Sometimes it seems like minds are rarely changed by anything we say beyond an occasional answer to a question that is appreciated. We get a few
likes from people who probably already agree. But have people who began by disagreeing come to change their minds or has the wider discussion been altered in any significant way by something you've contributed?
After a few years of spending perhaps an hour or more a day engaged in various internet discussions I have to ask myself; has there been anything beyond a bit of personal satisfaction to show for it?
I have a couple of examples where I think I have had a small influence - whilst noting that sometimes the time is right for an idea or different focus and what can appear to be my very own logical leap is a consequence of the current flow of information that is out there and won't be actually be unique to me.
Example one - the function of human body hair. The first topic I got involved in at scienceforum.com was the
Evolution of Human Hairlessness thread. At that time human body hair was almost universally considered a functionless vestige or at most have some minor role in carrying pheronomes. I pointed out that hair has a sensory function - something so obvious and self evident to me that I struggled (and still do) to understand how it could be so consistently overlooked. A lot of searches with variations at that time found plenty of references to body hair in lists of 'useless' and vestigial body parts and I recall struggling to find more than passing mention of that sensory function - a paywalled paper that included an experiment that puffed air to move hair and thus 'enervate' follicular nerves, a mention of use of body hair's sensory function in an obscure journal on Haptics (interfacing between people and machines). Otherwise from Darwin through to
Jablonski, the human evolution experts failed to notice or take into consideration this clear and easily demonstrated function.
Take a tour with a search engine today and you can still find examples of body hair in the 'useless' lists but you will also easily find mentions of it's sensory function. A peer reviewed paper appeared since then that showed hairs could detect parasites and that has flowed through but that didn't happen until long after I first discussed it here and elsewhere. So, did I have any influence in this? I think that, if any single internet contribution of mine has had an effect it's probably been my contribution of a "Touch Sense" paragraph in Wikipedia's entry on hair (not my best worded effort but it still stands). I keep thinking that every time someone has the urge to publish something about human body hair, they probably have Wikipedia on the list of places to get acquainted, and reading it there means they can't ignore it.
This was a case of pointing out the obvious. Being so obvious makes it difficult to claim credit but I'm going to do so anyway. Think I had nothing to do with the growing acceptance of hairs having a sensory function? Feel free to argue otherwise.
Example two. Asking a question of an expert that prompted a peer reviewed climate science paper.
On an open thread at
OpenMind I asked -
"...msu-amsu data shows ENSO strongly. Would it be of any value to see temperature data adjusted for ENSO or does that pose problems?"
A few posts later Tamino did
"Sharper Focus" -
A reader asked whether or not it’s possible to remove the el Nino influence from temperature data, since the el Nino response is one of the key differences between satellite and land-based temperature estimates. Of course we can’t remove the el Nino influence perfectly but we can do so approximately, and the same is true for volcanic eruptions and the residual annual cycle.
Ultimately this was developed into the peer reviewed
"Global temperature evolution 1979–2010" which included a graph of adjusted temperatures that was to become very well known -
I wouldn't claim that no-one would have thought of this approach if I hadn't asked the question, but I did ask the question and the answer we got (the answer was not addressed specifically to me) was well worth the asking.
So, any examples where your contributions have had an impact?