I agree with the author that internet discussions are like graduate seminars, and with other posters that this can be a good way to spread information.

But the problem with graduate seminars since the 1990s has been that, due to new funding models that require huge amounts of time spent on applying for & reporting on funding, professors haven't really had time to go to them anymore. So seminars can be just the brilliant students wandering unguided around intellectual space. Being a useful intellectual isn't just about being smart; it's also about knowing a litany of attractive but ultimately false ideas people have already spent a lot of time exploring.

Where there are concerted efforts by top minds to disseminate their research through blogs, the question becomes one of moderation --- if a site is the place to be, how do you make sure it doesn't get filled up with lower-quality posts that make the time / value benefit too low for serious academics and policy makers to have time for it? Normally by moderating, but this takes time too, and we are back where we started with peer review (not a bad place to be, but a slow one.)

Meanwhile, what if science becomes like the protestant religion, where charismatics who do find it worth their time to moderate their sites and encourage participation start trouncing the people with serious advanced degrees and insight, but unpopular messages. Like the southern baptists shutting their seminaries that did biblical scholarship because they were indicating someone other than the disciples wrote the gospels, the economics that winds up in policy could be dominated by easy answers spouted by likable folks who are rewarded for applying their cleverness to the defense of politically palatable solutions with lucrative consulting and public appearances. And well-informed voters will go along with this because they have read all about the reasons on the political/intellectual blogs they are made to feel most welcome and valuable on. But then, maybe that's not much different from the situation of the last two hundred years, but using newspapers, not blogs.

As someone who follows the cultural evolution of Wikipedia, I've been amazed at the way citation has become the sword for ending revision wars. Currently it is rather indiscriminate citation (e.g. lots of links to hobby websites & vanity press political pamphlets). But if the community has gotten over the hurdle of realizing citations matter, it hopefully won't be too much harder to get to realizing that the quality of citations matters. In which case we will have a way of connecting the work of the brightest minds in the highest-quality journals to the policy -- via the good work of hobbyists and bloggers.

Yeah, sorry, I got taught this in college in the 1980s. You'll find more verbal men and women more capable of spatial manipulation at a university. It turns out that one way to be smart is to be good at what both sexes tend to be good at, rather than just your own. It's depressing that people can get papers off stuff that was already known about decades ago, but science is cultural and culture sometimes forgets.

It's amazing that people spend so much time on these games, but I think it is probably better & more useful than spending that time watching TV -- at least they meet people, and they may do some work.

I once heard Marvin Minsky complaining about all the "trillions of processors" (brain cells) that get wasted during football games on Sunday afternoons, and what you could do with that power if you could harness it. No surprise the Media Lab likes McGonigle!

And yeah, as some posters have pointed out, `private' (anonymous) entertainment is often dominated by porn & violence. But who cares so long as it might be a route towards some people wasting less of their lives.

As for the military, yeah, that's a concern (though of course a lot of what a military does is protect you, so that might be useful!) I'm not sure why they don't just pay people trivial amounts on the Mechanical Turk if they want work done. But anyway, this just means citizens need to be informed & consider what they are getting involved in. The ultimate ARG is democracy, after all.

I agree with one of the early letter writers, people are missing the point of this letter due to a misleading title. Given there's no god and the universe will either expand until every particle is too far away from every other one to affect it, or collapse back into another big bang from which no information of this universe can come out, why get up in the morning?

One of my atheist philosopher friends said that being an atheist is great because you can make up your own meaning. I think he does. I keep looking for a provided one (having grown up religious) even though I know it is arbitrary, like improving the probability that at least for the next few millenia life on earth stays healthy diverse and the quantity of human knowledge, the probability people will be decent to each other, things like that. But if the intellectual stuff runs out on you, you can go back to your biological programming and start having (or adopting) children. Evolution has programmed us to make them ultimate causes of our behaviour. Personally, I find even having graduate students helps.

On the tangential note Older & Wiser brought up about atheists being smart and good but having no chance to run for president, take heart. Atheism is the fastest-growing belief system in the US according to the US census. A summary can be found on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States

see the table on "religious identification". All the more reason to work on th real point here, which is defining meaning without recourse to the supernatural.