I was right about bloggers and their commenters.

I haven’t wanted to post here for days, for the same reason I haven’t wanted to read blogs and especially comments for days. With a few exceptions, blogland just seems so harsh and analytical, so determined to punish thoughts or ideas. Why put your stuff out when the return is so consistent? On many of the blogs I read, the dominant mode is antagonistic critique. Such ceaseless critiquing, lots of it obvious, some of it hostile, lots of it prideful, so little of it intended to help the original author. It feels like smart boy jockeying, which is an annoying dynamic, appealing only to smart boys who are temporarily up.

I want people to give authors the benefit of the doubt. When some hot new study comes out, right away you get the same few critiques on lots of sites, the ones that we learned the first quarter of a decent methods class. Potential sampling bias! Sample size too small! Results may not translate! Dude. Any critique that comes to mind within a couple minutes of reading a summary of an article is very likely one of the widely known errors. I assume that tenured professors who spent years on a study that got published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal also thought of those. Seems to me, the choice ought to be to read the paper or to assume that experts who publish peer review papers avoided the clichéd mistakes. At the very least, don’t lead with the trite critiques without a strong reason to think they apply.

Or a couple days back, a usually good blogger I read wrote a careless post. I knew it was dashed off because I read him regularly. It clashed with what I’ve come to think are his views. People pounced on that; his commenters called him out and other bloggers linked and pointed. But why do that shit? He is self-aware and bright. Surely he re-read that piece and cringed. There’s no need to scold him; he knows. Other bloggers linking to that piece and critiquing it? That was cheap. The mistake was obvious and out of character. You got a post from it that you didn’t have to work for. His piece was careless; your piece was cheap. It was weak thought, for one, and graceless, pointing out someone’s patent mistake*. It is fair game, but it turns the game flashy and ugly.

And then! I am so bored of commenters constantly pointing out the obvious counter. If the counter is obvious, assume a bright blogger whose work you respect already thought of it. But Megan, surely we need to critique each others’ work to strengthen the thought involved! But Megan, it is important to state the obvious, because there are people out there repeating and strengthening falsehoods that damage our communal life. We need to combat those! See? Those were obvious and I already thought of them. You (for some small portion of you) were all flexing your fingers, storing those up, getting ready to type to score off me. But that is boring. I thought of those; I often do. Sometimes I don’t type them because it is so tiresome to read those relentlessly qualified posts. (So few people, Hilzoy, Tia, LB, manage to make all those qualifiers read-able.) Sometimes I haven’t thought of them first, and it is really valuable to point them out in the comments. The technique there is to mention them graciously as preparation for better work; modestly pointing out what we all knew, establishing baselines quickly so we can all move beyond the obvious thought. So much nicer than trying to score off the blogger.

I’m tired of reading people picking things and people apart. So much of that is just smartness, swirling around in pointless circles. All that smartness, doing damn near nothing. Certainly not making people feel good. That’s why I think that smartness is such a limited tool. It solves some problems well, I fully understand that. But so much of it makes people, the other commenters, lurkers intimidated out of the conversation, the blogger, feel bad. Considering how little good it does and how much it makes people feel yucky, I think saying nothing is usually an improvement.














*There are loving ways to handle an uncharacteristic mistake, if you think the person needs your help seeing the error. You could send a quiet email, depriving yourself of a post but helping the blogger. If your friend were wearing her shirt inside out (which could happen to anyone, OK?), would you point at her in front of your crowd or would you take her aside and mention it, while telling a funny little story on yourself to cover her embarrassment? Basic manners apply in blogland too.