proposal for #sciencetwitter:

If one is to throw fire or shade at science on here, one must effortfully engage w/ science in a permanent fashion; tweets are cheap and fleeting. Write a commentary, force a correction/retraction, etc.

we could call this...the Pottery Burn Rule

(ht @hardsci)

there's lots of excellent examples of #sciencetwitter debate leading to real progress in science — retracting bad science, creating new collaborations, generating ideas, etc, but until that stuff happens it's just people talking on the internet

for example, the parody account @evopsychgoogle had a thread go viral about an absurdly bad paper ( https://twitter.com/evopsychgoogle/status/1189958542616252417?s=20) but didn't stop there — they wrote a detailed, thoughtful critique which got the journal to pay attention. paper's now retracted. https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and-templers-2012-paper-b334ed8db5ae

personally I've got several collaborations that started as discussions on here, in a similar fashion to how collaborations start up at conferences. I imagine this is not uncommon

as @davidpoeppel likes to say, 'coffee is for closers' ... translating twitter discussion into substantive results seems a good goal for the community (whether new experiments, fixing or removing old ones, or both) //