A War On Expertise?

I see that Popular Science is shutting down the comments function on their web site. Like a lot of news organizations, I think that their signal/noise was pretty low in the comments. (And that prompts me to express, again, my appreciation for the commenters on this blog - one of the first questions I get when I talk to anyone else who runs a web site is how on Earth the comments section around here stays so readable and sane!) They're citing some experiments that seem to show that fractious comments sections actually make the original posts above them seem less reliable, and that may be how it works. In reality, my impression is that if a site seems to have a lot of fist-waving in the comments section, that pretty soon most readers don't even bother with it, and the only ones that show up are there for the fights. I'll say this for the Popular Science folks - they're not doing this for monetary/traffic reasons, because wildly argumentative comments sections also drive traffic from the people who just can't stay away (and hit "Refresh" over and over in the process). Here's the key quote from their article: A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: General Scientific News Source Type: blogs