http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/05/02/attack-on-climate-scientists/

I think that this is a test for the rest of us. In my opinion, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is making a very politically calculated move, one which he is likely to believe will be quite popular with his constituency. Science Blogs such as Deltoid are providing a very useful service in raising the alarm among those of us active in this region of the blogosphere.

But can we succeed in doing outreach? Can information provided by Science bloggers be relayed outward and transformed into support?

Name calling, in my opinion, only strengthens the Virginia Attorney General’s hand with the public.

Would it be better just have moderated forums for discussing science rather than just commenting on blogs? Forums can have their own team of moderators. That would free-up your time for other things. One of the things I like with forums is being able to go back and fix things like typos and grammar errors. You typically can’t do that in blog comments.

The unfortunate thing would having to check two websites instead of one; the blog and the forum postings, unless they could be integrated somehow.

This and the whole tone of the interview (and reading about the topic many times before) leaves me with the impression that for you “civility” and not getting into a too heated debate are more important than actually finding out the truth.

If democracy is about “bargaining positions and interests and generating a workable compromise” then democracy will almost never work, as it is not certain that the truth is “in the middle ” or even that the “middle” it is in is the “middle” where the “workable compromise” is found. Which is indeed the case as we can see almost every day in the news.

Ideally, I’d like to include Darlene Cavalier and Richard Sclove in this hypothetical discussion. Initially, my concern was that the Participatory Technology Assessment Network (as described in a previous post) would be over-run by special interest groups. This was satisfied by a description the process of participant selection criteria and facilitation. But then, my thoughts turned to my frustration with the times I have served on advisory groups where the facilitators seemed to be driving towards some predetermined point of “consensus”. Participants whose time to devote to the topic,whose background in the field, and whose access to the necessary data, may be more limited can be cut out of the real process or left to believe that the process itself was a farce.

How do we work to find the balance between facilitation, establishing norms of civility, combating misinformation, and too much control?

As you indicate above, attempting to optimize these communication processes will be quite a bit of work, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/05/the_republican_war_on_science.php