Uncommon Descent

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Uncommon Descent is a blog created by William Dembski in April 2005.[1]

Though he himself lost interest in it for the first time in Dec 2005 ("I’ve decided to put Uncommon Descent into mothballs indefinitely. Although I’ve enjoyed blogging, I find it distracts from more pressing work that I need to get done.")[2], it was carried on, by him and his friends, e.g. Denyse O'Leary.

It still seems to be the place for his announcements, as his alternative projects have not gathered a comparable amount of interest.

Contents

[edit] Stats

threads at UD
comments at UD
comments per month
new threads per month
boxplot: comments per thread

From April 2005 until February 2012 more than 8,400 threads were created at Uncommon Descent, most of these by the blanket persona of News - or by Dembski. Obviously not everyone is allowed to start a thread: you have to be a moderator or been invited to do so. In the latter instance, you are allowed to moderate the thread you have created, i.e., tamper with the comments of other users. The real moderators can do so on any thread - an ability often abused on this heavily moderated blog.

All editors (after enrolling with wordpress.org) are allowed to comment on most of the threads (during the year 2011 there have been an increasing number of threads for which commenting was disallowed) - at lest theoretically: verging from the blog-line will lead to being put into the moderation queue or outright banning. Having a comment in moderation is an annoying experience: it won't appear on the site until after some (any?) moderator approved of the edit. There is no discernible system behind the approving method, and no time limit: a waiting period of a couple of days is not unheard of. Obviously this is a disadvantage in a discussion, and comments which have been in moderation tend to be ignored.

Nevertheless more than 3,000 users have commented on Uncommon Descent generating nearly 200,000 entries which can still be retrieved.

The traffic at Uncommon Descents depends on the buzzing of the creationists' community - the aftermaths of the Dover trial, Lenski's experiment, etc. generated many comments. This is sometimes amplified by the major players at the blog who are able to use astonishingly childish humor.

OTOH, some editors are attracted to the blog by the work of Dembski et al.: as there is no place where to discuss (and rectify) Dembski's mathematics, one would think that this could be done at Uncommon Descent: many mathematicians have found out that this is not the case.

Another source of endless debate is that most of the regular editors at Uncommon Descent are often wrong. And they tend to perpetuate their errors even when corrected - the best one can hope for is that they wait a couple of days until they repeat their old canards.

For the first six years, the number of threads per month was manageable, three, at most four a day were posted. In 2011 this changed quite a bit: now we get four to nine a day, and many of these have the character of announcements, i.e., it isn't allowed to make a comment. Others just don't gather enough interest. This more active threading may have helped to make 2011 the year with the most comment:

Year 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
#Comments 8,400 23,000 22,500 23,000 41,100 24,900 41,900

But one effect is obvious: in Oct - Dec 2011, half of the threads were commented on only twice and in general the median of the comments on threads stayed in the single digits in 2011 - a sharp contrast at least to the years 2006 - 2009. Thus 2009 saw the thread with the most edits:

Year longest thread #comments
2005 Stephen Jay Gould’s Contempt for the John Templeton Foundation 259
2006 Gil Has Never Grasped the Nature of a Simulation Model 200
2007 Kevin Padian: The Archie Bunker Professor of Paleobiology at Cal Berkeley 387
2008 Complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees 571
2009 Answers for Judge Jones 768
2010 Intelligent Design and the Demarcation Problem 712
2011 http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/science-and-freethinking 685

[edit] The Skeptical Zone

The Skeptical Zone,[3] often abbreviated "TSZ" and not to be confused with the Australian podcast of a similar name,[4] is a blog started in 2012 by Dr Elizabeth Liddle to continue conversations at UD while escaping that site's "format."[5][6]

Similar to UD posts at TSZ are written by a variety of authors who submit "OPs," though these are not necessarily limited to anti-ID positions.[7] Series of rebuttal posts between the two sites are becoming increasingly common, on topics such as Complex Specified Information[8] and the nature of consciousness.[9]

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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