Disincentive for Popular Science, perhaps. But, let’s be clear: The problem is not, as Popular Science seems to think, the peoples’ desire to debate the science articles; the problem is two-fold: (1) the failure by our university system to teach people how to think critically about scientific theories; and (2) the failure of the comments board paradigm to elicit wisdom from the crowd. I mean, the notion of a blank page which people type text into should be assumed to support the existing theory in every case; the only wisdom people will be willing to spend the time to read will be slight annotations to the article. Any real idea in science takes a bit of explaining. What this means is that the current comments technology simply filters out those ideas which start from an alternative worldview (which would require a bit more explaining).
We now have graphical information technologies like deep zoom. I don’t quite get why we are not graphically mapping out these worldviews, models and concepts. We could use topic modeling to help the system automatically identify where to place conversations, and to flag to moderators conversations which stray from topic. We can use deep zooming to make good ideas and dialogue physically bigger than bad ideas.
It’s not that we cannot solve this problem. The technology is all there. The problem for the public is the culture of one-way communication which appears now rampant in our graduate programs, and which is apparently obstructing education reform in our science programs. We will not achieve unification in physics, by pure chance, with a university system which is more fundamentally designed to create ideologically-disciplined thinkers mostly destined for corporate jobs. The big questions in science will remain elusive to that sort of educational system.
The public has to make a choice of sorts: Do we really care about making our theories better? Because if we do, the first step is to teach students how to properly be critical of the existing theories. And that would require that grad students not be weeded out of the graduate programs for ideological disagreements.
