Me to! Dammn them!

I haven’t seen anything yet about what Seed thought Pepsi would bring to the table (although I’m eagerly following Adam’s blog for the details).

I doubt this is going to get covered in the detail you are looking for on Adam’s blog or elsewhere. At present the Pepsi Maneno remains as a source of fascination and as a touchstone for the usual consternation to many on the internet, but Sb central is much more interested in moving on.

it looks more like they were looking for some money and were prepared to not look too closely at how they were getting it. I don’t think it was deliberate, but it does cause me to worry about what else might start appearing here.

Well, one could take the approach that since they made a mistake that they are deeply tainted to the bone in all other things, and to expect them to srcrew up again any second. Or, one could take the attitude that this fiasco realtes to one event, a thing that happened once over a four year history and that they clearly wish they had not done, and thus it would be surprising if it happened again. In this case (and I very rarely say this) the truth is somewhere in between, and as a relatively optimistic person I’d lean towards the latter.

The ads on the side are just that, ads. They are not dressed up as being part of the scientific conversation that is the purpose of Sb. That conversation could and should have room for industry scientists, but I think that the pepsi idea was so flawed that it should never have gotten off the ground. (BTW I think that Nitic Oxide is what helps you to do pess ups)

Oh yes, it uses Nitic Oxide. Nitic. I don’t think that’s a thing, is it? I gotta admit, though, Ben looks a lot more ripped in his “after” picture than his “before” picture. http://xrl.in/5ttk

It is my opinion based on having worked with the Sb staff on a couple of projects, and from what Adam Bly has indicated. In other words, it is what I have come to understand as the case from my conversations, and what I believe to be true based on my trust for my colleagues.

Seed must have known that this was advertising rather than an attempt to include corporate scientists in the scientific conversation.

Hind sight is pretty sharp! The point was not to replicate an existing blog. But yes, the signs were there. But no, the new blog was not going to be hosted by a PR rep. Which deflates your next point:

At best, I would say that their decision to host the blog showed that they are indifferent about the quality of the content they deliver (so long as they get paid for it). At worst, they deliberately tried to pass off advertising content as legitimate scientific discussion.

That does not reflect the actual situation on the ground, no.

There were two parties to this fiasco and I think that calling Seed’s involvement an accidental mistake diminishes their true responsibility.

My intention is not to diminish anyone’s “true responsibility.” But that is my analysis of the situation.

The other day someone I know spilled a deadly chemical all over herself in a lab accident. It was an accident. There were no nefarious intentions. But, in retrospect, with hindsight, it is now clear that a certain procedure that had been done dozens of times had this risk. The procedure has been modified.

The analogy is no where near perfect, but I use it to demonstrate that there is a difference between intentionality and other forms of fucking up.

Science blogs and Adam Bly totally screwed the pooch with a big giant fat dildo.

I believe that, and so does Adam Bly, from the looks of it. And I hope that satisfies your need for blame.

But you don’t get to decide how something went wrong by what appears to be a requirement you are expressing for a certain kind of inentionality to match with a certain level of how badly something fucked up. That is a fairly common kind of reasoning but is not really rational.

This is like the bullets in Oswald’s gun. Three guys on the FOURTH floor of the book depository heard four shells hit the floor and four rifle reports. Oswald’s rifle was found with zero bullets in it. But it holds five. Where was the fifth bullet? According to the best reconstruction, he had been target practicing and used most of his ammo just before hearing that he had a chance to shoot the president. No way or time to get more ammo. That simple fact alone utterly kills all the conspiracy theories. There is no version of cubans, russians, or mobsters involving Oswald as a patsy or an assassin in which he brings four bullets to work that morning to use with his rifle.

At science blogs, if you’ve been paying attention an ad for acupuncture or Russian brides or a copper bracelet causes the bloggers to go apoplectic. In exactly which universe is Adam Bly or the Sb staff going to say to themselves “Oh, let’s sneak this blog which will be nothing but a big fat ad by the Sblings. They won’t mind.”

For me, I know that this blog was not thought of as a big fat ad when it was concieved and pushed out. It was a different kind of experiment. Indeed, since it never existed, we can never be sure if it would have been a big fat ad. Our other corporate blogs were not, and this was an evolution not from a standard science blog but from those other corporate blogs. I.e., the evolutionary “gap” is not so big as many people imply. I know that is what this blog was, but for those looking in who can’t or won’t try to understand (or trust/believe) what has happened, consider the problem of the missing fifth bullet.

And that is probably going to be my last “defense” of that position. I’m not really interested in the usual sophistic bullshit. I’m telling you what I’m pretty darn sure to be true, and you can take it or leave it. The blog was a bad idea, but it was not a nefarious attempt to sneak an ad past the Sb bloggers and readers. That is an absurd idea.

Fair enough, although I would be interested to hear what you feel the relevant facts are. From my perspective (not having any inside knowledge of Sb management), there was no reason to believe that this blog would be a beneficial contributor.

Considering that the pepsi hosted version was light on science and heavy on PR (including the posts from those illustrious PhDs, efren) and that it was edited and moderated by a PR rep rather than a scientist, Seed must have known that this was advertising rather than an attempt to include corporate scientists in the scientific conversation. At best, I would say that their decision to host the blog showed that they are indifferent about the quality of the content they deliver (so long as they get paid for it). At worst, they deliberately tried to pass off advertising content as legitimate scientific discussion.

There were two parties to this fiasco and I think that calling Seed’s involvement an accidental mistake diminishes their true responsibility.

What I mean specifically is on the part of scienceblogs. I truly believe that the Sb management thought they were fairly using the blog format to set up a place for industry bloggers to go, and that they were not doing something much different than Collective Imagination. That was a major goof, of course, but I think they blindsided themselves. My opinion is reasonably well supported by the facts at hand, but has nothing to do with Pepsi’s motivation. For that, yes, what you said is certainly close to the truth.

The reaction did seem a little over the top to me. I would hope that the readers of scienceblogs have enough critical thinking skills to on the whole, be able to look at a blog by Pepsi workers, as long as clearly stated, in a critical manner. I know that when I read other blogs and people say things I disagree with or think are wrong, I have no amount of intrinsic faith in them, and I imagine had the blog remained, people would have held them to account.

As a science student, I’m also very aware of the possibility that when I graduate I’ll be working for some kind of “evil” corporation, possibly even a company similar to Pepsi, so I would have enjoyed reading their blog.

I do understand and sympathise with the arguments against the blog, but I just don’t feel like it was as serious issue as people treated it. I can only speak for myself, but had the blog remained, it certainly wouldn’t have made me question the credibility of your blog Greg, or any other blogs that I read, and I wonder how many people actually would have regarded your posts as less trustworthy because of the existence of that blog.

I’m obviously a pragmatist and care about what actual impacts it would have had, more so than the principle of the matter.

there is a substantial principled difference between a blog that is sponsored by a corporation and to which corporate employees may contribute as a subset of the authorship and a blog that is owned and operated by a corporation.

Did you even look at the biographies of the four individuals who were going to contribute to FF? They had PhDs and some had even worked as scientists in the oh-so-virtuous public sector. Did you even have the decency to look at their publications and the quality of their science before you started besmirching their integrity? Oh, but they must not have any integrity because they work for a corporation, huh?

And, frankly,the Science Bloggers didn’t have an immune response, they were exercising the heckler’s veto. Better to shout them down before they actually say anything. Protect the poor innocent audience from even being exposed to what they might say. Yup, us poor dumb bastards in the readership need you to protect them from the EBUL CORPORATIONs because we are just too stupid to figger things out for ourselves.

You know, if the Science Bloggers were so worried about their reputations, they might stop and consider what it looks like for them to be running around like hypercaffienated Chicken Littles. But, that is okay for you CPP since you blog pseudonymously and can fully engage your OCD by running around to every blog post about this incident sanctimoniously talking about “fucking corporations.” Get over yourself.