On the philosophy of this blog

I get a number of interesting comments on my blog, although the majority that come in, especially when I haven't posted for a while, are spam. (That said, one can get into an interesting discussion about what exactly constitutes spam. "Click here for hot girls" is one thing, but I regularly get comments that advertise what appears to be a genuine counselling service in Edmonton, Alberta. I delete those mostly because I don't think that anyone who is looking for counselling will be visiting my comments section, and also because if I was looking for that sort of help I probably wouldn't want to go to a practice that tries to get free advertising via blogs that have some peripheral relationship with clinical psychology.)

It's already an interesting question whether one should moderate comments at all. I still prefer to do so, because I find that there is something very incongruous about a blog, especially one with occasional pretensions to some kind of scientific accuracy, having cogent comments interspersed with ads for "working from home to make easy $$$". However, although it's not a lot of work in an absolute sense, dealing with several mails a week notifying me that someone has commented on my blog does get a bit dull after a while.

Once you have decided to moderate comments, the question becomes what exactly counts as unacceptable. For example, when I posted this I thought it was quite likely that I would receive a lot of comments from the "climate skeptic" community, and so it proved; I decided to accept anything that wasn't obviously spam, which allowed everyone to let off steam. After a few weeks I announced that I would close comments for the post on the following Sunday, and everything ended peacefully. As I nice bonus, I even received a couple of e-mail thanking me for my even-handedness.

A related question is how to address the conflicts of interest that I guess will inevitably arise over time. When I started writing about psychology (after a few years of writing about software and network operations; this post from 2007 is still my most-viewed ever, by a considerable margin) I was a complete outsider. Now I still think of myself as an outsider, but I have an affiliation and publications and an h-index and co-authors and friends as well. Should I spend time examining the work of my friends, or people whom I might have chatted to at a conference? For any given degree of professional or personal closeness to me, how hard should I look the other way in case I notice problems in one of someone's articles, or receive an anonymous tip about them from someone who has insider knowledge? Should I try to blow the whistle about issues of, say, sexual harassment and bullying, or grant fraud, or should I stick to what I've become reasonably good at, namely pointing at things and saying "These should be identical but they are different" (or "These should be different but they are identical")? I'm not sure, and I don't think that there's an easy answer.

Similarly, I'm not sure whether I should extend the scope of what I write about. Currently I tend to concentrate on fairly simple facts: This paragraph is 80% copied from that paragraph, or one-third of the 274 regression coefficients in this table end in 7. This is partly because I find that sort of stuff both interesting and easy, and partly because it's fairly safe legally; nobody can sue you for saying that these two pages are alike, because anyone can see that they are. But a lot of the serious problems in science are more subjective, including the whole question of fraud (a word that I try never to use on the blog), which arguably depends on the state of mind of the researcher who is committing what I try sometimes have to try quite hard to call "these errors".

(to be continued)