This comment thread is both relatively obscure (sorry Karen), and on a blog by a person with some prominence (translating into attention) in the field.

In practice, people who don’t have some sort of status – which often requires being connected to real-world centers of power, and/or doing the real-world conference circuit – might just as well be ranting on streetcorner for all the readership they’ll get by themselves. Again, that’s not arguable, that’s statistics.

It’s sort of an absurd statement to say something like look, look, it’d be even easier for them to be read if anyone ever did read them (i.e. even though they won’t be read).

Concretely, the fallacy you are doing is if a system consists of several factors, which lead overall to a bad result (no effective reply ability), pick one favorable factor, declare because that factor has changed favorably, it thus means the net result has changed – even if the net result is no different, and even if there’s arguably other factors which have changed negatively. But it’s the net result which matters.

As for the notion that one can’t effectively talk back to a blog post if the blog’s owner doesn’t allow critical comments, this very thread, and the various other replies to Gorman I ran across in various other blogs and forums before I even read his own blog post, refutes that claim. “Side by side” in the online world can just as easily mean two or more sites side by side on a screen as a post and a comment on the same web page. And it’s increasingly easy to find such critical replies, whether same-site or off-site, with the tools we now have on the Web. Certainly much easier than it would be on TV, or even in a bookstore or library for many topics.)

P.S. : John, no, one *CAN’T* effectively talk back to a blog post (over opposition), that’s utter nonsense. The blog-owner can zap any critical comments or disallow comments entirely.

Obfuscation is handy for confusing a code, and as a tool for covering up one’s own insecurity by over-dressing one’s speech.

Eschew, Mr. Gordon! And Gesunheit.

He didn’t even say alternative medicine; he said alternatives to “Western” medicine. I think that was a slip, and a telling one. We have a lot to learn from other countries, and yes, I do think modern U.S. medicine tends to be of the big-pharm model, even when good doctors want it to be otherwise.

What is true, though, is that what’s marketed as “alternative medicine” includes a lot of quackery, unsubstantiated claims, and in some cases outright dangerous recommendations. A lot of this propagates on the Internet. But it also propagates in a lot of “respectable” channels, including public TV pledge-week programs, and drugstore bookracks. At least on the Internet (as in good libraries, I might add) you can see both the questionable claims *and* skeptical responses to the claims. The web-2.0 world makes this even easier, allowing claims and their rebuttals to appear side by side. You can talk back much more easily to a blog post than you can to, say, a Gary Null special on “educational television”.

I should write about Google and log retention, but as long as I haven’t quit entirely yet, the following is too good to a traffic-magnet to let pass. It seems the Britannica Blog is having a link-baiting party, I mean……