Shameless Self Promotion

It's easy to make a sort-of informed and relevant comment on relaxed, nerdy culture stuff; something that will, in some small way, add to the discussion. It's pretty much impossible to do that on real science unless you happen to work in the same subfield.

And since we generally don't want to display the true depths of ignorance everybody but the specialist has, it's better to just keep quiet. Unless you do something to invite uninformed speculation to your hard science posts, something that takes the sting out of being utterly wrong and having misunderstood the entire post, you're not going to get much in the way of comments.

We have the same problem over at BioCurious, the heavier posts on published articles or our own research usually get zero comments, and I'm often left wondering if people like those kinds of posts.

I know I like them on other people's weblogs, so I just assume we're all afraid of sounding too stupid (as Janne points out above) when we're out of our own area of expertise.

To be clear: I greatly prefer hard science posts - light, amusing fare can be found anywhere, but actual science is why I subscribe to the ScienceBlogs feed.

But no, I almost never comment on those posts. I'm not qualified to do so in an intelligent manner.

The lack of comments at the end of hard science posts (and I think all science bloggers would agree) feels like a lack of question at the end of a talk. Either the audience feels intimidated or you did a horrible job and no one is interested/understands. It's satisfying to get questions comments ... you've initiated a discussion that benefits both the speaker (or here blogger) and audience (here reader). You've piqued their interest. And maybe someones view of the natural world has expanded.

I guess the difference between questions at the end of a talk and comments at the end of a blog, is that the later are permanent records. This fact can intimidate and inhibit any serious discussion of the topic. How to remedy this? I guess you one could leave anonymous comments. But another solution is not to worry about sounding dumb. Leaving a dumb comment or not having read the post with extra attention will not make me think less of you. If I really did, this blog wouldn't have the feel of a long rough draft - full of errors typos and strange overblown comments. But what good is it if I don't put my money where my mouth is.

I will attempt to leave a comment after every "hard science post".

(I think that this will end up being a post ...)

Too often questions at the end of a conference talk are a) abundant proof the person really didn't get the point of the talk; b) a brief lead-in to expound on their own research for five minutes, transparaently disguised as a question; c) the obligatory chairpersons "someone has to ask a semi-intelligent seeming question even though we all know the answer already"; or d) all of the above.

It's no wonder nobody wants to immortalize it on Google.

What's needed, really, is some change of form or content, in a social manner, so that posting clueless misunderstandings is encouraged, not implicitly punished. How to do that I have no idea.

If you had to make a comparison, blog comments would be more like comments at a poster session than end of talk "official" questions. I'm not standing in front of an audience of my peers when I'm commenting on an article, because I don't know many people in my area who read blogs. If the leaders in the field of mesenchymal stem cell biology were active readers of the same blogs as I, I might do more lurking, but as it is I take it as given that readers don't know who I am in real life and that no one expects brilliant insights with a specialists inside knowledge. I mean, the accepted style of writing when leaving a comment is very chatty and casual, with typos and sentence fragments galore, so the standard to which readers should feel held is pretty minimal, right?

I thank you for your comment.