We’ve published 193,208 comments on this blog, and I’ve loved almost all of them. Thanks so much!
And now I have some requests for you:
If you’ve never commented: Feel free to join in the fun, if you have something to add, a story to share, and especially if you disagree with something we posted. Don’t just stew in your own juices, being angry that we are Wrong on the Internet. We read all the comments, and if you see something we got wrong, this is your chance to correct the record, to engage in conversation with us, and even maybe to realize you were wrong. I’ve learned so much from comments, and lots of times I’ve changed my views. Even when I’m not convinced that I was wrong, I become aware of a failure of communication on my part. So, yeah, we’d appreciate your input. Share your stories.
If you occasionally comment: Thanks! and feel free to comment more, as discussed above. Your comments are interesting in themselves, they motivate us to continue posting on certain topics (when we get zero comments its kind of a bummer), and they help us refine our research as well as our communication. I learn a lot from blog comments.
If you frequently comment: Thanks—we really appreciate it! You keep a sense of continuity in the comments over periods of months and even years. Just one thing. Try to make whatever point you’re making just once in a thread. Or maybe twice if there’s a need to reply to another comment. But please do your best to avoid long exchanges in comments. I’ve been told that many people avoid participating in our comment threads or even avoid reading the comments entirely because they’re sick of seeing the same old arguments litigated endlessly. Again, I appreciate your comments! Just keep them within reason.
Unlike the Nate of 2024 but like the Nate of 2012, I appreciate an iterative back-and-forth, but if goes on too long, over and over again in thread after thread, it degrades the reading and commenting experience for everyone else. Thanks for understanding.
And, finally, if you’re a spammer: Just stop it! You can have the cleverest comment in the world—you can prove Fermat’s last theorem in the margin of your comment, whatever—; if it has spam links, it’s going into the spam folder. So don’t waste your time. Just do the right thing and buy an ad somewhere.
I am an occasional commenter and read this blog since 10 years. This post leaves me confused, especially your advice for people who frequently comment. It is not clear to me when an exchange is an iterative back-and-forth and when it is a long and tiresome exchange.
I love the comments on this blog and I love long exchanges the most. Sometimes they are only barely related to the post, but I love that too! What I love about this blog the most is that it gets smart people to discuss things I care about: Science, statistics and methods. After reading the post I usually only skim comments that have no replies. If I see a long exchange with the right people in it I am hooked and I read everything. Especially I like technical discussions like log(a + x) instead of log(1 + x) stuff, philosophical discussions about the nature of probability, discussions of your simulations (like recently about p-values) and everything about model building, especially about scientific model building.
Yes, there are tiresome discussions, especially about politics, but these I don’t read. It is true that the same topics arise over and over again, but in my view, this does not happen in comments alone, it also happens in posts. What this blog misses is commenters of a greater variety though. For example I would love to see some non-Bayesians and mainstream economists.
While we’re at it: Many thanks to you, Andrew, and all the long time commenters. This blog and it’s comments did much for my scientific education and due to long time commenters I kind of feel at home, even if I did not ever engage with most of you.
Huan:
I agree that it’s not always clear when comments move from a constructive exchange to “garbage time.” What I’m asking here is for non-commenters to consider commenting, for occasional commenters to comment more, and for those commenters who get into long exchanges to think about keeping such discussions crisp, in part to allow space for others to join in.
I want to echo the confusion.
It seems hard to determine when something is or is not a too long back-and-forth. I try and keep this all in mind, also in a recent discussion I took part in. Even if someone says something like “please restrict yourself to at most one such comment per post.” or something like that, that still leaves room for interpretation. For instance, what does “such comment” specifically mean?
I have tried to solve my confusion in the recent post by not commenting on the post for the remainder of that day, also to allow possible others to comment which might be in line with the spirit of the proposal and all that. However, if someone then replies to my comment and I feel that I want to explain myself I don’t know what to do.
If I did then reply to such a comment, and if that is seen as me posting the kind of comment I preferably should only post once per post it becomes a bit hard for me to try and participate in a manner that I think is fitting for a discussion section of a blog post.
Please no worries, it’s all good. Perhaps these are all just learning experiences or bugs to fix. I am also not saying this all to cause more commotion, or to be annoying. I just want to explain that I try to be mindful of things and suggestions, and apparently that is not good enough. I just wanted to note this all should this be relevant and useful information for the blog to know in light of the new rules or experiment or whatever you want to call it.
I’m a non-commenter. I discovered your blog in 2013 when I was a grad student, from reading an AMS Notices about p-values. Your talk at Google “Red State, Blue State,…” brought me up to speed about how Americans vote. It has helped me to explain to my friends in my native country who like to know about U.S. presidential elections.
Thank you for giving us something interesting to read, and it’s free.
*The name Dew as in Mountain Dew is my first name translated in English.
I’m an occasional commenter. So here’s my first contribution to trying to comment more.
I tried to find when I first posted a comment, to try to get a bound on when I started reading this blog — but the presence of comments on the right hand side of the page confuses Google when you try to restrict searches by dates. In general trying to find a comment that you remember reading is difficult.
I have made a few comments, and I might comment a bit more often except that Andrew blogs faster than I can read and think. I typically only get around to a post a few days or even a week after it is posted, and on those rare occasions when I feel that I might have something useful to add, I usually don’t because by then the post is “old news”. I figure the only reason to comment on a post more than a day or so old is if the comment is of archival importance, which for me is rarely the case.
David:
I read comments on old posts too. Every workday (except when I’m on vacation), at some point I go in and read all the comments that came in that day. I learn a lot from comments!
Hi Andrew,
Just wanted to say that I do, sincerely, wish to write comments more often. Together with the post on the anniversary of this blog (congratulations!), I wanted to briefly say that your blog has been an incredibly valuable source of information and understanding for my own thinking, research and teaching; I literally reference one of your posts in my slides.
The issue is that with this sort of high quality, I feel I should put some sincere effort into writing, which isn’t always possible. I’ve learned from my more freewheeling days on the internet that care should put when writing online and, specially when there’s high quality surrounding what I’d write, I feel compelled to do.
I.e., to attempt some wordplay, this is praising (your blog) by faint damming (of my own capabilities).
Regardless, I’d like to try and I do sincerely want to praise your blog and thank you again for the time and effort and intelligence you put in.
Thanks for your post Andrew, and for all the work you put into making this an accessible place to discuss interesting aspects of science and meta-science. I’m an occasional commenter, and like David above I tend to read posts days or even weeks after they’ve been published, thanks to your prodigious output.
Regarding long threads and digressions into “garbage time”, I made the suggestion in your recent request for feedback post of enabling collapsible threads: once we reach a comment that is sufficiently “garbage” by our own metric, we can just hide it and the replies to it instead of having to scroll another 10-15 comments further to get to a more interesting response. Although this might be tricky to implement given the current site design, and the maximum nesting level of comments being 3 may mean useful responses further down may be unfairly skipped.
As a long-time lurker who’s been reading since 2015, this post is the nudge I needed. I’ve always hesitated to comment because I felt like I needed to have something profound to add, or that my perspective as someone outside academia wouldn’t be valuable.
What strikes me about your request is the balance you’re trying to strike: encouraging participation while maintaining quality. The insight about frequent commenters is particularly interesting. I’ve definitely noticed threads where the same two or three people go back and forth extensively, and while sometimes those exchanges are illuminating, other times they do feel like they’re crowding out other voices.
One question: do you find that the “long exchange” problem is worse for certain types of posts? In my reading experience, it seems like posts touching on causal inference or political polling tend to generate more of these extended debates than posts about workflow or visualization.
+1 for using the word “nudge”!
In answer to your question: generally I’d prefer more comments on all our posts. But i recognize that people are busy so it makes sense that they comment on topics where they have some particular sense of expertise, interest, or urgency.
Quotes from above:
-“As a long-time lurker who’s been reading since 2015, this post is the nudge I needed.”
-“+1 for using the word “nudge”!”
The questions that I now have is:
-Whether this means or implies that Mr. Gelman can now, technically, be considered to be a so-called “nudgelord”.
-And if so, is me commenting here and thereby providing more comments, which I understand might be something desired, a way to at least try and ease the possible mental anguish that might have arisen due to pondering the previous question?
Anon:
I’m kinda puzzled why a long-time lurker who’s been reading since 2015 would get nudged by a post that’s now over a year old, so who knows!
I thought about what words rhyme with “nudge”
And subsequently thought of the word “fudge”
I then looked it up, and read it’s not only a word for a certain candy
But also means “nonsense” or “to fake or falsify”, which was interesting to me
Before my earlier comment, I searched this blog for the word “nudgelord”
Which I remembered being used a few times on this message board
I wanted to see exactly what it means, and how “nudgelord” was being used
To see if I could make a joke with it, so hopefully at least some might be amused
I then noticed “nonsense” or “fake” sometimes go together in blog posts regarding a “nudge”
Which then made me think again of the word “fudge”
So, perhaps a “nudgelord” or can be a “fudgelord” as well, but not necessarily
As the example of this blog post “nudging” someone made clear to me