Crowdsourcing and Scientific Truth

ygslash writes "In an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, Jack Hitt states that comments posted to on-line articles, and elsewhere on line, have de facto become an important factor in what is accepted as scientific truth. From the article: 'Any article, journalistic or scientific, that sparks a debate typically winds up looking more like a good manuscript 700 years ago than a magazine piece only 10 years ago. The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.'"

Re:Science as a social construct

[Samantha Wright]

Definitely not. In that sense, it's very predictably naive. I mean, you can trust me on it or RTFA, your choice. :) If only NYTimes had a non-paywalled, publicly-accessible comments section so we could tell them...

Subconsciously already noticed this

[belthize]

In thinking about how I look at articles and commentary I realized I factor in comments almost as much as the article itself, particularly any inherently subjective article, for example one that discusses the social or economic impact of a scientific discovery.

The article itself is likely to have a good signal to noise but suffers from bias, the comments typically have very poor signal to noise but can often correct or at least expose the original biasing. Taken together I at least feel like I have a better sense of 'truth', particularly if the subject is likely to expose my own bias.

In other words, yeah the article makes sense initially but I'll reserve judgment till more people have posted about it on slashdot.