Snarky NASA SMD Response to Snarky Public Astrobiology Discussion

Interesting back and forth.

Ironically, Rosie Redfield's response repeats the sins of the offender she is bashing (which might be true) - she seems highly motivated by an agenda herself, and she's mostly poking holes at the methodology and psychology of the authors, not at the results themselves. (e.g. - what do the meteor claims, by other scientists, have to do with this ?!)

Of course, being a critique, she doesn't have to hold the same standards.

Given that the critique of the methodology seems to have valid points, the authors should respond.

Luckily, this seems an easy enough issue to resolve - the samples are here, and we'll definitely get more eyeballs on the issue now.

Curious to see how it turns out.

I guess I don't see the snarkiness here (except maybe from Wired). Redfield is just expressing valid scientific skepticism, and there is no problem with that. Dwayne Brown is just stating the fact that the original research appeared in a peer reviewed journal. At least as reported, Brown was hardly being "snarky" about Redfield's skepticism, and was in no way dismissing it. Brown was just making the good point that peer reviewed journals validate science better than NASA can, and NASA trusts such review to do that validation. That being the case, NASA doesn't want to participate in the kind of scientific debate that needs to happen. The SMD response was certainly not "snarky". Some responsible journalist needs to do a retraction on that headline.

The Wired author doesn't seem to understand all this. No, I'm afraid that science validation doesn't happen in blogs. It just doesn't. But that doesn't mean blog-discussed and critiqued science can't be valid. Such discussion and criticisms are excellent opportunities to "raise the flag" on issues that need closer examination.

In general, there are two advantages to conducting this debate in peer reviewed journals:
-- The peer review gate requires each author to give a crisp, technically precise, and well-supported exposition of their reasons for supporting or opposing the prior work. The blogosphere encourages blathering, imprecision, generalities, and ad-hominem attacks, none of which are helpful.
-- The rigors of developing that exposition force each author to explore the reasoning and facts of the opponent, to construct the strongest possible rebuttal. And it gives the author time to do these things well. The blogosphere encourages haste to avoid "losing the moment".

I fully advocate the peer-reviewed literature as the proper venue for this slugfest. If Redfield were to submit a paper detailing her objections, it would give a hard target for Wolfe-Simon and co-authors to respond to; otherwise, they'd be punching at ghosts. Each author could give a quick post in the blogosphere, as an advance summary, but that would be just "press releases" for the real story.