I actually think leaving comments online is a more scaleable strategy than people realize. I leave a lot of comments on LW, the EA Forum, etc. and I’m now no longer surprised when I meet someone IRL and they recognize my name. It took me a while to internalize how skewed reader/writer ratios are online and how many lurkers there really are.
My experience has been similar. I also believe this is true of Wikipedia articles, and that’s one reason I still engage. I’m less confident that I am making a difference by hosting fulltexts or scanning books, but I figure at some point I can do a time-series analysis of citations as a proxy.
As far as genetics goes, direct interactions haven’t gone too well, especially on Twitter; if you’re dealing with someone who flatly denies that GWAS hits replicate or that sibling comparisons prove causal effects or who claims that all hits are population stratification, at this point, there’s no reasoning with them. So I try to simply publicize a little all the research going on for the hidden masses, hoping that it’ll be Grothendieck’s ‘rising sea’.
My experience has been similar. I also believe this is true of Wikipedia articles, and that’s one reason I still engage. I’m less confident that I am making a difference by hosting fulltexts or scanning books, but I figure at some point I can do a time-series analysis of citations as a proxy.
As far as genetics goes, direct interactions haven’t gone too well, especially on Twitter; if you’re dealing with someone who flatly denies that GWAS hits replicate or that sibling comparisons prove causal effects or who claims that all hits are population stratification, at this point, there’s no reasoning with them. So I try to simply publicize a little all the research going on for the hidden masses, hoping that it’ll be Grothendieck’s ‘rising sea’.