For shame: Trolls defeat Scientific American, Popular Science

[cyberswede]

For shame: Trolls defeat Scientific American, Popular Science
Op-ed: Leading outlets for scientific knowledge miss the point when it comes to community.

by Ken Fisher - Oct 14 2013, 3:30pm CDT

Every publication makes mistakes. Great publications learn from those mistakes, and the best publications also learn from the mistakes of others. So imagine my surprise at seeing two legendary publications make compounding mistakes by taking serious missteps with their communities. I'm talking about Popular Science and Scientific American, two of the oldest and most revered publications for the popularization and support of the scientific enterprise. Both publications will easily survive these missteps, but they are leaders in the field, and those who follow their recent moves will be led astray.
SciAm nukes its own righteous blogger

Scientific American (SciAm) Online features, among other things, a science blog network. The network's bloggers are paid to write for SciAm, and until this weekend, most of them thought they understood the rules of the quasi-independent relationship they had with the publisher: share their love of science, make a little money, and be part of a real community. But this past weekend, SciAm pulled a post made by one of the network’s writers, Dr. Danielle Lee, and so far the publication has failed to explain its actions in any believable way.

For those of you not familiar with the blog network, it features routine science content as well as posts about being a scientist generally (including a celebration of things that scientists geek out over, etc.). Dr. Lee’s post was prompted by a rather reprehensible event that occurred when her work at SciAm attracted the attention of another publication. An editor from Biology-Online liked Dr. Lee's work so much that he asked if she would contribute to BO as well. After learning that BO was not paying, Dr. Lee politely declined. But the response from the editor was incredible: he asked Dr. Lee if she is a real scientist or a whore. (Yes, you read that right.) By not agreeing to work for free, this professional scientist was apparently a whore in this editor’s view. The editor, an individual named Ofek, has since been fired.

Dr. Lee realized that this was yet another example of the oppression and marginalization of women in the sciences, and she decided to write about it. Not too long after she hit “post,” SciAm deleted her entry from the network site without even informing her. You can see the original post here.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/for-shame-trolls-defeat-scientific-american-popular-science/

Good opinion piece - the article goes on to discuss Popular Science disabling its comment section, due to trolls and spam-bots.

[JimDandy]

1. Her blog entry is back on SciAm's site. n/t

[cyberswede]

2. Yes...I should have included this update

Update: Great News! SciAm has reposted Dr. Lee’s original post, claiming to now have “verified the exchange” (as if this was ever reasonably in doubt). This is a victory nonetheless, and it establishes that SciAm does believe that Dr. Lee’s experiences are important to their audience. We could not agree more.

[n2doc]

3. I see this happening more and more often in the future

Looking through almost any comments section, you will find the most vile, hate-filled racist crap being spewed. Doesn't really matter what the site is about-sports, cooking, weather, etc. The onslaught here at DU is obvious, even though the trolls have to be more clever as outright sewer-spew gets banned pretty fast. The effort required to keep them down is pretty high, it seems. I can't see a non-political site wanting to put that much effort into it.

[cyberswede]

4. I agree. It's a shame people can't be more mature.

Our local TV news website changed their comments to be connected to Facebook, which helped a little, but people are even super rude when they are identifiable by their real name, believe it or not. The site doesn't allow comments on crime stories at all.

[HuckleB]

5. It's also very difficult to have truly science based discussions online.

Too many people who've bought into one belief or another simply spam the boards, making it difficult to create and engage in discussion.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

6. I'm glad Dr. Lee decided not to work for free.

Besides the simple fact of not being taken advantage of, this has disturbing undertones of racism and sexism.

Good for her!! Yes, there are some very smart people in Oklahoma!!

[cyberswede]

7. You're right

...though I would venture to call them disturbing OVERtones of racism and sexism ("Are you urban scientist or an urban whore?" - unbelievable!)

[proverbialwisdom]

8. Censor those "trolls and spam-bots."

http://blog.tedx.com/post/37405280671/a-letter-to-the-tedx-community-on-tedx-and-bad-science

Link from: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_28343.cfm

[proverbialwisdom]

9. "A scientist hits out after her views are misrepresented in an article on GM crops" in the COMMENTS.

http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15105-nathanael-johnson-at-it-again

Nathanael Johnson at it again

A scientist hits out after her views are misrepresented in an article on GM crops.

[img][/img]

As Claire Robinson recently pointed out, Nathanael Johnson in his current series for Grist on GM food and crops fails to live up to his claim of providing a fresh and more balanced take on the GM debate. Far from being objective, Johnson is often highly selective in how he deals with the points raised by GM-critical scientists while treating the claims of GM supporters much more uncritically.

Now Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist with the Pesticide Action Network, has also taken Johnson to task for his lack of rigour and his tendency to take pro-GM statements at face value while glossing over the detailed evidence-based critiques provided to him by those in the science community who have a more critical perspective.

Ishii-Eiteman was prompted to speak out by Johnson's latest post on Bt crops in which he not only misquotes her but omits 99% of what she shared with him regarding the science, technology, application and real-world impacts of GM crops, which have increased pesticide sales and seed industry concentration, with negative consequences for farmers' livelihoods and rural communities' health and economic well-being. This has led Ishii-Eiteman to post the following comment on the Grist site, where Johnson's series is being published.

The comment of Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist with the Pesticide Action Network, as posted to GRIST, 10/10/13:

After spending nearly an hour in conversation with Nathanael Johnson about the biology, ecology and politics of corn pest management, as well as the overall failures of GE crops to deliver on their promises, I am disappointed to see this misrepresentation of my statements in this article.

First of all, I never stated that Bt crops have led to a “vast decrease” in insecticide use. I acknowledged that we have seen a decline in insecticide use since the advent of GE crops in the 1990s (and that, at least initially, resistance management - where practiced - was successful in slowing evolution of resistance to Bt), but that decrease has not been sustained and is trivial in comparison with the tremendous surge in herbicide use associated with GE crops over the same period. (I also pointed out that a potentially significant load of Bt insecticide has been introduced into the fields through the Bt plants themselves, a fact noted by molecular biologists and biotech experts, but missing from Johnson’s piece.)

Johnson states, “There’s broad agreement that, so far, GMOs have helped the environment by cutting use of chemical insecticides.” He then goes on to quote me, presumably as evidence of this “broad agreement”, while ignoring the much larger evidence of harmful GMO impacts which I provided him. I would emphatically state that GMOs—including the insecticide-based Bt crops—have had a largely negative impact on the environment, for many reasons which I do not have space to go into here, but not least because they are designed to drive and maintain industrial mono-cultural production. (When assessing impacts, one cannot separate the “idea” of a technology from how it is used in practice.)

As for “broad agreement” about impacts of GMOs, I provided Johnson with an eight-page Issue Brief I wrote, which synthesizes the findings on GMOS from the UN and World Bank-convened International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, 2008), a comprehensive report produced by over 400 scientists and development experts from more than 80 countries. This report concludes that “benefits” of GMOs have gone mostly to large corporates manufacturers of the technology, and not to the world’s poorest farmers, nor to the environment.

As for impacts in the U.S., it’s important to put GMOs in historical context, as I told Johnson: few insecticides were used—or needed—in corn back in the 1980s, as crop-rotating conventional corn farmers will explain. So part of the push for insecticide-containing corn came with the economic incentives to plant corn-on-corn year after year (and abandon well-established corn IPM practices), driven in no small part by the larger political and trade agenda of a government eager to push biofuel production and funnel the overproduction of American corn into export markets.

Regarding the efficacy of Bt crops globally, I sent Johnson the two separate Chinese studies he mentioned in his article and explained to him their findings: a) cultivation of Bt cotton in China reduced cotton bollworm levels but led to emergence of secondary pests as new, economically damaging pests and b) farmers who purchased Bt cotton often still applied insecticides as insurance to protect themselves from possible crop damage, precisely because they had paid so much for the Bt seed to begin with. I also pointed out the frequent failure of Bt cotton in India; the Bt variety requires irrigation and fertilizer, inputs that low-income farmers operating in rainfed areas simply do not have access to. When the Bt crops fail (whether because insects have evolved resistance to Bt or because farmers are relying on rains which don’t come), they fall deeper into debt.

I gave Johnson these and other examples to emphasize the point that the “in-the-box” (or “in the lab”) design often has little to do with the “on-the-ground” reality. It is the latter which is relevant. If he is truly interested in the facts rather than futuristic scenarios, as he says, he needs to examine more closely the reality of the GE industry’s success at driving up pesticide sales, and its failure to deliver on so many of its promises.

I also explained to Johnson the money-politics behind the erosion of Bt resistance management in the U.S., and how Monsanto successfully lobbied EPA to reduce the percentage of non-Bt crop refuges that had been initially required as a way to slow Bt resistance. Bill Freese of Center for Food Safety has explained all of this in his comment above. I provided Johnson with the statement by Dow AgroScience’s scientist, John Jachetta (quoted in the Wall Street Journal), that pesticide resistance driven by GE crops “will be a very significant opportunity" for chemical companies. Strange that neither of these points —or much else of what I told Johnson—made it into his piece.

More problematic is that Johnson appears satisfied with misquoting and then slivering comments out of the larger context in which they were delivered, in order to make his own case. On the other hand, he seems perfectly willing to take “pro-GE” statements at face value, without employing a critical lens or scrutinizing or fact-checking these statements for veracity.

What I find most disappointing among many things about Johnson’s coverage throughout his GE “series” is a tendency towards extreme over-simplification (or deliberate omission?) of the evidence—whether agronomic, ecological, economic or political—that a truly rigorous assessment of GE crops, the industry and their real-world impacts demands.

GRIST readers deserve better.

For Johnson's article:

http://grist.org/food/in-the-insecticide-wars-gmos-have-so-far-been-a-force-for-good/

For Claire's articles on his series:

Nathanael Johnson: Grist to whose mill?
http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15012

Nathanael Johnson: A beacon in the smog?
http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15019

[proverbialwisdom]

10. Imagine the comments this might deservedly inspire.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/09/06/scientific-american-comes-out-in-favor-of-gmos/