How long to leave off-topic comments visible?

Question

Imagine a situation where someone asks "How does standard model leptogenesis work?" and someone comments "What about the mass of the eta-prime?"

This comment would seem to be completely off topic, and I can imagine hiding it in a state of ignorance. But the point here is that there is an analogy between the instantons in the QCD vacuum, and the instanton events in the Weak SU(2) gauge group during leptogenesis, and chirality breaking events in QCD, where we have experimental data, can be used judiciously to give non-perturbative estimates for leptogenesis with weak SU(2) instantons.

This is just a silly example, but there are lots of cases where the relevance is not apparent to the moderators immediately. Given that this can happen, I think it is good to have a courtesy period before hiding off topic comments, in cases where it is a judgement call. I think 2-7 days is reasonable, with leeway depending on the degree of off-topicness. There is no rush, they aren't doing any harm sitting there.

Comments

I agree, all the more any my participation is perceived solely as a fight with renormalization. Dilaton and dimension10 are too quick to execute.

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I don't see the point of downvoting this question - it's a good idea to have an (unofficial) policy on deletion of posts once a consensus has been achieved; unofficial because it's difficult to list down all the exceptions (spam, plagiarism, etc.) and because sometimes the discussion may digress too quickly and pull the thread's topic away from it's original intent.

@VladimirKalitvianski Sorry if you think I'm being too quick to delete; I'll slow down in the future, usually I do propose the comment for deletion at the V2D queue, but in this case, there were already clearly at least 4 users who wanted the deletion of the comment (there were three upvotes on Ron's comment), and at least two of them had > 499 rep (Ron and myself), I assumed at least one of the other two had > 499 rep, and decided that proposing for V2D would only slow the process down. I won't make such unjustified assumptions in future, sorry.

Answer 1

Having a free discussion in the comments to this question: http://physicsoverflow.org/22400/understand-success-perturbation-theory-despite-haags-theorem , without hiding comments, over less than an hour, completely resolved the issue to the satisfaction of all involved. I think this is a good thing, as we didn't have to shut anyone up, just explained why the comment is off topic until everyone was on the same page.

The comments have been moved to chat (here: http://physicsoverflow.org/22462/discussion-between-vladimir-kalitvianski-regarding-theorem , I did it, so it is done incompetently--- the attributions are wrong. Help!), and Vladimir agrees his comments were off-topic to the question.

I think this is also a value in letting discussions go for a little while, if they need to be moved, they can be moved once there is consensus, including the fellow who started the discussion. It's friendlier, and the end result is the same, with no acrimony.

Comments

I never agreed that my comments were off-topic, I agreed to have my comments hidden. We all have different background and our explanations may look weird to each other. I will give my detailed review in the Chat room shortly.

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You agreed that the scattering of dressed particles is of no relation to Haag's theorem, which makes comments about rejiggered interaction terms off topic, doesn't it?

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No, I said a different thing: scattering of dressed particles bypasses the Haag's theorem. Please, see my discussion in the Chat room.