ZapperZ said:
But who do you believe here if you were a mentor who isn't an expert on the issue being discussed, and you have one member making such-and-such claim based on a paper, and another member claiming the contrary?
Since DanP has mentioned it so explicitly, and since you also ask what I would do as a mentor myself, let me just say that this is a tad awkward.
I don't think physicsforums should rely on anyone person.
To be honest, I am pretty confident of my own background on this topic, sufficient to recognize in advance most of the claims people might be making with respect to climate in the present (and many of the claims with respect to paleoclimate in the past, though this is not my main interest). I know many of the names on all sides of people who are publishing. Because the contrarian or minority authors are comparatively limited, I'm particularly likely to recognize them. Because I like to understand the issues on their own merits, I am also well acquainted with many of the authors for conventional climate views, and I have a large collection of several hundred papers that I've used trying to sort out different matters. The fact I am not a professional doesn't prohibit this. But then I have had an interest in this topic for some time.
I don't want to overstate this. I don't recognize all the topics within climate science, of course, and I am still learning more about the details of the various topics, as a learning amateur.
I am very happy to be a part of this forum and as a (still quite new) science advisor I already have a bit of additional standing, even if rather nominal. There's no additional power to enforce anything, of course. I'm also aware that physicsforums deliberately aims to keep a fairly small mentor teams; with new mentors as replacements as people retire.
We should also remember -- it is the members who contribute most of the discussion and in many cases they are going to help a lot in sorting out issues. With basic content and referencing guidelines in place, the cranks are already at a severe disadvantage.
Managing a content dispute
So, on your specific example, what should be done when two members argue conflicting views, and mentors can't immediately recognize one of them as nonsense?
Even professional experts have a particular focus of research interest. ANY finite team of mentors is going to come up against specific issues that are new from time to time. Even in a case where three mentors happen to know that area well, what do you do when they happen to be away for a week? What does the team do about this argument between two members?
(1) If one member is making unsupported claims, then they can be advised that a reference is required. This much is fairly easy.
(2) If both members are claiming that the same paper is arguing different things, then you have a somewhat unusual situation. It will happen occasionally, and it may take a bit of checking, but usually you can identify who is distorting the reference, especially if you have a good general background in science.
(3) If two members are using different references that make mutually inconsistent claims... then there's not a problem. Mainstream science really does involve conflicting ideas and debate. The main thing to watch in this case is simply civility. A well grounded discussion on an open question can be very useful and interesting, and it is a part of good education in science to understand such differences. Physicsforums is all about helping students and interested members improve their understanding of mainstream science, and that legitimately includes understanding the differences on open questions.
(4) If two members are looking at the same paper, and one says it is correct, and the other says it is incorrect, then you have a difficult case. The onus is on the one claiming a paper is incorrect. If they can give a reference presenting the conflicting view, then you are back to case (3) above. If they cannot, then they need to be really specific in dealing with the paper they wish to refute on its own merits.
Sometimes, under case (4), you will have a case where a paper is junk. This does happen, from time to time, and I think we should live with that. I can give a couple of examples from the threads in 2009, several in climate and a couple in other areas as well. We should not rely on the mentors alone to identify all cases where a published paper is junk.
Science isn't perfect, and there are mistaken ideas that change. Some of the things in physics that we think we know, will very likely be substantially different in twenty years. Scientists are well used to working with uncertainty and the possibility of being wrong. We should be more relaxed about that here as well; it is in my own opinion a more serious failure of the physicsforum ideal of fostering education and learning of modern physics to have an important topic cut off at the knees than to have a possibility that sometimes some things will be said that turn out to be incorrect, without having been adequately challenged at the time.
I brought up one very obvious example in which it is clear what is being bastardized, but in most cases, the issues are NOT that obvious! I have had to deal with people objecting to very subtle issues in which, if I were not familiar at all with the details of the subject, I wouldn't have been able to judge who's doing what to whom! In many of these calls, they do require an expertise, and not simply a bot to do a check of some citation index!
I've never said a bot with a citation index is enough -- though many of the worst problems can get resolved pretty quickly with little more than this.
In cases that are not obvious, you have to allow that some questions really are open questions. You mentioned back in [post=2530911]msg #126[/post] a tricky case... the example of Schon. The lesson from this example is that we must not demand of mentors that they are perfectly able to identify in advance every case of fraud, or junk science.
Again, we have a physics section of this forum that not only run like a well-oiled machine, but also has the ability to keep the noise level down. This cannot be attributed simply because all we do is nothing more than check references. This short-change all the hard work at the Mentors have to do. Instead, the various expertise we have in many areas of physics are often called into play in the running of these physics sub-forums. It isn't just blind routine check-the-references-and-you-are-done task. It was never, and has never, been like that. To think that simply doing that will make the Earth forum move as well is underestimating what it takes to run it.
I don't think that is all it takes.
But I DO definitely think that having a tighter set of guidelines for managing the discussion will give a workable result, given the current set of smart and knowledgeable mentors we have, AND a core of substantive contributors as members. I do not accept that I am underestimating what it takes. I've been involved in contentious science discussions for many years, on a range of topics and in a range of roles. Perhaps we disagree on this, but I don't think you should take offense at my suggestions for managing discussions.
It is not reasonable to take suggestions about useful guidelines for managing discussion as a claim that any bot could apply them, or that guidelines alone make everything perfect. It takes much more than just a set of guidelines to run a quality discussion; but the guidelines are still are very important framework, no matter how expert the mentors. They give transparency and consistency to how discussions are managed.
I base this all very much on the fact that climate discussions HAVE been going well. People have been learning, discussions have been substantive, and much of the really nonsensical stuff that gets posted has been exposed pretty effectively. You never actually convince a really determined contrarian; but people wanting to learn about the issues have been doing so.
I know that mentors have been divided on the matter. The specifics of those divisions are probably quite a touchy subject. If I'm right about this, then having a clear set of guidelines that everyone can accept will be essential.
I've given several specific guidelines that I think can tighten things up, and I fully expect that ANY set of guidelines will need a small and well informed team of mentors to carry on, and that (like science itself) nothing will ever be perfect. I continue to hope that this topic will be opened up again at some point, and that it will be useful to have some strong guidelines such as I have proposed to help manage it.
Cheers -- sylas
