How do we revive PhysicsOverflow?

Question

My name is Roger Cattin (but for consistency if prefer to stay polarkernel on this site), I am 65 years old and I live in Germany. I am a former professor for Computer Perception and Medical Image Processing. I lectured and researched at a University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. I had to retire there two years ago due to my age. I am completely independent, I don’t care about any reputation and I will never again in my life have to search for a job. As I always declared in my profile, I am not a physicist.

Instead of cultivating my garden, as pensioners usually are expected to do, I decided to invest my knowledge and a large part of my time to create and support PhysicOverflow. I have been impressed by the level and the culture of discussion I have found on SE.TP. I have been convinced by Dilaton that it could be worth to setup a free site for physicists. I am not related to Dilaton and we are not the same person (this stupid idea made me laugh, seen that our styles to write are really completely different).

I have prepared a plant for you in the hope that it gets cultivated to a beautiful garden, where flowers and other plants may grow, even those that get cut on other sites. But what I see today is a desert. The site got an arena of politics, where gladiators and self-proclaimed prosecutors produce an abominable mud-wrestling, in order to get power over the site. It makes me sick to see how you try to undermine and pervert fundamental rights, as privacy and anonymity.

@RonMaimon You say I do not talk to you? Well, I have once searched in my mail archive. The last time I have been in the recipients list of your emails was in a response to my Christmas wishes. Then I have to go back to September 2014, where you complained about a database connect error. So, who does not talk to whom? You are right, I do not trust you. You appear to me as a very destructive person, an egoist, absolutely unable to work in a constructive way within a team. Your capitalized words in your emails (forwarded to me by the co-founders) do not impress me at all, although you call them arguments, I can’t respect such a tone. As I am not physicist, I also can’t understand how you got such a halo, as you seem to have. You do not trust me? Well, I don’t care.

I am Swiss and you may be sure that I know how democracy works. The first part, demos, means people. But who is "people" on the actual PhysicsOverflow? Today, PhysicsOverflow has fewer users than in private beta. There was a time at the beginning, where more than 200 users contributed to PO, at least by voting. Almost all of them have gone. This is a number that I consider as "people". Would I follow their votes, I could immediately close the site. But as Ron said in his emails several times, he doesn’t care. Politics seems to be much more important than physics. The Q&A category is dried up, there is almost nobody on the site that is able to give answers and nobody anymore writes reviews. We are near to have more moderators than users.

Now who is guilty? I would say, we all, me included. We have lost track of the initial goal of PO. It is now time to stop this mud-wrestling immediately. I propose that the corresponding threads get closed (not deleted) now and I would like to see constructive ideas on how to change the situation. The most important issue of PhysicsOverflow is the lack of users. Should once a moderator be elected by 20 votes I would be impressed. On demand of such a moderator, I would even be willing to publish my code. I am waiting for your constructive propositions.

Be sure that I may invest my time and knowledge in projects that are more fruitful.

Comments

I have moved all off-topic or tangential discussions to a new thread in chat, please continue the discussion there.

It's possible I was too liberal with the moving, please tell me if there were any comments that are actually relevant to the revival of PhysicsOverflow.

However, if your issue is that the comments are no longer as prominent as before, and tell him to capitalise this comment, make it red, bold, italic, underline, highlighted yellow, or whatever, then don't expect me to respond.

Answer 1

In my opinion, to get the site back on track, we need to work on the following:

• Post reviews of papers you've reviewed - Many here would have been a reviewer for a peer-reviewed journal. So create a submission for the papers that you've reviewed in the past, and post your review here! That's what open reviewing is all about, isn't it?
• Promotion - This can't be mentioned enough. There seems to be too little promotion of the site. Sites like this thrive on free, word-of-mouth advertising, so please, help out! Please, if you like PhysicsOverflow, you can (see Help Promote PhysicsOverflow for some resources)
  • Place a banner of the site on your blog or webpage
  • Post a pamphlet on your department's noticeboard at your university
  • Distribute some pamphlets at a conference
  • Post about the site on social networks
  • Tell people around you about the site!
• Self-answered questions - The biggest problem we have now is not a lack of questions, a lack of views, or even a lack of users, but a lack of answers. Answers are eventually the backbone of any Q&A site, because there's no incentive to ask or visit the site, if you will not be getting answers. Often, answering your own questions also encourages other people to answer it themselves. By asking questions you know the answer to, and then answering them, you can not only help add content to the site, but also fuel further discussion on the site.
• A clear comment deletion policy - The delete review queues are not as often used for comments as they should be. The issue is that if an off-topic comment is placed in the delete review queue, by the time there is consensus on deleting it, more comments would have appeared in reply to the original, and to delete the original, these comments need to be deleted first (because or else, they would look out of context), and the cycle continues. This leads to comment deletion being unilateral de facto, which needs to be stopped. I propose that for comments, one should be able to vote to delete a number of comments together. A clear policy could help avoid similiar conflicts in future.

In terms of revival, I would recommend focusing only on the Q&A and Reviews sections, although I am actually of the opinion that the Open problems section is an underused gem with great potential.

Comments

Regarding "open problems", I am willing to offer money bounties on both of them, and if we did allowed people to put money bounties, it would get attention. I have proposed this before.

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The judgement that

The biggest problem we have now is [...] a lack of answers.

seems very true to me.

More promotion might help a little, though maybe not. I announce most every question or answer that I send to PO also on g+, but I am unsure if this has any noticable effect regarding user activity here. 

From experience I expect that the only way to eventually succeed is to, somehow,  get a small core group of active users that set a precedent. If only there were two or three more of the kin of, say,  conformal_gk, Arnold Neumaier, regularly active here, having actual exchanges with each other (answering each other's questions) then people would see this and by seeing this that would become convinced to join in.

Answer 2

Its a strange thing, One year ago the this site was just starting, Now there is talk about how to revive It.

Personally, The questions on this site are too hard for me to answer. Stack exchange had a lot of questions which I could answer. Perhaps one day I can contribute good answers to some of the questions on this site.

What I like about this site is there are some experts on this site, which makes it completely worth it, on the rare occation that I asked a question I got excellent answers.

It doesn't matter how many question are asked, so long as good question are being asked(and bad questions are understood for why they are bad), it always counts as progress.

However It seems to me that, there are several other issues that need to be sorted, the kind that really will kill the site. I have absolutely no idea, what when on, why so many and nearly hostile comments exchanged. I hope you can sort it out between yourselfs, I will only say a place where research happens, requires a warm and forgiving environment.

Comments

If it helps the community to solve the comment edit/delete issue, I will give priority to the development of point 5 of our roadmap. However, this will take some time, it isn't that simple as it may appear.

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@RonMaimon @Dimension10 @Dilaton @JiaYiyang @physicsnewbie

There is scientific content and there is everything else. Everything else is not what this site is meant for(Including toasters).

If you have anything else to say to a someone, do it in your personal space.

There is a provision in the site for that, use it.

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@RonMaimon You have misunderstood my intentions. This is not for the sake of power. I will be going ahead and redrafting the user-rights and putting it up for vote. Clearly you don't want to help here.

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@Prathyush:

I will only say a place where research happens, requires a warm and forgiving environment.

Now it is time to pave the way for it here on PO, by supporting with your comments and votes an improvement of the current user rights and editing practice. 

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@ArnoldNeumaier I did not know that this discussion was happening in the meta. Thank you for pinging me. I will carefully review your suggestions, write a longer post perhaps over the weekend.

While I have not yet read your suggestions and the comments closely, I am of the view point(strictly at a personal level) that all conversations must be soft(as opposed to harsh), as it would be most helpful if it was done that way, even in the light of the most severe disagreement.

However, I do not like the idea of putting words into someone else's mouth. I see it is a responsibility of users to create a warm environment and not the Moderators. And only suggestions must be made in this direction.

I am very much in favour of encouraging a polite conversation as @JiaYiyang has suggested. Perhaps in the form of a FAQ question or guidelines.

My reason is simple, If you force someone, he will never understand why it is important to be polite, even if you do the same edits a 100 times. It may help the site to look good on paper, but the real problem is probably much deeper than that. 

I have to think about it again. When I write a longer answer, I will share the draft of the user rights that I originally suggested, and had discussed with @RonMaimon and @Dilaton. While I think the draft still works for my intended purposes. I had decided against it because of possibility of abuses.

I have been reading the all the answers since the discussion started, and It seems completely peaceful so far. I would still prefer to wait and see, if a change to the user rights policy is really needed.

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@RonMaimon I admit I have doubts. Not because I see the user rights as being well drafted. It is a horribly written document, with little foresight. You simply don't write user rights, with an implict assumption that it can be broken at any time. And please, "Screw you" is not an argument if someone asks for his rights.

I do understand the circumstances for its writing.

My doubts mostly originate from the possibility of policy change being misused. It could be used to edit things that one might find uncomfortable(I assure you my intentions are not to edit out such things).

After reading comments you posted and stories of various kind of abuses of moderation powers, I think it is important to explictly mention that all Scientific viewpoint will be preserved in a form of the author's choice.

PS: You make a lot of assumptions.(often wrong ones)

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Yeah, you're probably right about that. I'm totally cool now that you've explained yourself better, and maybe the user rights are written crappy, sorry. Excuse my paranoia, but this is like playing whack-a-mole with abuse, you stop one kind, and then another comes up again, and it's incredibly frustrating. If you have a better written document, and it still is able to guarantee the rights intended, no problem.

When I said "screw you", I didn't mean one should violate rights, simply that there is no possible way any spammer would ever come up to you and say:

"My name is BigDaddyMachineGun7863. On the 18th of April, 2014, I made the comment: 'asdgfasghasfdhadfgasdg$**!@#asdasdgfasgasgsag, Nigerian prince! Yo, Send money! adfasdfsdfasdfasasdfasdfasdf Cheap knockoff Ming Vases! Cheap! Cheap!' as a reasoned response to 'What is the standard deviation in the estimates of the Higgs boson mass from LHC data', and I was preplexed when, contrary to my explicitly enumerated user rights, this comment seems to have been rolled back and removed from view with nary as much as a request for input to explain, from my point of view, why this information is crucially relevant to the discussion at hand. Please contact my attorney, as I have decided to file a lawsuit..."

The proper response to a spammer saying this kind of retarded shit, is, well, "screw you!". It's not a reasonable circumstance to consider, dream about, or make policy to deal with, it is simply a joke. I don't see any way anyone can confuse spam and reasonable comments, the two simply have zero overlap.

Now, there are several such cases, where reasonable comments were interpreted as spam, which happened on stackexchange--- whenever Dilaton or Dimension10 post a link to this site, they get summarily blocked for "spamming". A similar deletion happened when Jed Rothwell posted a link to his website lenr-canr.org on a cold fusion question. These deletions are obvious censorship, and when doing spam moderation, it is extremely easy to tell spam apart from sincere messages. You can see what kind of convoluted ways moderators can dream up to censor people they don't like, and when you conflate spammers with sincere users, you are always doing censorship in the area of overlap, and it's never an innocent mistake. So I don't take seriously the claim that the user rights protect spammers, because you can just ignore the user rights when you are dealing with spammers, and nobody will ever notice or complain, not even the spammers. You haven't dealt with spammers--- they are just fishing for dead sites. Anyone who would bring up the user rights is for sure not a spammer.

Answer 3

From an outsider's perspective,

I agree entirely with @ArnoldNeumaier , @polarkernel , and like minded statements. I am a graduate student, engaged peripherally in several topics discussed. I appreciate the intent and content of the site but choose not to participate when I come. I suspect many others do the same. The site appears elitist and unwelcoming, even to qualified prospects.

You have chosen absolute tolerance of bad behavior at the expense of reality. In the real world (academics included) we share equal freedom of speech but there are practical limits and consequences. While you have the right to be rude to friends, eventually you will have no friends to be rude to (the natural consequence). While this analogy is slightly misplaced in an academic setting, professionalism is paramount. A professor is not entitled to curse during lecture, at students or faculty, despite their accomplishments and feelings; they willingly accept a level of censorship to further their institution. Rudeness is never a virtue, always a vice- without (imposed) consequences to the individual, the real world (natural) response results in fewer members and ultimately hurts the community as whole- Physics Overflow has overlooked this and is paying the price.

Why even have guidelines regarding conduct when they are not and cannot be enforced?

After reading the monumental question posed, I spent a great deal of time looking through past Meta discussions with respect to the comments, answers, and tone presented in the Q/A and reviews. As noted, it is difficult (and dangerous) to isolate tone from science. However, answers and comments should reflect the objectivity and respect seen in published scientific journals. Disagreement and legitimate discussion is possible (and more productive) without hostility! Answers should not be downvoted for their tone, but users must be held accountable (by the community) for their tone or the entire community suffers.

@RonMaimon  You are toxic. Chaos and vitriol follow you at every turn. You hide behind physics and freedom from censorship, intentionally being contentious and hostile. You insist on having the last word and continue until others are silenced, the epitome of a troll. I was hard pressed to come across (consistent) overtly rude behavior by other users- in other words, currently, the lack of censorship protects *only* your hostility and hurts the community at large.

Without a doubt, vigorous discussion is unavoidable and should be encouraged. Difficult problems require more heated debate. Presumably, there is mutual respect and professionalism, where censorship is not needed. By observation, this is not the case.

While I agree that censorship should be minimal, if Physics Overflow cannot reconcile civility with scientific inquiry, it is doomed to fade into oblivion. Without mechanisms to protect the communities interests alongside our own, we all lose this valuable resource.

@Dilaton , @dimension10 , @physicsnewbie @VladK. , @JiaYiyang , @annav 

Comments

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and perspective.

Yes, there admittedly have been some rough times in the past (you see, that this discussion is almost a year old by now).

But I think we have learned a fair bit from it, for example we have new editing guidelines

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/28190/proposed-editing-guidelines?show=28190#q28190

that allow everybody who has editing privilege to help maintaining the professionality and standard of contributions an academic community expects, needs and is used to, by editing any too rough edges.

Of course, what also helps discouraging not so good things and behavior is a strong community, who firmly and consistently calls bad things out as such whenever they are happening, and actively takes part in community moderation.

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@Dilaton Thanks for your response.  I post because I want PO to succeed, not to criticize, and I respect that this community operates differently by choice.  I did read that post and I think it is a great compromise.

Ill add that in my opinion, its a temporary fix because other users must actively work to hide the root problem, often after damage is done.  In the real world there are consequences.  How is rudeness discouraged (other than asking)?  What are the consequences if they continue to violate the communities consensus?  Without consequences, why conform?

* Obviously criticism, critique, and disagreement are vastly different than hostility!

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@Outsider I appreciate your comments as a much needed feedback rather than seeing it as a criticism.

Since this thread has been active, the climate on PhysicsOverflow has significantly improved. Of course, there certainly is still room for making the site more attractive and useful to the targetted audience of PO, this is why when announcing our newest features to our registered members by email, our system developper explicitely invited feedback and comments about the site too.

Further Improvements need to be backed up and supported by a large enough community, which means that there have to be enough people who are willing to share their point of view, issue their concerns, and generally give feedback as you have just done.

I think what is most urgently needed at present for the community to grow, is having interesting physics discussions going on the front page ...

So thanks again, and we would be very happy to see you making use of PO.

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@Dilaton: dimension10 has hidden my comments here because he does not want me to share my point of view.

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@VladimirKalitvianski No, I deleted them because they were off-topic. The question was in the context of string theory. You can't expect anyone to tolerate the same "string theory is wrong"/"renormalisation is wrong"/... comments on every post related to the same.

Heck, perhaps we should allow the philosophers to post "positivism is bad" under every physics thread, since it's related to the topic of the site. PO would be drowned within hours.

Comments, like all other posts, are expected to be relevant to the discussion, rather than just the general category of the same. You can start a chat discussion for it if you like, but that's about it.

Also, if you want to continue this discussion, please start a new meta post or message me. Irrelevant comments will be deleted.

Answer 4

I will try, if I may, to give my personal point of view on PhysicsOverflow, and the reasons why I have used it very little.

When PhysicsOverflow has been launched, I hoped that it would be something equivalent to MathOverflow, a lively community of high-level physicists covering all aspects of physics. But after a few visits, I understood that this was absolutely not the goal of PhysicsOverflow and I have been disappointed. I deeply regret that PhysicsOverflow is actually almost restricted to high-energy theoretical physics. As if MathOverflow was limited to the Langlands program. There a many people working in physics, studying theory, that are not high-energy physicists. For instance people working in transport theory, non-equilibrium (far-from-equilibrium) thermodynamics, correlated systems, condensed matter. Theory also exists in complex systems, where quantum mechanics does not play any role. On PhysicsOverflow, one should see all these topics. These topics do no appear here probably because there are also nearly absent on Physics.SE. They are part of university courses, so the concerned communities would not interested in Physics.SE. PhysicsOverflow could have been an opportunity to enlarge the community of teachers, students and researchers sharing their knowlegde, but it has remain extremely narrow-banded, below the critical mass.

Comments

Hi Tom-Tom,

thanks for your thoughts and feedback !

Yes, the Q&A part of PhysicsOverflow is indeed meant to be a physics analog of MathOverflow. All topics of physics (including astronomy, experimental, and applied physics) as well as math that is used by and of importance to physicists are welcome, as long as it is graduate-level at least.

We would be more than happy to see people posting about at present not so well represented on-topics, such as the ones you mentioned for example. It might be that we have a bit of a "chicken-or-egg problem": because these topics are not often present on the front page people dont (dare to?) post such questions, and because people dont post such questions, they are not sufficiently represented on the front page ect ...

One way to seed new topics a bit could be to import corresponding high-level questions from Physics SE.

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PO is an invitation to contribute. If you want to see your field represented, the best thing you can do is to ask or answer questions (or import questions from Physics SE that you can answer or want to see answered) from your fields of interest.

The current bias (apart from being inherited from the former TheoreticalPhysics SE) stems solely from the fact that a handful of founding members cannot contribute to more than a few research subjects within the vast realms of physics.

Answer 5

Thank you, polarkernel, for all the work you invested into this site; I am sure that it will pay off in the long run. 

I don't think that PO is dead; it just needs time since the level of the questions, and hence the effort needed to write good answers, means that answering is slower and fewer people spend their time on it. Indeed, contributing significantly to PO is very time-consuming, and I just had a break of 3 months because other work didn't allow me to free enough time to contribute.

On the other hand, I also think that PO needs better rules for handling rudeness. Professional scientists are used to an academic atmosphere that is polite, friendly and inviting, and few are willing to actively support an institution where these attributes are missing. But we need them to give answers to the many questions with currently 0 answers and to give the review section more weight.

I therefore strongly support Prathyush's view that the nonscientific part of all contributions should be edited whenever it can be improved in tone without affecting the scientific content. This has nothing to do with scientific censorship which is the suppression of the right to openly discuss scientific opinions.

Therefore I do not agree with Ron Maimon on the extent the user should be protected. I don't want contributors to be banned for rudeness, but I want them to be corrected, so that all content visible to the casual user has a polite, friendly and inviting appearance, and any rudeness that may have been imported by users should be hidden in the revision history for the few who want to search in it, and to be able to clear up user complaits about poor editing (which are hopefully rare). Moreover, editors or moderators responsible for an occasional inappropriate edit should be protected to the same extent as users who write contributions in an inappropriate tone. 

Since Ron Maimon was very influential in establishing the no-rudeness rules of the site I'll take his posts as example. I very much dislike his tone in several of his contributions; for example this review, which is far below scientific standards as regards the tone of the review. In my opinion, this sort of rudeness chases away many potential contributors, and if the rudeness is not far outweighed by scientific content, it is detrimental to a scientific discussion and to the reputation of the site in the outside world. (I left StackExchange after his ban there not because I supported his rudeness but because I found the SE action inappropriate compared to what he had contributed there.) 

It is necessary for a healthy site to suppress rudeness. The contributor's individual words are not sacred and should not be treated as sacred, only the scientific content they contribute is. I do not at all support the expression of any sort of rudeness - I am just willing to temporarily tolerate it if it is compensated for by the high scientific quality of the contributions. But the contribution should then be edited such that all traces of rudeness are purged out, hidden in the revision history. I would have done such editing in a number of cases myself if the rules had allowed it, in the same way as I routinely correct for mistakes in spelling or grammar. The quality of the site increases not only with the scientific content (which is of course central) but also with the quality of the form in which this content is presented, and for newcomers the latter plays an even larger role than for regular members. 

The voting mechanism is not a suitable regulator for the quality of form. I never downvote because of the form, since downvoting should be for scientific content. (I also don't upvote a post just because its form is perfect, if the content is not also good.) Moreover voting on comments (where a lot of the rudeness happens) has no effect on user reputation, hence exerts no real influence at all.

Thus users who are allowed to edit should actively improve the outer form; any scientific content including the most severe criticism can be cast into a polite form at the level acceptable in any professional scientific paper or referee's report. The rules of PO should explicitly say that this is expected and will be achieved primarily through contributions by users who care, and if care is lacking, through editing by competent and trusted members. (Moderation means creating a moderate atmosphere, and this includes creating politeness.)

There is nothing ethically dubious about such a procedure. The contributors know what to expect; if they think they are corrected without sufficient reason, they can complain, and everyone can check the editor's actions, and other competent and trusted members can reedit poor edits if necessary. 

On the other hand, the rules should say explicitly that all scientific content - i.e., facts or beliefs about scientific matters, including criticism, reformulated in a polite way if necessary (even unjustified beliefs or criticism) - will be preserved in the main text, while all matters of forms may be subject to correction, in which case the original form will still be available in the original form in the revision history. Thus all users will be able to thrive in a polite and healthy atmosphere, and contributors must not fear to be banned because of secondary reasons such as lack of politeness. 

I hope such changes to the PO policy are feasible and will be made quickly, as this is necessary to attract all those who like to contribute only in an atmosphere comparable to that existing in the traditional academic institutions. 

Comments

Thanks for this answer Arnold, I am happy to see you back and agree with everything you say.

What should be changed a bit to realize your suggestions about how to improve the atmosphere on PO by editing (without changing the scientific content), are the user rights

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/user-rights

They are hard to find on the site, you have to scroll down to the very buttom of the page and then follow the link "your rights".

Could you make a suggestion about how to change the text of the user rights accordingly in a new meta post, if you have time for it somewhen?

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I am still somewhat short of time but will do so soon (not tonight though, I am just preparing to leave). 

Why not make the user-rights easier to find by placing them more conspicuously?

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Thanks @ArnoldNeumaier, and also for the nice new contributions in the Q&A section.

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@ArnoldNeumaier @Dilaton @RonMaimon @JiaYiyang @dimension10 @physicsnewbie

If you have suggestions for a possible draft to the user rights. It would be good to discuss it here in the comments section before putting it up on the meta for voting.

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@ArnoldNeumaier While I agree that in Harshness is often a detrimental thing for the site.(It unfortunate people can't take criticism for what its mean for)

I see the change to site not as a rudeness policy. I don't want people later to come and challenge what seem like necessary edits, because of the wording in the user rights policy allowing for everything. It is mostly to prevent severe abuses, and to handle events where tonality switches from scientific criticism to meaningless attacks on to a person.

In the post you linked @RonMaimon was harsh(not to me, but Prof. Dynin saw it as disrespect), the very same content could have been expressed in a very different tone. But If Ron wanted to say it in that manner, then he should be allowed to, because he was only expressing his viewpoint on the topic.

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@ArnoldNeumaier @Dilaton @RonMaimon @JiaYiyang @dimension10 @physicsnewbie

For this moment I will not be asking for a change in any policy. While it is clear that in any forum such as this site, role of a moderator is to keep non scientific content out of the site. And the community's responsibility to make sure only non scientific content is removed from the site.

It is possible that even the most well intended changes could be misused at some point.

I was assured that the current mechanism, will keep junk away from the site.

In the event that the current mechanism would fail, I will reconsider changing of the policy.

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Sorry Arnold, but you know I fundamentally disagree. Your contributions are valuable, but rudeness rules are an invitation for abuse. The politeness in academic institutions is a thin veneer over hostility to competitors, and to outsiders, and it is not an acceptable way to go about seeking truth. The internet is better, because it is more rude. My review that you linked is correct in its criticism--- the paper is fundamentally nonsensical, and your interpretation of the construction was too charitable, reading it in light of other constructions in low-dimension topological theories which happen to make sense. I am not confused on what the outline of the proof given was, and I know that it is not even close to remotely correct, and I don't care who the paper comes from, the criticism is independent of the authority of the source. I don't think PhysicsOverflow has had any significantly ruder discussion than other such sites, it simply doesn't get rid of them by policy, as such policy leads to abuse, and to prevent honest reviews from getting expressed, such as the linked review.

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@RonMaimon: Yes, I know that we fundamentally disagree on this issue. An answer, comment, or review doesn't get any better by phrasing it in a rude language, but it improves considerably by phrasing it politely without changing the factual essence. This is always possible, and it can still be devastatingly critical if the facts are devastating.

Politeness is part of the qualities a good answer or comment should have. Rudeness is never a virtue, always a vice. Those of your posts where you use harsh language would have higher quality if you edited the tone, even if you feel that that harsh language expresses truthfully what you think, it creates an unnecessary barrier for the readers. I know of no case in real life or on the internet where someone criticized heeded the criticism more because it was presented in a rude form, but of many examples of the opposite, both in real life and on the internet.

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I agree with Arnold. Rude comments are not only offensive for a normal user, but also imprecise. It is not sufficient to say "It is crackpottery"; it is necessary to give a detailed explanation for such an opinion. And this explanation can safely be left in the comment without rude words. Precision - what is really valuable. Not flattery, not offensive remarks, but precision of judgment.

However, and I wrote it previously, it should be an internal imperative for each user, not a "rule" of PO. Any rule can be used to turn a scientific discussion into a quarrel between users and administrators, and here I agree with Ron Maimon.

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I will change the text of the review. I simply was speaking off the cuff, and I did not consider the tone of voice at all. I stand by all the technical content of the post however, and I think it is not fair that Dynin has people bending over backwards asking me to be polite to him, while Marco Frasca (or Vladimir Kalitvianski) does not. It's simply because of the authority he has accrued in academic discussions. But I change it because I respect your opinion Arnold, and I will consider this discussion as a request. One of the goals I personally had was trying to convince moderators to ask instead of impose. Don't you want to catch the bugs with honey, not vinegar?

I actually wrote the review without having read any previous publication by Dynin other than this one, and he did not have a mantle of authority for me. Perhaps I would not have been so rude had I read something else by him, but I treated it as a manuscript without a name, sent unsolicited to my door (by being referenced and posted here). This led to the disconnect between the tone and the expected tone, I suppose. But Dynin's feelings also need to be considered, although it is extremely strange for me to think that any tenured academic with a long publication record of correct results could possibly have their feelings hurt by anything I might have to say, as I imagine that their skin was already thick. Regardless, out of consideration for your opinion, I modified the review, and I hope the tone is acceptable now.

I expect that any future problems with rudeness can be resolved this way, by a civil request and by shaming the user into being more polite, rather than through imposition of power. I am surprised you did not make a comment on my wall or on the answer itself requesting a more polite tone, as I believe I would have made similar changes earlier. At the time, I was more worried about what his quartic term in the Hamiltonian does, rather than what the tone was.

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@RonMaimon

Shaming the user?

Please don't do that.

Just ask him, Directly.

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@Prathyush, I take Ron's words to mean "If you just ask civilly, the author of the rude text will naturally feel ashamed and retract the rudeness."

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@ArnoldNeumaier: The point of rudeness is not to get the person you are speaking to to listen--- it never works for this, it has the exact opposite effect, it usually makes them ignore you. It's not for them. Online, you aren't having a personal discussion, there are always 100 times more spectators than participants. The rudeness is to diminish the impact of social authority on the spectators, so that there is no respect given to ideas based on who is saying them, but a spectator only can judge ideas based on their technical merit. The rude language establishes that there is a fundamental difference of opinion that is not going to go away, and that both sides are going to stand their ground forever, and you can't avoid determining who is right on the facts. Then the readers evaluate the technical content independently (or not) and vote based upon the result, and experience shows that the result converges to accurate content when everyone is free to be rude (they don't have to be rude, they just have to be free to be rude. If people are not free to be rude, people with fraudulent content can eke out a niche. To challenge things that are wrong, a person with authority usually only needs to give hints of a threat of rudeness, like saying "oh, that doesn't pan out at all", or "it's nonsense". Real rudeness is only essential when it is the authorities who believe total nonsense)

Without this, it is easy to get a false consensus regarding science. Aristotle was always easy to refute (drop a heavy and light ball side by side), so why was it impossible for someone to refute him for 2000 years? Because he was authoritative! You would drop the balls side by side, and people would say "Aristotle didn't mean this!", and "all these academic people are not so stupid as you are saying!" Until Galileo came along, nobody was willing to mock him because his academic followers were all the people socially allowed to talk about physics. But yes, all the authorities were stupid.

Aristotle died precisely when the mocking started, because Aristotle was wrong. Einstein's ideas were mocked much harder, also mocked were Gell-Mann, Scherk, Mandelstam, everyone's ideas are mocked, but their material can easily survive an authority challenge, because it is actually correct. Correct material mocks back.

Any authority in science must always be a fossil of a previous era's fact checking, not an a-priori thing given to a group of people socially. If it really is a fossil of previous checking, it can't hurt to check again, and that's what a rude challenge forces you to quickly do. The only way to assure that the fact checking actually happened is to make sure that it is always permissible to be as rude as you like, and be refuted rudely too. The events where this is necessary is only when the material is both authoritatively accepted and wrong, and this is a rare event.

But here an example is good--- the current consensus in Geology outside of the former Soviet Union is that oil is made from living things. This was known to be false in the USSR, and yet, it is impossible to correct the western consensus for 50 years already. Authoritative geologists keep saying "The deep abyssal abiogenic theory of oil is crackpot", and people keep listening, and textbooks still say nonsense. In this situation, you absolutely need to be rude, so that the entire field loses authority, all the geologists, so that the consensus can shift. It just doesn't happen without rudeness, at the very least the freedom to threaten to be rude.

That doesn't mean you need to be rude all the time--- Dynin's material does not have a lot of authority, and does not require rudeness to refute. But ultimately, rudeness is not important at all, it's just a marker of social class--- it tells you who has power and who doesn't. The powerful person is the person who is allowed to be rude to the powerless person, and the offense only comes when the rudeness goes in the opposite direction. Rudeness removes social power, and it is very effective at doing so, so that mocking a dictator means a dictator will be deposed. When everyone is free to be rude, nobody has any social authority over another, and the ideas themselves must persuade on their merit.

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@JiaYiyang I hope that's all he means. I had imagined something much much worse. Never mind...

@RonMaimon

"The rudeness is to diminish the impact of social authority on the spectators, so that there is no respect given to ideas based on who is saying them, but a spectator only can judge ideas based on their technical merit."

Speaking personally, I give very little weight to who is saying it. If someone has previously well established record of making accurate statements, It would make me fact check everything at least once more, but that's about it.

So if you make the argument that you were being rude, for people like me and others, to break the "Influence of  authority". I would say that was absolutely unnecessary.

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@Ron Maimon I'm shocked at your change in attitude. I thought the whole point of this site was to allow rudeness and directness; to tell someone they're an incompetent idiot when they're one. I see NOTHING different in your treatment of Vladimir and tenrured academics when you review what they write. As you say, when someone knows what they're talking about, they're usually immune from rudeness because they're protected by the truth and certainty. They know their peers see what they see.

But still, at least you won't get your arse whipped over it here as much as you did at PSE.

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@physicsnewbie: There is no change in attitude--- I was never really all that rude on PSE either, or anywhere else, at least no more than the amount I was rude in the review before editing (it is still rude after editing). The only time I insulted was when someone started arguing from authority and then you need to insult the authority. Everyone needs to be treated equally, that's all, so that authority doesn't cloud things.

@Prathyush: anyone who thinks they are immune to authority is not immune. I know that I am certainly not immune, and this helps make me more immune, because I counteract against the tendency by double checking the authorities twice, and bending over backwards to take seriously people who are on the margins. If you don't do this, then you will make terrible authority mistakes again and again, for example, you will believe the recent dismissal of the BICEP results on PLANCK's authority (correct or not, jury is still out, but only authority is behind the rejection of BICEP).

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@RonMaimon: Thanks for improving the tone of the review. Many other opportunities for improving your tone (since you asked me on my wall) are in your discussions on meta (e.g., here) and on the walls of people like Prathyush. Whenever your political course is in danger you seem to get mad and lose all sense of respect.

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@RonMaimon: I don't think that rudeness has any more constructive value that a pistol. You can use both to demonstrate power but people will just comply while you have the power to force them, then go out of your reach and will never again come close; and this happened already on PO.

Raw force such as displayed by rudeness is a sign of weakness in arguments. If you have convincing arguments you convey the same through them, and much more efficiently.

Rudeness is also no weapon against dictators; they can always be more rude than you, and with more power; proof is how they treated you on SE. What kills dictatorship (but only in the very long run) is not rudeness but a certain sense of humor that develops under dictatorial pressure.

In short, rudeness has no place in a place such as PO that strives to be professional. 

Answer 6

Physics overflow isn't dying at all, just the opposite. In my personal opinion, PhysicsOverflow has just been born as a healthy, mature site. Perhaps it's now ready to go out of beta.

It's an open and honest forum, with honest discussion about all problems, with honest moderators that tell the truth always (to the best of their knowledge, and with good intention), and one incredible developer working on it.

The squabbling is simply not a sign of death. This isn't an advertising agency. It's both the way physicists normally talk to one another (or at least, how they used to talk, and should talk), and it's also the sign of a healthy intenet community with no censorship, where people can discuss science without the threat of being silenced from above.

This might not be obvious to a non-physicist who is not accustomed to online discussions. At the moment, after Jia reassured me, I myself have full faith in all the other moderators, and I am pretty sure they will have full faith in me too in return. I also realized that you are a separate person, and I am very thankful for the description you gave of yourself, and I think that you are a saint. I said "you don't talk to me" because the emails you send to Dimension10 are not auto-forwarded, that's all, not to imply that you are hostile, rather that I am shut out and among the moderators, only Dimension10 trusts me.

I have not contributed science to the site since the political problems began, which is when Vladimir started getting harrassed. I think others were put off by this too, but I can't speak for them. I am fully convinced that the community functions well, because I have said stupid things and less stupid things, and nothing has been hidden, closed, or shut down. All that happened is that we figured out what happened honestly, then reasonable people made  reasonable up and down votes and came to reasonable conclusions. There is no need to hide anything, this type of discussion is a sign of complete honesty, and is attractive to any decent physicist.

The reason I got such a "halo" around me (inasmuch as it is true, which is not so much) is because I did similarly rude things in other forums, and then was banned for it eventually, but to physicists familiar with the role of forthright honesty and rudeness, my behavior was not seen as a problem rather the banning was. I am have no political power on the site, and I am not trying to get any. I simply removed power from others. Physics works only if there is no authority. In case you think that is a contradiction, lessening someone else's power does not make yours go up, because power is not a conserved quantity. You can make everyone's power go down, including yourself, and that's what happened here.

The people who left, in my opinion, left because they were worried about the moderation--- there was simply no guarantee that abuses would not happen. I think we have demonstrated that this is impossible, that open discussion means that abuse will get exposed and fixed quickly.

Comments

I agree with Ron about everything. In fact, Ron did his best to save the site. It is too early to judge. Of course, regular intervention of Dilaton in my conversations with other users distracted us and hindered the very discussions. I have suspended my participation several times - to than extent I was disappointed with Dilaton and dimension10. Now, I hope, the atmosphere became healthier and more attractive to participants. Now we may advertise the site without shame. @polarkernel: We all are grateful to you, really. Do not give up. Soon, everything will be much better. (By the way, the anonymity of Dilaton is a myth. Even I found his name on internet. Besides, anonymity of an elected ruler does not look democratic.)

Answer 7

Dear @polarkerner,

We are very grateful to you.

In  my opinion there are two problems: First, the rate of contributions is very low. This is in my opinion the reason why many people left the forum: it's a chain reaction. When we users start to contribute, more people will come. This can happen at any time, for example, tomorrow. I really think it will happen soon. Second, the recent censorship problem. One of the moderators (Dilaton) has admitted his mistakes. I personally have forgiven him and I am still grateful to him (and to dimension10 and to you as well) for setting up this forum. However, in order to close this sad issue, I personally believe that Dilation must stop moderating. His "mistake" (I've used quotes because it was made on purpose) was very serious. Impunity is always the seed of new "crimes". I really think that he should stop moderating. And also all moderators have to receive all emails and be kept updated.

Comments

Can the downvoter explain their reasons?

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+1, and I am still a pariah among the mods. You have to understand the moderator mentality--- they have a feeling that once you're "in the club" you can't betray the others in the club by agreeing to remove people, or add too many new ones. Would you like to be mod by the way? You seem nice. I'll nominate you.

It's not supposed to be the moderator's choice who mods, the users choose who to approve as moderator. I am sure Dilaton will be trusted again very soon, as I have verified that aside from the one incident involving comment deletion and details of that, pretty much everything else pans out. I no longer worry about multiple personalities, or sock-puppeting, or code shenanigans. Everything was on the up and up except the one thing.

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+1 for "This is in my opinion the reason why many people left the forum: it's a chain reaction.", this is my speculation too.

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The same chain reaction brings people back when you host some real, actual, content they can't get elsewhere. That means a new result, actual physics. They also come when their papers are reviewed, but its better not to be too harsh, as the early tone of reviews was perhaps too negative because it's always easier to see the bad than the good.

Answer 8

What is it about physicsoverflow that needs "reviving"?

Maybe some have this deluded perception that it should be performing as well as Mathoverflow?

Physicsoverflow has never been, and never will be within the next two years, in the same class as Mathoverflow:

• Mathoverflow was started by Berkeley graduate students and postdocs Anton Geraschenko, David Zureick-Brown, and Scott Morrison. Physicsoverflow was started by Dilaton, Dimension10, Polarkernel, none of whom appear to have a Phd qualification in cutting edge physics to attract their peers here.
• Mathoverflow was originally hosted by Ravi Vakil, and is now integrated into the regular Stack Exchange network. Physicsoverflow.org is currently owned by Polarkernel who owns the code, won't release it as things stand and might even sell it. Therefore, there's a growing feeling that all contributions made here are pointless long term and could end up being binned within a year or so.
• The Mathoverflow homepage has a pleasant, professional look about it, whereas Physicsoverflow looks still amateurish, in my opinion.
• Maths is a more popular subject than physics, meaning much lower traffic here.

I therefore think this idea of "reviving" physicsoverflow is just deluded nonsense. Physicsoverflow exists, there's three hard-working people making it work, it's continuing to evolve, numbers are settling down to what the site deserves long term, it's a magnificent achievement compared to what existed a year ago.

Let's stick to being realistic about what the site deserves based upon the way things are.

Comments

I agree with the positive outlook and nature of the answer, but I have a few squabbles.

1. You don't really know whom Dilaton is, his qualifications, etc.
2. I don't understand how "polarkernel may also sell it" has any negative implication. Just to be sure, we're talking about him selling his plugins, theme, and patches, not the site itself! Stack Exchange is also proprietary software, and was "sold" to MathOverflow as well, by the way.
3. I don't think this site looks amateurishly designed. In fact, I'd say it is much more well-designed than MO, because MO doesn't embrace flat design yet.

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@dimension10 1a. Yes, the Stack Exchange software was sold from the start before the site was created before anyone had invested time and effort, whereas massive time and effort has already been invested in the creation of physicsoverflow.org, yet it's reliant on code it doesn't own that lies entirely in the hands of someone else who won't release it to anyone on here because he wants to sell it eventually 1b. Whois gives the registrant as Roger Cattin aka Polarkernel so I'm assuming he's the one who owns the site right now. He also claims in his post that: " I could immediately close the site".

2. It gives me cause for concern that you honestly believe your design is "much more well designed than MO". It's certainly a "good, functional" design, but lacks the professional crispness of say even n-lab, although no doubt you'll disagree ;) But there's not a lot that can be done about this, since it would require the input of a good graphics-designer/website-designer that does this for a living, or has an intense interest in this field.

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@physicsnewbie: look and feel are the first thing the user sees, but the easiest things to change. We have a scalable site that is capable of organizing both Q&A and reviews completely heirarchically using arbitrarily deeply nesting tags, and this allows us to be far more useful, as we can directly access anything by subject, subfield, topic, subtopic, or independently and overlapping tags, like equation, method, or reference to a particular scientist or user. This is the central feature we offer than no one else offers, and it is what makes this site scalable as a serious refereeing and scientific platform. The UI issues are next to deal with, and I have an idea for doing so, but as Polarkernel does not feel like releasing source, I'll try do it myself first.

Answer 9

This whole system is screwed. You need a system where you can't delete or hide anything, not if you are a normal user/mod/admin NO ONE. Moderators like Dimension10 and Dilaton should step down as admins/moderators like Ron Maimon did and be replaced by completely new people.

Comments

That's complete poppycock. You need to hide spam, you need to hide retaliatory posts, like deanonymization attacks, you need to move or hide material that is completely off-topic (like a person posting their personal wild theory in 20 different places), you need to hide homework questions that are too low-level. The moderators are doing a much more difficult job that appears at first glance, one in which it is very easy to make missteps, and the users only see the annoying side of the stick, because when it works well, moderation is basically invisible. Just cut the moderators some slack, everyone had good intentions throughout.