and poor arguments thought to support evolutionary theory, and I addressed them.
Of course, the title of the original post had to do with a plea for the intolerant.
Yours,
Rus
I saw some pat and poor arguments thought to support evolutionary theory, and I addressed them.
No you didn’t.
Okay, instead of doing this the way Jeff responded, and I responded back, we’ll do it your way.
Yes, I did.
Yours,
Rus
I see you as a 3000m steeplechaser. I hope Henry will confirm this.
Bob, Yes, I realised my grammatical infelicity after pressing “submit”, thanks for pointing it out. I meant people are welcome to discuss their own religions, etc as far as I am concerned, but I’m not joining in (even to say that I can’t run or jump, but can manage standing still eating oats.)
Rus’s 12.24 argument is logically flawed in at least three places.
Darn. Must have not pressed “submit” back when I thought Rus was just trying to be funny.
Anyhow, I came bearing a peace offering. I still think it makes for interesting reading.
My opinion is that science-oriented blogs are not just for the eyes of (editors and ex-)scientists but anyone who deigns click on the link, so you have to live with the consequences; and that it’s unadvisable to feed the trolls in a general sense.
Heather: I suppose it is true that I do see Nature Network as a network of blogs, forums etc for scientists and those interested in science, not for anti-scientists to sneer and stir the pot for the hell of it.
(A disclaimer: this is my own view as a user, not the official view of Nature Network, which I don’t represent. However, the N N getting started page states: “have fun hanging out with other scientists! There is a fierce debate to be had about the future of science, so make new friends and allies and develop your vision of the future on Nature Network.”)
Hi Heather,
Yes, I was having fun, fun with ideas and such, when I thought that was acceptable. Trains of thought were brought in with creative-style thinking. The damper was the mod wand, necessarily. That’s how such transactions work. I am perfectly willing to go down that 3000m using an analytical style of thought as well, if this is more comfortable and inclusive for everyone here.
Hi Maxine,
Which three flaws? (and I say it that way on purpose). Please.
~~
I think we need to be careful about slipping from the usefulness of the ever-evolving evolutionary theory, into acceptance of evolutionary theory as truth. At least two leaps must happen for this. The first would be to postulate that truth is within evolutionary theory, and the second is the logical flaw, the postulate that since there is truth within evolutionary theory, evolutionary theory must be truth. In this sense, we go from the utility of the theory, to the theory as dogma, a dogma intolerant of being questioned.
Science studies the world poets have bequeathed to us. Creative thinking moves us forward. In playfulness, in snaky dreeams, possibly similar to what was taking place in this thread above, and our thinking may evolve into something new. Maybe we are on the cusp, not of an evolution to a news species, but within our own species, to a yet-new way of thinking, leaving the Age of Evolution for historians and sociologists to study.
Sorry for any typos. I am at work.
Yours,
Rus
I started writing a reply, and upgraded it to a full post .
I suppose it is true that I do see Nature Network as a network of blogs, forums etc for scientists and those interested in science, not for anti-scientists to sneer and stir the pot for the hell of it.
Yes, but if scientists really want to engage with the wider world, it won’t help if we form a circle from which we exclude everyone whom we think (according to our own criteria) do not belong to our group. I, for one, enjoy Rus’ comments. I don’t always understand them, but appreciate that he has a perspective that’s different from mine, or anyone else’s here.