I then sent out a plea to a bunch of scientist friends to please comment on the blog. They replied about the deplorable state of science education in the U.S. and how you’ll never convince these folks of anything, but none of them commented on the blog itself. Which got me to thinking about why they stayed away.

Undoubtedly they didn’t want to deal with the blowback of the internet world. You have to feel pretty strongly about something and feel that what you’re saying will make a difference to deal with the insults, down arrows and so on. It could be they just didn’t think it was worth it.

Another big issue is time. It takes a lot of time to craft meaningful answers to these comments.

Ideally you want to provide links to support what you say which, if it is a bit outside your field, will take a lot of work. This is especially a problem given some of the lengthy comments that need refuting. It would take so much time to refute eleven separate points in a single comment that a scientist might just throw their hands up in frustration and walk away. (I have certainly done that on occasion.) Add to this the fact that most scientists aren’t natural writers and that there is little to no incentive for providing these comments and you have a recipe for no scientist involvement.

A final reason might be the loneliness of being the one person bringing up mainstream science. This is really driven home in the comments section of Liza’s blog by the one commenter who doggedly refuted many of the most egregious assertions on the vaccine blog. I have the utmost respect for this person because he (or she?) was willing to keep going in, spending the time and taking the abuse to point out what the science actually says. This is probably more than most scientists would be willing to deal with.

And unfortunately, without support, this commenter appeared to be shouted down and almost seemed a minority opinion even though he was expressing the majority view. What this person could have accomplished with some support and a little sunnier disposition!

What all of this points to is scientists needing to be more involved in these sorts of comments. Now I don't mean they should dominate or be the only voice heard. One of the greatest powers of the comments section is that alternative views get to be expressed and debated. But for a debate to be meaningful, all sides need to be heard and mistaken comments corrected.