Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Fri Nov 06, 2015 7:11 am

Listing Observations
CC said: Few people will be willing to step through an article, one sentence at a time, evaluating the observational content of each sentence. I tend to think that people preparing articles will break out the observations. It's good form in a scientific paper to describe the instrumentation and the data that were collected, and then, in a different section, to discuss the interpretation thereof. So what I'm saying is that those sections that deal just with the data collection would appear in the Observations folder. The advantage will be that you won't have to read through each individual article to get to the data -- they'll be in their own folder, organized per topic. And people will be able to discuss the validity of the data collection methods as an independent topic.
Proposing Encyclopedia
Having thought things over a bit since last night, I think we need to do both: Compose an Encyclopedia of Observations and Write and Collect Papers. Your Observations Folders shouldn't be too hard to collect into an Encyclopedia. And the Theories about the Observations could be referenced in the Observations Folders. Right? So the Papers could be organized under Observations.

Papers
So I guess you're saying each Paper would have an Observations section and a Theory section. The Observations will likely cover several specific topics, so each Observation may need a Topic Title along with the specific Observation. That way the Titles can help organize the Observations into the Encyclopedia.

Your Site
Your site then could be used for:
1. productive Scientific Discussion (in threads and the chat room in the Teams and Topics section, I guess)
2. Collaboration to write Science Papers (in the Blogs, Teams & Topics section, I guess)
3. Collaboration to compose an Encyclopedia of Observations (in the Teams section, I think)

Encyclopedia Collaboration
I think the Encyclopedia writing could draw a lot of collaborators, i.e. new members, who would like to edit Entries, like people do on Wikipedia. But it would be more fun on your site, because it'd be fair to everyone, letting everyone's theories be listed in the Reference section and anyone would be able to critique anyone's theories where they're posted on your site.
- I'd like to get started right away to compile a list of Topics for the Encyclopedia, starting with Astronomy etc. I see Wikipedia has an Outline of Astronomy at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_astronomy, so that may help.

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Fri Nov 06, 2015 9:07 am

Lloyd wrote:Proposing Encyclopedia
Your Observations Folders shouldn't be too hard to collect into an Encyclopedia.
Yes, that will be the easy part. Putting something IN those folders is where it starts getting tough. :D
Lloyd wrote:Papers
So I guess you're saying each Paper would have an Observations section and a Theory section.
Yes. And the advantage to breaking out the data into their own sections, in the Observations folders, is that other people will get to re-use the same data in their projects.

BTW, another thing that we should be thinking about is not just standard observations, but anomalies. Ian Tresman is the keeper of the late William Corliss' collection of scientific anomalies. Some of them are on the website (http://science-frontiers.com), but I guess that most of the info is in the print media. That's the low-hanging fruit, for a pack of enthusiasts such as ourselves.
Lloyd wrote:Encyclopedia Collaboration
I'd like to get started right away to compile a list of Topics for the Encyclopedia, starting with Astronomy etc.
Go for it. ;) Just remember that too much structure frustrates creativity. We should have just enough structure to maximize the value of the material that has been created, but not so much that people don't feel free to conceive things their way. Everybody likes exploring fresh territory, so they don't need a map -- they just need the tools to help them make faster progress through their journeys. Making it easier to utilize information developed by others will make their efforts more gratifying. Likewise, seeing that their results lay the foundation for progress being made by others will be fulfilling. So they just need the tools to explore whatever interests them -- they don't need to be led by the nose, and told what to do, or how to do it.
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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Fri Nov 06, 2015 5:22 pm

Collecting Observations
CC said: We should have just enough structure to maximize the value of the material that has been created, but not so much that people don't feel free to conceive things their way.

1. Don't you think a lot of people would like to edit an alternative to Wikipedia that gives links to their favorite theories?
2. What would be enough structure for Observations? How about:
-Topic Title;
-Location in Hierarchy;
-Organized List of Relevant Observations (from submitted Papers and from online sources, like Wikipedia);
-Relevant Theories;
-References;
-Bibliography?
3. When submitting Papers, would Astronomy authors likely be willing to check off which of the following categories their Papers should go under: Universe; Galaxy Filaments & Great Voids; Galaxy Clusters; Galaxies; Galactic Cores; Molecular Clouds; Galactic Halos; Star Clusters; Stars; Planets & Moons; Asteroids, Comets & Meteors; Dust & Matter; Radiation; Space & Time?
4. Should there be templates for the Observations Encyclopedia Entries
- and for the Papers?

Link to preliminary Encyclopedia work: http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=4741-13268-6226-9754-17197
Any comments?

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Fri Nov 06, 2015 8:16 pm

Lloyd wrote:1. Don't you think a lot of people would like to edit an alternative to Wikipedia that gives links to their favorite theories?
Yes.
Lloyd wrote:2. What would be enough structure for Observations? How about:
-Topic Title;
-Location in Hierarchy;
-Organized List of Relevant Observations (from submitted Papers and from online sources, like Wikipedia);
-Relevant Theories;
-References;
-Bibliography?
I'd be happy enough just to see things in folders, on the basis of what they're observing, and then leave the structure of the article up to the author. The only rule would be to keep the theories out of it -- just say what you saw, and how you saw it. Theories go in a different folder. That way, other people can use those same observations in their theories, without having to spend time contradicting somebody else's theories that were written into the observations.

BTW, in QDL you can import a Wikipedia article. Once it's already inside QDL, it's a little easier to copy-and-paste HTML to other places. See this for an example:

http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=17271
Lloyd wrote:3. When submitting Papers, would Astronomy authors likely be willing to check off which of the following categories their Papers should go under: Universe; Galaxy Filaments & Great Voids; Galaxy Clusters; Galaxies; Galactic Cores; Molecular Clouds; Galactic Halos; Star Clusters; Stars; Planets & Moons; Asteroids, Comets & Meteors; Dust & Matter; Radiation; Space & Time?
In QDL, "categories" are just folders, since the whole thing is categorical. So to get something into a category, you just copy-and-paste a link for the item into the appropriate folder.
Lloyd wrote:4. Should there be templates for the Observations Encyclopedia Entries - and for the Papers?
Why don't we make it easier on people by not requiring any additional structure at first?
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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Sat Nov 07, 2015 11:32 am

Hey, you guys, I'm trying to try out an Etherpad online at https://titanpad.com/IVjl7gjmPb with one or more people at the same time to see how good it is for collaborative writing. It's better than Google Docs in that no one has to register or log in for it and it is said to reload much faster than Google Docs. I'm inviting anyone to come try it out with me. Is 5PM Central Time, 6PM Eastern a good time to try it? I think that might be good to have on CC's site, including the no registering or log in, if possible.

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Sat Nov 07, 2015 9:17 pm

CharlesChandler wrote:Votes and weights
So if I'm browsing a folder that is sorted by rank, the software has to:
1. Find all of the votes that were cast, and who cast them (already stored, in a different table).
2. Search the Weights table for me as the ranker, and any of the voters as the rankees.
3. If any are found, weight the votes accordingly. An average user gets 1 vote. A user ranked 1 notch above average gets 2 votes. 4 notches above average yields 5 votes. 4 notches below yields 1/5 vote.
4. Multiply the votes by the weighting factor, and add them up, for each item in the list to be sorted.
5. Sort the list.
I got this done on QDL. It will really only be worth something with a lot of users, some of whom with opinions you respect, and others not so much. ;) But it really looks like it will work well, to help bump up things that are actually interesting to you, and to ignore the circle-jerking and the mindless masses of people who always up-vote the consensus.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll spend the rest of the day sitting in a small boat, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes.

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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Sun Nov 08, 2015 6:21 am

Observations Folders
CC said: BTW, in QDL you can import a Wikipedia article. Once it's already inside QDL, it's a little easier to copy-and-paste HTML to other places. See this for an example: http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=17271
I like that the sections of the article are in separate openable/closeable compartments. How many steps did it take, about, to post that?
I'm anxious to try the Etherpad with someone at https://titanpad.com/IVjl7gjmPb. I think it'll be real helpful for collaborating.

Plan
Here's a potential Plan I came up with this morning. What do yous think of it?
1. Hold Etherpad Discussions/Conferences
- First organize online Etherpad Conferences
- Later maybe hold Conferences at physical locations too
2. Post CC model observations to QDL Observations Folder
3. Critique CC model onsite & on Etherpad
4. Post newgeology.us, MM model, EU mythology to QDL
5. Use Etherpad to sort observations to Observations Folder
6. QDL team vote on other models to post
7. Critique these models onsite & on Etherpad

It seems like this may be a fairly good way to proceed now. Anyone have other ideas?

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Sun Nov 08, 2015 5:24 pm

Lloyd wrote:Observations Folders
CC said: BTW, in QDL you can import a Wikipedia article. Once it's already inside QDL, it's a little easier to copy-and-paste HTML to other places. See this for an example: http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=17271
I like that the sections of the article are in separate openable/closeable compartments. How many steps did it take, about, to post that?
It's really easy. See Importing Wikipedia Pages.
Lloyd wrote:Plan
Here's a potential Plan I came up with this morning. What do yous think of it?
1. Hold Etherpad Discussions/Conferences
- First organize online Etherpad Conferences
- Later maybe hold Conferences at physical locations too
2. Post CC model observations to QDL Observations Folder
3. Critique CC model onsite & on Etherpad
4. Post newgeology.us, MM model, EU mythology to QDL
5. Use Etherpad to sort observations to Observations Folder
6. QDL team vote on other models to post
7. Critique these models onsite & on Etherpad

It seems like this may be a fairly good way to proceed now. Anyone have other ideas?
For reasons I don't fully understand, I'm having a hard time visualizing this process. I think that it's because the creative process doesn't like structure. ;) So here's a thought -- maybe we should consider swinging all of the way the other way, for a starting point. For the sake of the argument here, I'm going to call this the "I have an idea" method. So you announce that you have an idea on something that you want to discuss. You fire up an Etherpad session for it, and you start explaining your idea, identifying what it's about, and why you think that it's a good idea. There shouldn't be any rules for this stage in the process. Then, people can join in, asking questions, contributing supporting material, citing contrary arguments, etc. The advantage to using something like Etherpad is that material can be inserted precisely where it is relevant, instead of new material always going at the end, which fragments the logic, and forces people to read everything before understanding anything, which is usually too much for most people. So you never fully grasp the value of what is emerging. But if you can put new for/against material where it is relevant, people can follow the logic a lot easier. This is what we found with our Google Docs sessions -- we could quickly get focused on the key issues, because of the dynamic editability.

Once the idea has been fleshed out in initial the Etherpad session, work can begin on formalizing the arguments, including the addition of citations, images, tables, etc. Once formalized, the idea becomes an article, that can be added to the relevant category in some sort of Encyclopedia, such as QDL.

So the idea here is to start off with a tabula rasa for the idea exploration, and to do all of the formalizing after the fact.
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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Tue Nov 10, 2015 3:22 pm

Etherpad for Catastrophism Discussion Thursday

There's a discussion planned for Thursday 7 PM Pacific Time, 10 PM Eastern

It will be similar to collaborating on Google Docs. Several people can write on the same document at the same time for faster and clearer discussions.

It's to be at http://meetingwords.com/AO21VXSROJ

There's already some text posted there in preparation for live discussion. Anyone may add questions or comments etc at any time. The purpose is to help develop more productive and efficient ways to have science discussion and do science.

Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Fri Nov 13, 2015 8:24 pm

Previously listed Etherpad conference didn't stay connected well, so it was moved. Here are 2 more coming up this weekend.

Online Conference on Miles Mathis Papers Saturday & Sunday
(About 1 Hour Each)

Saturday at 10 AM Pacific Time, 1 PM Eastern, 6 PM Universal, I think.
Sunday at 11:30 AM Pacific, 2:30 PM Eastern, 7:30 PM Universal.
https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/fzYkRGkhnX

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Fri Nov 13, 2015 9:13 pm

Lloyd wrote:Previously listed Etherpad conference didn't stay connected well, so it was moved.
BTW, I just thought that I'd mention that posting the links on a publicly-accessible bulletin board might be part of the problem. Etherpads allow anonymous access. This means that all of the spiders that are indexing this site are finding the Etherpad discussions, and going there to index those too. Thus the Etherpad servers might be getting a lot of traffic, and perhaps they have limits. If we keep having this problem, you'll have to resort to sending out the links to the Etherpad documents via PM and/or email. You could post the announcement that there will be a discussion, but anybody wanting to participate would have to request the link in an offline correspondence.
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Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Sat Nov 14, 2015 8:37 am

Charles, could it be that the Etherpad we used yesterday has protection from spiders etc? It didn't seem to have any problems. It has the name, Mozilla, in it, so maybe it's part of Mozilla. Eh?

If there were a problem with spiders etc, would I be able to use something like [dot] in place of the period in ".com" and thus still be able to post the link publicly?

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Sat Nov 14, 2015 4:32 pm

Lloyd wrote:Charles, could it be that the Etherpad we used yesterday has protection from spiders etc? It didn't seem to have any problems. It has the name, Mozilla, in it, so maybe it's part of Mozilla. Eh?

If there were a problem with spiders etc, would I be able to use something like [dot] in place of the period in ".com" and thus still be able to post the link publicly?
You're right on both counts. Mozilla probably has a pretty complete spider list. Still, listing the URL as "domain dot com" would hide it from the spiders.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll spend the rest of the day sitting in a small boat, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes.

Volcanoes
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The Electromagnetic Nature of Tornadic Supercell Thunderstorms

Lloyd
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by Lloyd » Sat Nov 21, 2015 7:54 am

Take a short survey about your Catastrophism Interest (no login etc) at http://goo.gl/forms/kCrwkkAyrV.

Also, Etherpad discussion on Catastrophism tonight at 8 PM Eastern Time at https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/U0QsftuJQO. You can read or leave comments etc any time.

jimmcginn
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Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse

Unread post by jimmcginn » Mon May 16, 2016 9:01 pm

Zyxzevn wrote:
Lloyd wrote: .. we need to develop better scientific social media ..
How can we do that?
Even mainstream scientists from different disciplines have different views on similar subjects.
The reason they get along together is because they do not interfere with the subjects that other
disciplines are working with. It upholds the myth that "specialists" know it better.
So psychology and particle physics do not interfere.
And specialists on quantum physics do not interfere with people that are doing calculations on black holes.

This causes a dead-lock and stops all science from progressing.

Labels

My idea is to build a discussion forum that allows different theories and opinions on the same phenomena.
To make that possible I suggest not to use comments as a basis for communication, but labels.
(Scientists like to label everything already :lol: )
Not just like/dislike as we see in facebook and other social media.

There are different sets of labels for different subjects.

For a theory it would be:
- understand the theory
- do not understand
- interesting (whether you understand it or not)
- i see conflicts with (certain experiments/other theories/the theory itself)
- too far off (for me).
- I learned something (in positive sense).
- explain more.

For a news-item it would be:
- interesting
- i see conflicts with (...)
- what is relations with (...)
- funny.
- explain more.

After placing a label, you can add a comment. But often it will not be necessary.
There is still a like button to keep track of the interest for each post and comment.

To keep discussions logical, there can be logical fallacy labels.
To keep discussions real, there can be "I did this experiment" and "I witnessed this" labels.

The good thing would be that it easy to comment on something without adding any real comment.
The system should make criticism more constructive.

Perspective labels

There are also "perspective" labels:
"Personal theory"
"Mainstream science"
"Electric Universe"
"General Relativity"
<etc>

Each idea is based on certain theories, certain models of reality.
So these are different than key-words.

When you are member of the forum, you can subscribe or un-subscribe to certain theory-labels.
These can relate to things that you belief in and want to discuss about.

So you can discuss about gravity from the "mainstream science" perspective.
Or about "general relativity" from the "Electric Universe" perspective.
These discussions will be completely different.

With this system you will not directly see stuff that you are not interested in or do not believe in.
That means I can post about the relation between the paranormal and quantum physics, without
having to deal with people that do not believe at all in the paranormal.
But you can change the perspective if you like, but many posts you will see can be
in conflict with the theories that you find important.
The labels that you can place would default to "from another perspective (your theory)"

We have all our personal knowledge and ideas. We are all specialists in a small field.
Some/many will have the urge to push their ideas onto others, which will never work in my opinion.
James McGinn:
I think this is a really cool idea. There is one huge obstacle, however. And I think this obstacle is insurmountable: people (scientists) in specialized fields/disciplines tend to deeply buy-in to certain myths and extremely often these myths are irrational, even plainly irrational.

Unfortunately these myths--some of which are obvious nonsense--are believed on a deeply subconscious level. The more others (myself, often, for example) attempt to change the minds of these believers of science-based myths (much of which is openly accepted and even applauded by the academic community) the more they hide behind their expertise and circle the wagons.

Unfortunately without ridiculing those that do so there is no way to defeat these tactics.

Only if people deal with each other directly and honestly can there be any progress. And this is something that each individual must decide on their own terms.

Nevertheless I do think this is one of the coolest ideas I've seen on improving scientific discourse. I wish it could be achieved without the element of ridicule, as I suggested here. I honestly don't think it can be.

I guess you could say I'm a cynic. I like to think I have a good understanding of human peculiarities.

Many people, especially among academics, believe understanding follows knowledge. I believe belief precedes understanding.

James McGinn
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