There is no need to repost this question. Despite what a few are reaching to imply, the vast majority understood what the question was, and the question has been answered. My understanding of that paper was correct.
Sorry I missed this thread yesterday. I’m the mod that made the move.
The subject of this thread is, “I disagree that this thread is non-factual.” This brings up one of the GQ dilemmas: it doesn’t matter whether the contents of the thread are factual. Every forum in the SDMB has factual threads, from the Marketplace to the Pit. What matters is whether the OP’s question can be answered factually.
To me, both of the questions in the OP (“Is there any reasonable explanation for this other than the guy is a binaries scam artist?” and “Can I expect him to be endorsing HIV curing magnets anytime soon?”) seem to be asking for opinions. The tone of the responses could, indeed, justify moving the thread to Great Debates (the OP declaring that Montagnier’s paper is a “load of crap” seems to be spoiling for a debate) but I made a judgment call and shipped it over to IMHO, where opinion-based threads typically live. If the IMHO mods disagree with my decision, they will move it to another forum, which certainly wouldn’t hurt my feelings any.
Whether it belongs in IMHO, GD, or wherever, I still feel that it is not a GQ thread. I’ll chat with the other GQ mods and see if they disagree with me.
The question was answered factually. I see nobody disagreeing with the assessment of that research. There are numerous flags that point to it not being honest research.
- It was not published in any form that allowed for peer review.
- It invokes quantum field theory where it makes little sense.
- It explains its results with nanostructures that should be rather easy to confirm, but fails to even attempt.
- PCR is notorious for giving false positives, yet that is the only confirmation used.
Outside of one poster, the entire thread was going along smoothly with pretty unanimous agreement.
If you want my vote. Move it back.
I kinda see what you’re saying, Gary, about how the proper placement of the thread is determined by the OP. However, I’d suggest an alternate underlying principle: a thread should be placed in the forum where it’ll receive the most productive or interesting conversation.
Following that principle, a thread like this is much likelier to get interesting conversation in GQ or GD than it is in IMHO.
If the OP is poorly formed in your opinion, it seems to me that the most productive move isn’t to put it in a forum where it’ll probably die, but rather to suggest (as a member, not as a moderator) what a better phrasing of the OP would be.
We’ve talked it over and decided that it just doesn’t fit in GQ.
Valid point, but I did move it with a 2-day redirect so people could still see it in GQ, and I just upped the redirect so it would stay there for a week. Also, I think most of the people who want to participate in the thread have already found it.
As I said before, it wouldn’t bother me a bit if the IMHO mods moved it to Great Debates. I was on the fence about that from the beginning.
This has no relation to reality. There have been about a million GQ threads that had a perfectly good factual question but got moved - properly - to GD after they became an opinion-fest.
The content of the thread is everything. Always has been.
I suspect if one, and only one, poster had not got their panties in a bunch, twice, the concept of moving this thread would have never even occured to a mod, much less the actual move.
Yeah, that thread discussion consist of opinions, but “opinions” about actual science, theories, procedures, their capabilities and their limitations. Opinions virtually the whole field of science probably agrees on it. Which, in the science world, is about as factual as it gets. Its not like general personal opinions in which no two are the same, ethics debates, whether shag carpet sucks, what makes a good movie blah blah blah.
Hell, technically, virtually any question could be considered a non factual type question. But, IMO this discussion was pretty damn close to fact based.
In my experience, this redirect doesn’t do much good: when I’ve had threads moved from GD to IMHO, the conversation has died almost immediately. For some reason, people don’t seem to follow redirects when they’ve not participated in the thread prior to that point.
I definitely can see putting it in GD, but I just don’t think IMHO is the proper place for it.
I’m trying to explain why your thread was moved. I understand that your interest was in understanding if the stuff in the paper was really as wacky as it sounded. The problem is that the questions actually asked are really more about the sanity of the researcher than the content of the paper. Sure, the content of the paper is a necessary element, because that is how the researcher is being evaluated, but from an objective reading of your OP, it sounds more like you’re interested in berating the researcher than understanding the paper. Berating the researcher does not belong in GQ.
And there’s the rub, because while the questions asked were opinionated, the intent of the OP was a factual discussion of the science in the paper. As far as I’m aware, understanding a paper has never been a prerequisite for asking a question for people to explain the paper - that would kind of defeat the purpose.
Possibly - the mods don’t read every thread. And it’s possible without someone drawing attention to the questions actually asked, the mods wouldn’t have questioned the intent of the thread. But it has been noticed, it has been interpreted by what is actually written, and it has been determined to be in the wrong forum.
For the record, I would support a move back to GQ with a Mod note that the purpose of the thread is to discuss the paper, not speculate on the researcher’s mental state. Not that I get a vote.
There you would be quite wrong. When I first read the OP, I considered moving it to GD. As I said, the OP, being loaded with non-factual opinion, was pretty much foreordained to attract non-factual responses. I decided to leave it for the time being. In the end, Gary got to it first, but I would have ended up moving it as well.
Well, don’t give up the fortune telling business day job then, because thats pretty much NOT what it attracted.
Most folks that answered knew he wasnt really asking if the guy was crazy. The OP had a good inkling that something was majorly amiss. And folks answered in scientific terms why the experiment/paper likely had serious problems.
Seems to me the only people derailing the thread or misreading what the intentions were the complainers or folks/mods that didn’t actually post anything. Everybody else knew it was about the “science”.
These two statements are incompatible. You say that the thread didn’t attract opinionated statements; yet it was being derailed.
I might add that your own comments in the thread were for the most part non-factual.
WarmNPrickly:
You titled your thread “Has another Nobel Laureate gone off the deap end?”
And your questions are:
“Is there any reasonable explanation for this other than the guy is a binaries scam artist?”
“Can I expect him to be endorsing HIV curing magnets anytime soon?”
You also refer to the study in question as a “load of crap.”
I see a couple of problems with your thread as a GQ thread:
Factual Questions Rules & FAQs - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Your OP didn’t comply with the rules (besides the factual question requirement), and it got moved. Factual answers and discussions are availble in the other forums on this board, your own previous reading patterns notwithstanding. In the future, if you want to keep a thread in a particular forum, it’s a good idea to read that forum’s rules. 
Because I dont understand the biologic science that well. But I was smart enough to ask a science based question. And I didnt see anyone bitch about the poor quality of my analogy for that matter.
Derailed by opinions of complainers IS not the same as derailed because the thrust of the thread wouldn’t be factual based (which most of the thread is). And it wasnt EVEN really derailed. It was like two complaints by the same person and two responses to that by the target/OP who EXPLAINED that it really wasn’t about if the guy was crazy (though all evidence points to some variation of yes). All you guys had to do at that point was declare “lets keep it about the science” and all would have most likely continued on just fine (see, I can predict the future too). And once Stranger left it was just fine anyway.
Good grief. SDMB, the bastion of “Don’t offend the researchers of WOO with poorly worded threads”. The subjects you guys choose to get on your high horse about can be pretty interesting at times.
We could have done that, perhaps, or we could have moved it. Given that the OP was fundamentally flawed, moving it was the better option.
Sorry, this makes no sense at all.
This appears to be a tempest in a teapot. As we’ve discussed many, many times before, it’s easy to tailor a subject to fit in almost any SDMB forum. If you really want to talk about Luc Montagnier in GQ, simply craft a different OP that fits GQ. That would be much easier than arguing about it for days in ATMB.
Binaries Scam Artist = band name!
IMO the OP was not fundamentally flawed. This was fundamentally a question about science/scientific results (are you trying to tell me it wasnt?).
If your train is going down the tracks making sparks, you fix the damn thing and send it where it was intended to go. You don’t shrug your shoulders, say “fuck it”, and send it Albuquerque instead.
No need. The only people that interpreted this thread the way the SDMB staff did is the SDMB staff and Stranger. The question was discussed and answered factually. If I had genuinely “poisoned the well” as the SDMB staff wants to claim, I’ve no doubt Stranger and the rest of you would have not only left it in GQ, but made non-stop stink about how unprofessional the OP was. Instead, Stranger finds himself carefully backpedaling on his initial defense of this “esteemed researcher” while the SDMB staff does it’s very best to sweep it under the rug.