The internet is well accepted by society as a great technical milestone in human communication. In many ways, it is. But, as critical thinkers understand, this is just one more misleading mainstream generalization. When humans become a component of a communication system, information handling performance is severely limited. This is due to limits of human brains to manage large amounts of information, flaws in how society uses language, and serious emotional obstacles.
Modern science requires humans to analyze extremely complex information. Human brains have good capabilities to do that in quiet, undisturbed, unrushed environments. Evolved language skills, however, are best adapted to person-to-person dialog and single person oration. Unfortunately, the internet has focused on these "stream of consciousness" styles with formats like email, articles, article and commentary, blogs, and discussion forums. All of these are poor when communicating complex issues that require logical reasoning and exploration of novelty and hidden meanings.
At the 2016 CNPS conference, a presentation was made discussing the detailed limitations of conventional internet communication for scientific discussions. After the conference, some basic outlining tools were applied to an ongoing email discussion among some CNPS members. The goal was to verify and measure the extent of how the limitations were present in that discussion. This presentation explores the results of that study and describes new tools and approaches now being applied using the CNPS Forum to greatly improve cooperative analysis.
