As this is most fundamentally a conversation about science, perhaps quoting somebody you believe will help …
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" – Richard Feynman
I honestly don’t believe that Feynman was angry when he said it. And neither am I. I am simply focused.
And there’s nothing at all illogical about what I’m trying to do: Online scientific discourse is indeed completely broken – and in a number of crucial ways. A person can easily go through life without reaching this awareness, as it requires intention to actually learn and observe it.
What we see on sites like BoingBoing is that the point of introducing scientific discourse is to build community. But, community is oftentimes at odds with healthy scientific discourse, as scientific heretics are an essential feature of progress in science. John Stuart Mills was poignantly concerned that the crowd can be wrong. I personally do believe that there is indeed wisdom in the crowd, but that it must be carefully designed to emerge.
The systems we use to communicate today have not been designed in service to emergence in science. There is a long tail to science, but it is not being captured – in large part, because nobody has figured out how to bring a sense of order to the existing confusion. The person who figures out how to capture and organize the long tail of science will make a contribution to society which is worth every disparaging remark they will suffer along the way.
