@Jeff @jonsca and @BenBrocka: I had a conversation with an SE team member, and brought up the name change during that. I was advised to focus on growing our community first. The general feedback I got was that we should focus on adding more content to attract users, rather than focusing on the name
I don't believe the team thinks the name is detracting from visitors. You're more than welcome to try and prove them wrong :-)
But we should be concerned with dwindling usage and low active users, visits/views, and low percentage of questions answered.
Also @jonsca and @BenBrocka, I talked a bit about the Mind proposal. It doesn't seem it will be killed off at all. If we want to stop it, we should find a way to make those questions on topic here. As it stands, they are crafting out a topic niche for themselves.
> Which supplements for improving memory have solid research? Is there evidence that they work over the long-term?
?
> Recently, there have been claims that mindfulness-based practices can actually mitigate clinical depression - under what circumstances is this valid?
@JoshGitlin honestly I think the name might be part of that site, easier to grasp. But it being easier to grasp might have brought some of the less desirable users I see all over it's example questions
What came as a shock to me was that questions like this would be acceptable on a Stack Exchange site:
> How should one ideally help treat a friend with depression?
Apparently they're okay with medical / legal advice, given disclaimers and quality controls
So, we might not be able to stop Mind. it might become a pseudoscience junk bin...
@BenBrocka This was mentioned to me also. We're cautioned not to come up with a name that's "too basic" lest we lose academic users)
I hear everyone's concerns over the name, and I've expressed it to the team a few times. I keep getting the response "there's more important issues", so I'm going to focus on the other issues. Don't let that stop you all from voicing your concerns yourselves!
They're thinking "Let the Area 51 process work itself out" :-)
But the example you gave is a good one
They didn't say Mind was on track to get launched or be a good site. They just said that it's not a problem if the questions are wanting others to give medical / layman / non-scientific advice
I'm less concerned about the legal implications (which are probably minimal, which is why they think it's fine) and more concerned about the pseudoscience/nonscience that looks ready to proliferate all over the site
It was Anna I was talking to @Ben, you can ping her in the TL and discuss it with her specifically if you'd like. I can't really explain their logic, because I don't agree. I think we should have Cog Sci and Mind should be closed as a dupe, but...
@BenBrocka I agree, it will be filled with pseudoscience from the looks of it.
One of The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta.
How do we promote our site? How to reach out to the experts and other potential users?
At this stage in the site's development, we're not talking about big events or promotional material, but we need to get the word out that this site exists....
Sadly I am not a researcher or student, and the university here is very small, so I can't do much promotion locally. But I can email professors / universities / groups and try and attract new users that way.
I also want to review our unanswered questions and see if we can find out why we're at only 81%
@BenBrocka @JoshGitlin If you'd like an outsider's point of view, here's my 2 cents. I've been following the newsletter for a while now as I'm somewhat working in the area, though coming from computer science, I rarely have anything quite suitable (question or answer) - I think I managed a single question on this site.
@Indolering Feel free to either ask in here, or start a new chat room (or I can do this for you). Chat is a great place for subjective questions like that
But from reading the questions in the newsletter, I get the feeling that CogSci has a similar problem to most SE sites that, in this case, just gets exacerbated by its nature: Amateurs ask questions and experts answer
That's great for the amateurs in most cases, but can get frustrating quickly for the experts. In an area like CogSci, it is much harder for an amateur to ask a question that an expert finds interesting (as opposed to a novice programmer stumbling across an interesting quirk of C that the experts then go mad over trying to figure out)
@ThomasH I agree. I wish I could help with this more; however, I am an amateur in this area. As a moderator, I bring great experience with the Stack Exchange system, but not much experience with Cognitive Sciences.
I'd love to see the site be used by experts, with experts answering each other's questions. I learn a lot from reading expert questions. But I don't have the expertise to ask them myself.
@Indolering I personally don't, but I starred your message, maybe some of our other users do. If they respond to you, you'll get notified, even if it's days or weeks later
You could also start a chat room for recommendations, where the only thing people post are links. This way you get something similar to a forum post. No right answer, just a list of links.
For something to be considered a mental disorder worthy of it's own definition, it needs to have some really strong effects that are consistently different from others definitions and are not explained by co-morbidity of others.
ADHD, OCD, and Tourettes all exhibit co-morbidity and common brain...
I think that the question is totally inappropriate
@Indolering I saw a flag for that question. I didn't close it, because the question has some value, and I think it can be on topic. I might try my hand at editing it to improve it
It's a borderline question, it already had my down vote
@Indolering Agree, this is, unfortunately, the kind of question most visitors to the site see all the time, along with "I sometimes have the same thought as my dog at the exactly same time, what's the scientific explanation for that?"
@ThomasH It's a chicken/egg problem though. How do you get experts when a site doesn't already have those expert questions, so experts look around and think "ahah, this is a site for experts in X!"
@JoshGitlin Might? Hehe, well, they are welcome to try, but I think it will sully the good SE name when it becomes Brainzforumz.com. If they start doling out medical advice, it may be time for me to turn in the old moderator hat
They do have experience in building Q&A Communities though ;-) And they have the final say on our status, and if they tell me that as a mod I should be focused on things other than the name, then, I'm going to focus on things other than the name.
But like I said, don't let that stop you from speaking out!
This community belongs to all of us, we should all have a part in shaping it to be what we want
During discussions about a possible merger with the Neuroinformatics proposal see this Meta.cogsci question, on the related discuss.area51 post a comment was made about whether the name of the site is inclusive enough. (More on evidence of name confusion)
While I have always "gotten" that Cognit...
If someone asks "How can I stop my friend from killing him or herself?" or even "How do I get them out of depression?" and it backfires
I know there will be people smart enough to respond "GET THEM HELP", but some jackass will say "take 16 gallons of Ginko Biloba extract" and somehow that will be easier and make more sense to the person asking the question
@jonsca I'm not sure, I think parenting.SE gets a lot of self-help and somewhat medical questions and it seems to be a fairly decent site (judging from semi-official comments about it, I've never actually been to the site)
Well, just like you guys though that I was full of shit when I got pissed off about drug recommendation questions on our site a long long time ago, I think they probably view me the same way.
@JoshGitlin I see about the name now. To me (an amateur) CogSci has always been fairly umbrella, too. I still wouldn't be able to give a definition of it. Brain and Behaviour, while catchy, would, in my opinion, deter a lot of the more academic clientele, I would wager
@JoshGitlin I do agree though that there's an awful number of depression-related question on the mind proposal already, and they got a far bigger potential to backfire than "Help, my toddler won't eat anything but carrots, should I go see a doctor?"
@jonsca I share your ethical concerns. I wasn't ready to make a fight over Mind today (I was more concerned with Cog Sci's current status), but if it continues to gain traction, let's talk. I'll bring up my concerns again.
I've got to roll up my sleeves and handle a few. I have pulled articles for a couple in the past few months, but I haven't had much of a chance to read them enough to do an answer justice
I'd be in real trouble if my mom joined the chat! "Josh, you always tell me you can't call me because you're so busy working, but you're always in this chat thingadongdong!"
Also I think I would die of laughter if my mother said "thingadongdong" (CC @TimStone)
One of The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta.
How do we promote our site? How to reach out to the experts and other potential users?
At this stage in the site's development, we're not talking about big events or promotional material, but we need to get the word out that this site exists....
For something to be considered a mental disorder worthy of it's own definition, it needs to have some really strong effects that are consistently different from others definitions and are not explained by co-morbidity of others.
ADHD, OCD, and Tourettes all exhibit co-morbidity and common brain...
The Axon Terminal
The Axon Terminal