More importantly, the poster at #4 linked to a blogpost to support his claim of “Bogus”, and used the same name as the author of that blog. I found that blogpost to be generally convincing (also a previous post provoked by the original Bike-mag recension of the story)… no doubt because they confirm my prior beliefs, that the magical power of the microbiome is vastly oversold.
So it doesn’t really matter whether the author of comments #4 and #23 is indeed the author of the Phylogenomics blog (as opposed to some random anonymous person using Eisen’s name to link to Eisen’s blog). It is convenient to assume that the name is accurate, but any appeals to authority here relate to Eisen’s bloggerly activity rather than to the comments.
Thanks for saying. I mean that flying monkeys seem to show up in the wake of some people, folk of a type seem to attract hangers on willing (or driven by unknown forces) to fight their fights for them. To attack and berate. I mean, how DARE I not recognize the revered ones name?! How dare I ask if he were a microbiologist in order to determine what place he was speaking from.
I’m just unclear on a professor taking a dump on a postgrad quite like that from a place of anything other than pettiness. There’s way too much invective for me to take him any more seriously than say, I get taken when I use that much invective.
i have no reason to doubt that was the professor, but I rather wish it were not.
Oh gosh no. Literally the model in my head for what a petty person acts like is a very high ranking college professor I used to know. Little fiefdoms yield little despots.
Going back through the archives at Phylogenomics, I see that Eisen has been fighting his rearguard battle against over-hyping the microbiome for quite a while. This may be conducive to vitriol, sarcasm and disrespect.
The continued enthusiasm among churnalists for microbiome over-hyping does fit into peregrinus_bis’s contention that sarcasm and disrespect are counter-productive.
I use “churnalism” to mean something like “journalists and bloggers passing a story from one to the other in the manner of a half-sucked lollipop, recycling text without adding much that is new, or looking for an original source to see if the story is supported by facts”. With the implication that they are reporting the story for its clickbait quality, and not wanting to be left out.
Especially prevalent in pop science reporting, where university press units thoughtfully provide journalists with a overwrought and predigested version of any headlineable publication, to save them having to read the original.
Clearly not a new phenomenon.
There may be better definitions elsewhere.
