I find it distracting when people report typos in the public comments--more distracting than the typos themselves in the actual post. There should be a better interface that: 1) allows users to easily report typos without writing a comment or a direct message 2) drives awareness that the community should help edit posts 3) alerts users that a typo has been reported in a unintrusive way.
Perhaps they can make each line of a post a live link that you can click to view a pop-up box in which you can write an edit. A little red dot in the margin by a line in which a user has reported an error would be enough to let people know it's been taken care of. A little note in the margin that explains the system will help spread the word.
In lieu of a new system--we have to figure out if it's more important to influence the readability of articles or more important to insure the flow of comments is not disrupted. I would argue that the comment flow is way more important, considering how the caliber of the users in this community protect the readability of the articles from any serious jeopardy. The flow of comments, on the other hand, is what makes this forum uniquely nurturing to rational thought. This detailed matrix of connecting ideas is as reflective of the cognitive process as it is supportive of it.
Report a typo, and then reply to your own report. As a footnote to the typo-report, you would ask people to downvote the report so it became hidden, and upvote the daughter-post as a karma-balance.
e.g.
Larks:
You spelt ### wrong.
NB: could everyone please downvote this post so it becomes hidden, and upvote the post below as a karma-balance. If you would like to express disaproval of this post, simply omit to upvote the balance.
Larks:
Karma Balance
I don’t want to be too dogmatic about this claim, but Godzilla is unrealistic. I don’t want to be too non-dogmatic about this claim either. OK then, just how dogmatic should I be? I have all sorts of reasons for thinking that skyscraper sized lizards or dinosaurs don’t actually exist. Honestly, the most important of these is probably that none of the people who I imagine would know if they did exist seem to believe in them. I never hear any mention of them in the news, in history books, etc, and I don’t see their effects in the national death statistics. No industries seem to exist to deal with their rampages, and no oil or shipping companies lose stock value from lizard attacks. Casually, at least, Godzilla attacks don’t seem like the sort of basic fact about the world that people could just overlook. How confident should I be that Godzilla type creatures don't exist?
I can also fairly easily recognize good biological reasons not to expect there to be giant rampaging lizards. The square/cube law, in its many manifestations, is the most basic of these, but by itself is not completely decisive. I can imagine physical workarounds that would allow sequoia giganticus sized reptiles, but not without novel bio-machinery that would take a long time to evolve and would surely be found in many other organisms. I can even vaguely imagine ways in which biology might prove resistant to conventional military weaponry and ecological niches and lifestyles that might support both such biology and such size, though much of my knowledge of Earth’s ecosystems would have to be re-written. For all that, if I lived in a world where essentially all authorities did refer to the activities of godzilla giganticus I would probably accept that they were probably correct regarding its existence. What should a hypothetical person who lived in a world where the existence of Godzilla type creatures was common knowledge and was regarded as an ordinary non-numinous fact about the world believe?
Godzilla would be considerably more perplexing than thunderstones, and would have to be considerably better documented to be credible. Even with the strongest documentation I would have substantial unresolved questions, inferring that Godzilla’s native ecosystem must be quite different from any known (possibly inferring that the details are classified), and even wondering whether Godzilla was a biological creature at all as opposed to, for instance, a giant robot left behind by an advanced and forgotten civilization, a line of inquiry that would greatly increase my credence in secret history of all kinds. For the most part though, I would probably go about life as normal. Even Natural Selection, the most damaged part of my world-view, would endure as a great intellectual triumph explaining the origins of almost all of Earth’s life forms. Only peripheral facts, such as distant history and the nature of some exotic ecosystems would be deeply called into question, and such facts are not tightly integrated with the broader edifice of science. In a conversation with a hypothetical Michael Vassar who believed in Godzilla, the issue would typically not come up. Science in general would not be called into question in my mind, but should it be?