39 Comments on “Commenting on Cosmic Variance”   rss feed

1. flo on Jun 15th, 2008 at 9:29 pm

   Way to go

2. Retired from DRG I on Jun 15th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

   Sounds like a plan.

3. Costanza on Jun 15th, 2008 at 11:36 pm

   I like it.

4. Sean on Jun 15th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

   But don’t worry! Anyone who doesn’t feel they are getting a fair shake can go here to complain:

   http://cosmicvarianceiscensoringme.blogspot.com/

5. Gabe on Jun 16th, 2008 at 12:15 am

   Well that’s a dumb new policy. Personally, I think the reason for a decline in comment quality is our education system.

6. Jason Dick on Jun 16th, 2008 at 12:59 am

   Sounds like a good policy to me!

7. Kea on Jun 16th, 2008 at 1:38 am

   So nobody is allowed to disagree with /\CDM cosmologies?

8. Jason Dick on Jun 16th, 2008 at 2:39 am

   Disagreement isn’t the issue. Derailing threads onto peoples’ pet theories that have no evidence or support is. And, by the way, LambdaCDM cosmologies are questioned all the time within the scientific community.

9. Jason Dick on Jun 16th, 2008 at 4:27 am

   Slight clarification: what I meant above was not intended to claim that these theories shouldn’t be questioned outside the scientific community, but rather that valid questions are perfectly fine (and there are a number of them).

10. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 5:59 am

    Kea. That most certainly isn’t what was written. I think it is pretty clear.

11. davem on Jun 16th, 2008 at 6:02 am

    An elitist blog!

12. Tom O'Bulls on Jun 16th, 2008 at 6:24 am

    About time! The “protracted discussions of hobbyhorses” were particularly discouraging.

13. Michael Gogins on Jun 16th, 2008 at 8:13 am

    I think this is a very good idea. Thank you.

14. Moshe on Jun 16th, 2008 at 8:34 am

    Just a random idea, automatic filters for length and frequency of comments might help, at least they shouldn’t take too much work, and that should help somewhat with the thread takeover phenomena. I’d also be less generous to the few anti-establishment figures who frequent this establishment, but that’s a judgment call. In any event, still a very good blog to read and sometime get into a discussion, keep up the good work.

15. andy.s on Jun 16th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Re: cosmicvarianceiscensoringme

    Sheesh. You guys haven’t repressed anybody since last summer?

    Slackers.

16. Sili on Jun 16th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Good luck!

17. anonymous on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Am I the only one who remembers what the blog posts looked like not too long ago? Censor/Filter/Edit the comments if you wish, but try to lead by example as well.

18. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:04 am

    I have no idea what you’re talking about.

19. Professor R on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:15 am

    A good idea, I think, but there is another factor that hasn’t been mentioned…
    It’s usually pretty obvious to both the commentor and all other readers that a comment is off-topic or not particularly welcome, simply from the lack of response.

    Bloggers have a defnite tendency to respond to comments they value, and ignore comments they don’t. I think that’s enough in itself, except in the case of repeat offenders and/or insulting comments….Cormac

20. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:21 am

    Hi Cormac. In general I agree, but a couple of persistent problems have been people bringing up their own off-topic hobby-horse and a few other people feeding them, leading to a hijacking of the thread, or, similarly, someone raising their own theory of the universe, and one other person entering into a long and, typically, off-topic dialogue with them. Once again, this hijacks the thread. We’re looking to stop these happening, and to stop people insulting others. We’d like a lot less noise, which we think will raise the level of the discussion.

21. Matt on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am

    I have a comment theory I’m working on. In a nutshell, I’ve created a working model of the pre-inflationary universe wherein blog comments orbit atomic nuclei at precisely 1/2 the radius of a resting hydrogen atom’s electrons. Please discuss in detail.

22. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:53 am

    Thanks for the illustrative example Matt.

23. wolfgang on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:56 am

    Sean,

    are you ModernGalileo censored by C.V. yourself?

24. Matt on Jun 16th, 2008 at 11:58 am

    You’re welcome. But damn, I was hoping to be the first deleted comment. What gives?

25. Professor R on Jun 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    Mark - yes, I see what you mean. Might we call it derivative hobby horses?
    If I’ve understood correctly, the problem isn’t so much that one commentator goes off on a tangent, but that this then gets picked up by another, and the thread changes…hmm in that case I think you should strangle the comment at birth!

26. Sean on Jun 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm

    But Mark, don’t you remember the good old days when we only posted about [whatever it is that anonymous #17 finds interesting]? Not like today, when it’s all just wild-eyed screeds about [stuff that is boring to anonymous].

27. John R Ramsden on Jun 16th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    Once or twice I’ve been guilty of failing to resist the temptation to “hobby-horse” here; but on those occasions I was careful to wait two or three days after the initial post, following peoples’ initial comments, in the hope of thereby minimizing any sense of intrusion or hijacking.

    Although hobby-horse riders occasionally elicit instructive replies from experts, I must say (even as a former offender!), tightening up the rules a bit does seem the right policy, especially now your pool of bloggers seems to be expanding.

28. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

    Thanks for doing the right thing! I am glad to hear you don’t think a commitment to freedom of speech requires you personally to provide a soapbox to belligerent bloviating blowhards.

29. anonymous on Jun 16th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

    (How to say this without getting deleted…)

    anonymous respects talent, but not hypocrisy. (By the way, anonymous is now ‘giggling uncontrollably’ after having discovered that Sean did Coast to Coast AM TWICE.)

    anonymous would like to be free to make thinly-veiled insults in response to thinly-veiled insults from anonymous’s favorite posturing physicist. (#26)

    anonymous doesn’t want to ‘hijack’ this comment thread. Ultimately, censoring comments is about who gets the last word. ‘Bad’ comments are easy to ignore. Who are you talking to with this blog anyway - the [deleted] who can’t tell bad comments from good comments?

30. Mark on Jun 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    We’ve made our audience perfectly clear over the years. Also “thinly-veiled” may be a matter of perception. As should be clear from the post, we’ll delete things we think are dragging the discussion down.

31. Garrett on Jun 16th, 2008 at 6:19 pm

    It’s about bloody time.

32. John Merryman on Jun 16th, 2008 at 6:57 pm

    I definitely fall in the category of fringe characters, especially since my last post on Evolving Potentials just vanished, but I can fully understand why any structure needs to establish its parameters, especially in an environment as chaotic and viral as the internets. Presumably a community of scientists is intellectually adaptable enough to understand what direction the future will turn better than anyone else, so it’s just not my position to question the judgement of those who determine the standards. Sometimes though, it isn’t what lays ahead of us that decides our future course, but the stability of the foundation we are standing on.

33. Otis on Jun 16th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    Thanks for this very interesting blog. And I agree completely with the new policy.

34. JCF on Jun 16th, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    Admitting to an eager lay interest in multiverse cosmology and an appreciation of CV’s urbane/humane breadth, I find this site unfailingly informative and stimulating, even if occasionally tendentious politically (your perfect right). I salute the new policy; a blog is and should be a proprietorship, affording neither democracy nor anarchy.

35. Aristotle Pagaltzis on Jun 17th, 2008 at 9:34 pm

    I would suggest not to outright delete comments. Rather, it is better to “disemvowel” them (which means deleting all vowels and leaving all consonants, so that the text remains decipherable, but only with some effort) or doing what Sam Ruby does on his blog, which is to strike-through offensive portions of comments and linking the stricken portion to his comment policy.

    Deletion means that no trace of the offence is left. If I may go overboard here a bit, deletion reminds me of a weapon in a sci-fi plot where a spaceship pilot stranded on an alien forest planet: because it was completely silent, the local wildlife never learned to fear his weapon and thus never learned to avoid him. So it is with comment moderation: if it is done by deletion, many visitors will miss the incident completely, whereas if it is done visibly, they will witness what is tolerated or is not, and as social beings will quite likely almost involuntarily adjust their behaviour to the norms they see expected. Moderating visibly also reduces aggravation on the part of those at the receiving end of a moderator action, because their words are not outright disappeared, merely “painted,” reducing the sense of persecution. And lastly, it serves as a check for the moderators themselves, as their actions are openly visible to everyone.

36. Tyler on Jun 17th, 2008 at 10:10 pm

    how interesting.

    After at least a year of reading every day, I completely stopped hitting this blog a few (several?) months ago primarily because of this issue. I will be very interested to see if this policy is instituted fairly, or if more latitude is given to commenters who push the boundaries in a direction which supports the biases (subconscious or otherwise) of the contributors. Those biases, or my perception of them, were the other reason I stopped coming here, since the purpose of my reading is purely self edification and an untrusted source is not of value.

    Please note that I do not mean biases in a particularly perjorative sense. We all have beliefs and biases, myself no less than any other, and are entitled to express them, especially in our own forums. For example I absolutely share and support the stated CV bias against amateur Grand Theorems. At the time I tuned this blog out, passions were particularly inflamed, and perhaps this (very wise) new policy will keep things from reaching that point again.

    and to our local anonymous, #29, who is better spoken than most members of that clan but obviously motivated by the usual anon search for lulz, in a rather highbrow way - I enjoy polite, clever zingers & snarkiness and share much of your amusement. However, the comment threads here had become tedious and overstuffed with redundant nonsense, as well as final proof for all time that even very smart scientists are not necessarily more evolved or mature than anyone else.

    An improvement in the signal:noise ratio is welcome and so I will provisionally add this site back to my browsing list. Biased content censoring is anathema, and I do trust the Contributors here to refrain from it. But I won’t miss it if it does happen. There’s always Backreaction, after all ;o)

37. ght on Jun 19th, 2008 at 12:09 am

    It would be helpful if your software doesn’t delete the identifying number of the deleted post and shift the identifying numbers of other posts down by one for each deletion. Otherwise, the use of a post number to reference another post will become unreliable.

38. Mukund M.V on Jul 5th, 2008 at 10:33 am

    Hey can anyone tell me how to post here… i am relatively new to blogging

39. yo on Jul 7th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    more of a comment for blog software developers,
    but if the comments were threaded,
    offtopic comments could
    more easily be avoided.

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