Philosophical naivety

Attentive readers of this blog will know that I have been working on a book about Wikipedia for the past year. As part of the background research, I have been reading Lewis Hyde’s book Common as Air. The following passage deserves quoting in full:

The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion once addressed himself to the puzzle of how to psychoanalyze a liar and at one point in his argument he makes this striking claim: "The lie requires a thinker to think. The truth, or true thought, does not require a thinker—he is not logically necessary."

What can this mean? Bion compares the working psychoanalyst to a scientist, and in the case of science the point would seem to be that truths of the natural world are independent of the particular people who conceive of them. If Franklin and his friends were right that electrical charges always appear in equal and opposite amounts, the correctness of the insight would still exist had they never been born. Once the Leyden jar had been invented, someone else would have soon come upon this truth. Similarly, once Franklin declared his idea, anyone else could do the experiments in question and arrive at the same conclusion. Of "work that corroborates the discovery of others," Bion writes, "even if it requires a thinker it does not require a particular thinker and in this resembles truths—thoughts that require no thinker." Human minds in general are where such thoughts appear, but these thoughts do not depend on any one such mind.

The point gains clarity by way of its opposite: "The lie and its thinker are inseparable," Bion writes. "The thinker is of no consequence to the truth ... In contrast, the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar." Lies require a liar, and as such they say something about the liar, they are thus better fitted than truths to the task of gratifying the self-regard or narcissism of the individual who makes them. Any work that simply replicates a truth known to others lacks narcissistic appeal. No "I" can get much from it. When it comes to truth, however, as the poet Rimbaud wrote, "it is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought"

Eighteenth-century thinkers might have framed ideas such as these not so much in terms of truth versus lies as of truth versus opinions. Opinion, in Franklin's day, acted as a sort at middle term between truth and error, denoting any belief that was not yet, or could never be, confirmed by sense experience, experiment, and reason. Like lies in Bion's view, opinions reside with particular peoples in particular places. Englishmen in London observe the first day of the week as their day of worship, Turks in Constantinople observe the sixth: there may be truth in one case and error in the other, but no experiment or line of logic will tell us which is which. True knowledge, on the other hand, does not suffer the contingency of opinion. Lightning is electricity no matter if it is described by Dalibard in Paris or by Franklin in Philadelphia. As Newton suggested in his "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy", the cause of the tailing of stones should be the same "in Europe and in America"; the cause of "the reflection of light* should be die same "on our earth and the planets."

Opinions can never be detached from persons and places in that way. More to the point, because they require a thinker, as Bion says of lies, opinions are potentially divisive. Truth, needing no particular embodiment, can lead to concord; opinion, on the other hand, produces sects and tactions, and makes it difficult to move from any group of private selves to "the public good."

What is he on about? It is a wonderful example of “the confusions and absurdities of scientists and science journalists when they encroach ineptly upon philosophical territory”, as Vallicella neatly puts it (although Hyde is not a scientist, but a professor of creative writing). Taking the points in turn.

“… truths of the natural world are independent of the particular people who conceive of them”. Of course, but so are falsehoods. It is false that the earth is flat, and it is false that the moon is made of green cheese. These falsehoods are equally independent of the particular people who conceive of them. And yes, the correctness of the insight that electrical charges always appear in equal and opposite amounts would still exist had Franklin never been born. But equally, the claim that there is substance with negative weight that is released during combustion would be incorrrect, even if the inventor of the phlogiston theory (Johann Becher ) had never been born. If Hyde means that truth is mind-independent in some way that falsity is not, he is wrong. Both are mind-independent.

“.. once Franklin declared his idea, anyone else could do the experiments in question and arrive at the same conclusion”. Certainly, but the essential repeatability of scientific experiments is based on certain assumptions about causality, to which logical and epistemological issues are irrelevant. Certain true or false claims can be tested by experiment. Others cannot, e.g. claims about life after death, claims about parts of the universe which we could never possibly observe.

“Human minds in general are where such thoughts appear, but these thoughts do not depend on any one such mind”. False. Any thought depends on a thinker, and any thinker must have a mind. What Hyde probably means is that the truth of such thoughts is mind-independent. Sure, but as noted above, the falsity of such thoughts is mind-independent too.

“Lies require a liar, and as such they say something about the liar, they are thus better fitted than truths to the task of gratifying the self-regard or narcissism of the individual who makes them”.  To start with, this confuses lying with falsehood. A lie is an utterance known to be false, uttered with the intention to deceive. An actor is not a liar (not having the intention to deceive). One who utters a falsehood in good faith is not lying (because he or she does not realise it is a falsehood). And why shouldn’t truths be equally well-fitted to gratify self-regard? We often assert things we believe to be true in order to increase the esteem or regard in which others hold us. Why should truth be privileged over falsehood in this respect?

“… as the poet Rimbaud wrote, "it is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought" ” It is unclear how this observation about thinking relates to truth and falsehood. If I think that the earth is flat, can’t I equally say that ‘I am thought’?

“Eighteenth-century thinkers might have framed ideas such as these not so much in terms of truth versus lies as of truth versus opinions.” The definition of opinion that he attributes to Franklin is idiosyncratic, and does not seem true of other eighteenth-century thinkers (Hume? Reid? Adam Smith?)

“… opinions are potentially divisive” Why? Is he suggesting that the truth is somehow privileged, that, merely as truth, it has some inherent power denied to error? I discussed Mill’s view on that here. “A piece of idle sentimentality”, Mill says, “which all experience refutes”.

Argument by analogy and copyright infringement

There's an interesting argument on Jimmy Wales Wikipedia talk page, that deserves the attention of logicians. Jimmy has organised a petition against the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer, the Sheffield student who ran a website linking to and (apparently) streaming copyrighted material. Some called 'Incu Master' argues

If someone facilitates credit card fraud, using the credit card numbers of US citizens, helping US citizens commit fraud against other US citizens, and taking a cut of the "profits", while running a website served out of Sweden from his/her home in the UK, and gets extradited to the US, would you be writing a petition to stop the extradition? It seems you are saying there is something special about copyright law in this regard, and I don't understand it because you seem to agree that copyright infringement is, and should be, illegal. Incu Master (talk) 14:10, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Jimmy replies

I think one question that has been raised repeatedly in this thread is one that makes no sense. No, I would not launch a petition to save someone from extradition for credit card fraud. But you can't conclude from that anything about my position on credit card fraud or how bad it is relative to copyright infringement nor how I privately think credit card fraud should be dealt with legally, etc. For a variety of reasons, demands on my time among them, I don't take a personal interest in every issue on earth. I am not particularly knowledgeable about the laws surrounding credit card fraud, nor do I have any particular reason to become interested. I am not interested enough in the issue to get involved at all. Nor would the general public be particularly interested in my views on the matter, as I am not known in that field.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:18, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't follow his reply. Incu's argument is a version of 'argument from analogy'. Here are two similar cases X and Y. Why is your judgment about X so different from your judgment about Y, given the formal similarity between them? Facilitating credit card theft is illegal in both countries, and merits extradition. Facilitating copyright theft is illegal in both countries, and merits extradition. If you don't organise petitions against one, then logically you don't organise petitions against the other. Jimbo's reply is that there is a difference, namely he doesn't have an interest in credit card fraud, and that he is not particularly knowledgeable about it. So, logically, and given that he does regard facilitating copyright theft as illegal, it is OK to organise petitions against extradition for illegal activities, so long as you have an interest in it, and you are particularly knowledgeable about it?

Free culture looters

The stupid Internet is buzzing about the case of Richard O'Dwyer, a 24 year old British student at Sheffield University in the UK, who is facing extradition to the USA and up to ten years in prison, for creating a website – TVShack.net – which linked to places to watch TV and movies online. The pro-piracy chief of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, writes in the Guardian. Phrases like "encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood" are chock-full of power words like 'moguls', 'civil liberties', 'interests' and so on. But as I commented here, the piracy dispute is essentially between the hugely powerful advertising industry and the hugely powerful entertainment industry. Obviously content creators have their civil liberties too. This writer put it well*.

What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?

By analogy, what O'Dywer was doing (as someone has already pointed out in a comment on Jimmy's post), was running a site where people could post up the location of the shops where the owners were absent, and had poor security locks, or open windows, so that the looters could go there as well. So I am not impressed with the claim that "I wasn't a looter myself".

Jimmy also discusses it on Wikipedia, where he objects to a mischievous claim that the Wikipedia's pro-piracy and looting-support vote back in January was by IPs or newly-registered accounts. ("Spirits from the vasty deeps"). As I commented in January, there certainly was a significant amount of voting of this kind.

*Link fixed.

Is slavery harmful?

Larry Sanger's recent post brought out the usual idiotic comments. But some thoughtful and clever comments too, in particular from someone called 'Carl Gombrich' who I suspect is the grandson of E.H. Gombrich. Some asked for evidence which supports Larry's implicit assumption that pornography is harmful to children. Gombrich replies, asking whether there is any evidence that slavery is harmful.

[…] as far as I know there is nothing we could really call evidence to show that slavery is bad, either collectively or for individuals kept as slaves. Are those refusing to move on restricting the access of children to pornography therefore in favour of legalising slavery until we have ‘evidence’ (presumably a longitudinal study over many years involving several hundred people, control groups etc) to show that slavery is harmful? Specifically that it is so harmful to individuals that it should therefore be outlawed? If they do not advocate such a move, why don’t they? That is the logic of the position: no evidence, no move.

But the important point is that slavery is bad, and the argument that it is bad was successfully made on moral grounds by previous generations in the West. That is why it is outlawed in many countries.

Now ask: is it better or worse for children to come across hardcore pornography? We are talking children, not adolescents searching out of curiosity or for arousal, but children, for whom sexuality is a very different thing. I would like to know the libertarian answer to this question. If you think it is better that children do not see hardcore pornography, then we should something about the fact that, increasingly, many of them do.

What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?

By Larry Sanger here.  The logic of arguments for and against porn is interesting, although I don't have a great deal of time to go into it now.  The top level argument, as it were, is that people, i.e. all people, should have the right to see absolutely whatever they like, and that any restriction is an encroachment upon freedom.  The objection to this is that not all people, namely young children, should have this right.  Then we encounter all sorts of counter-objections and replies to the counter-objections.  For example, what exactly is wrong with children seeing such images.  If sex good or not?  If it is good, why shouldn't children participate in the good, etc etc.  Larry (who is a philosopher) covers some of these arguments in his post.

At least Augustine had a clear approach to this.  Sex, or rather shame about sex, is the result of original sin. I'll look up the reference some time.

Schools Wikipedia

Jon Davies (Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK) gave me a 'Schools Wikipedia' CD which I gratefully accepted along with a Wikimedia UK coffee mug, which I use for my early morning mug (thank you Jon!).

I didn't look at the disc until today, fearing what horrors there might be, but actually it is quite good. It has clearly been edited to remove the worst of the grammatical abominations. The pictures are a more sensible size so there is none of that ugly white space, and, best of all, no footnotes except where necessary. The links to the very worst article have been removed.

Yet there is one more thing of great significance. When I checked the Age of Enlightenment article, it was much better than the version of the article I criticised here. For example, I criticised the current article (permalink) as stating that the Age of Enlightenment was a movement when, as its name suggests, it is a period. The schools article, by contrast, correctly states that it is a period after all.

Sigh of relief that the corruption of our schoolchildren is not imminent, at least in this case. But why the difference? Had the mistakes been edited out by professionals? Well, probably not. A bit of research shows that the school version dates from around October 2005. Which bears out what I have always said. A lot of reasonably good people were contributing to Wikipedia around that time, then left after a wave of vandalism and trolling hit the project in 2006. The vandalism was like 'drinking water from a firehose'. This was countered by a massive increase in the number of vandal fighters, but at the same time and by that very token the project was turning from building into an encyclopedia, which requires certain skills, to protecting against vandals, as well as running a secret intelligence force that would have made Stalin proud, and this requires different skills.

Very significant that the quality of Wikipedia has got demonstrably worse over 2005-12.

Apples and oranges (and cherries)

"You are comparing apples with oranges". How many times have you heard that argument. Is it valid? Depends. Clearly apples and oranges are different species, and insofar as they are different, it is wrong to make a comparison. Yet they are of the same genus. If the objection is about a fruit-related claim, without regard to species of fruit, it is invalid. For example, you claim that all fruit is completely safe to eat. I object that cherries contain hydrogen cyanide, which is not completely safe to eat. You reply "You are comparing apples with oranges (or perhaps cherries)". Invalid. If cherries are fruit, and if cherries are not completely safe to eat, then it is false that all fruit is completely safe to eat. It is no good claiming that I am comparing apples with oranges, if I am talking about fruit.

The fallacy is obvious in this case, but it is frequently abused, and there some wonderful examples on Jimmy Wales talk page here, in a discussion about the 'paid editing' problem. Wikipedians don't like paid editing, because they see it as a 'conflict of interest'. If you are paid, your interest is to write an article satisfying the interests of the person making the payment, not the interests of a comprehensive, reliable and neutral reference work. That is bad, so paid editing is bad. Now someone has (rightly, in my view) objected that the same principle applies to any case where there is a conflict of interest.

I really, truly don’t understand why someone who gets $1000 to edit an article is more inclined to violate our policies (WP:NPOV, etc.) someone who is a “true fan” committed to showing the world how great their favorite team/singer/restaurant, or someone who is absolutely certain that Ethnic group X is better than Ethnic group Y. I don’t understand why we want or need a special policy to deal with one specific form of motivation, when we have a perfectly good set of policies that govern all forms of biased and improper editing behavior.

Wales replies. "You are positing a competition between two things that are completely different. Apples and oranges." Fallacy. Of course paid editing is different from "favourite band" editing. One is motivated by money, the other is motivated by a fanatical obsession with some stupid 'band'. These are different species of editing, just as apples and oranges are different species of fruit. But they are the same genus for all that. The genus is 'conflicted editing', and one case of conflicted editing is not 'completely different', qua genus than any other case. If it is wrong in the one case, why is it not wrong in the other, at least if the wrongness flows from the genus, rather then the species.

Wales goes on: "the incentives before them and the motivations are different". Certainly, as species of editing. But the question is whether the different incentives and motivations involve a conflict or not, and surely they do. Then he says that one size does not fit all, which is another, frequently encountered, version of the fallacy. Of course one size does not fit all, if the cases are different sizes. But the original claim may have had nothing to do with 'size'. Another editor objects that it is 'self evident' that money is special, and that it is "ridiculous to posit otherwise". How so? It is self evident that oranges are special qua species, and not the same as cherries, apples, bananas etc. But they are all the same insofar as they are fruit. The question is whether the different cases (favourite band editing, nationalistic editing) involve a conflict of interest, and surely they all do. Payment is just one instance of a general, problematic case.

Later on the real reason comes out: unpaid editors would be demoralised if paid editing. That is a valid objection: conflicted editing that is demoralising is specifically different from conflicted editing that is not. But that had to be spelled out.

Wikipedia, Britannica and Wales

Lest anyone accuse me of bias against the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, here is something about the inadequacy of its arch-rival Britannica, and its articles about Wikipedia.

Britannica on the origin and growth of Wikipedia: " In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, Calif., to establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company."

On Jimmy Wales: "From 1994 to 2000 he was an options trader in Chicago, amassing enough money to allow him to quit and start his own Internet company."

There are almost too many errors to count. First mistake, if you are going to be wrong, at least be consistently wrong.  Elementary logic suggests it is unlikely that he was both in Chicago and San Diego at the same time, unless he was commuting frequently.  Was he a bond trader or an options trader?  Did he start Bomis in 1996 or 2000?

Second, the facts, as far as I can establish.  Wales never traded bonds but rather futures and options, which are derivatives of bonds and other interest rate instruments.  He was probably not trading to begin with, as he joined Chicago Options Associates in June 1994 as a research associate.  He probably stopped trading in 1998, although he gives conflicting accounts of his time as a trader.  He moved to San Diego around August 1998, not 2000.  He had already established Bomis in 1996, but not as a Web portal company, that came slightly later, probably in October 1997.  Wales and the other founder, Tim Shell, explored many other ideas, including an online takeaway service, before they settled on the idea of the 'portal'.

What else?  There is no compelling evidence that Wales was a 'successful' trader.  In early interviews such as this, he claimed that he had made enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives. In later interviews, such as with Andrew Lih (author of the Wikipedia Revolution, which contains a mostly accurate account of the Wales's early years), he said he simply made 'enough'.

The price of knowledge

At least one commenter has spotted the problem about the application of Hayek's paper and Wikipedia. Hayek's central argument is that organisation is best made by people who are familiar with local circumstances, who know directly of the relevant change in circumstances and have the resources immediately available to meet them. No central planner can have this knowledge of circumstance. Thus organisation is best performed – and is being performed in many cases – by a decentralised price system.

Now if there were an analogy between price-based decentralisation and Wikipedia's decentralisation, there would have to be a way for consumers to signal demand for knowledge by paying for it, and a way for the 'miners' of that knowledge to be compensated by digging deep into the earth of information, trying to find veins of wisdom running through the slag of trivia, or by refining the crude ore containing knowledge thinly spread, into the pure metal of subtle and profound wisdom.

There is no such mechanism in Wikipedia. It is paid for by an annual fundraiser which appeals for donations to collect 'the sum of human knowledge', without any mechanism for donors to sponsor chosen articles containing parts of that sum. Even if such targeting were possible, there is no way of directing donations to individual 'knowledge miners'. All editors of Wikipedia are unpaid volunteers*. This fact has already been noted by Harvard researcher Andreea D. Gorbatai in 2011, who questioned whether collective production such as in Wikipedia creates social utility.

Now there is a sort of reward system on Wikipedia whereby editors can achieve non-financial status similar to kindergarten 'stars'. But follow-ups on Wikipedia to Gorbatai's study concluded that this reward system was perverse, with greater recognition being given to editors producing large numbers of low importance articles than to editors producing small numbers of high importance articles.  An article in the Wikipedia signpost concluded -

- It is interesting to compare the most prominent author of high importance articles at low production rates, Garrondo, with the most prominent author of low importance articles at high production rates, Ucucha. Garrondo has written one FA, Parkinson’s disease in 2011. Ucucha has produced 14 FAs on rare, Latin-named, mammal species. Garrondo has a lousy strategy for climbing up the WBFAN. However, when we look at the impact of the two editors' articles for the readers, there is little question. Because the single Parkinson’s disease article has 180 times the views as Ucucha’s average article, Garrondo achieved 13 times the total contribution to reader-viewed FA content. The problem is all our systems of rewards, all our tracking systems, all our unconscious assumptions, talk page remarks, and so on simply talk about number of stars…instead of the importance of them. We are incentivising the high production of low importance articles and discouraging the opposite. Yet the latter strategy is the more efficient way to serve the readers. [My emphasis]

This provoked fury from Wikipedia's established editors. The discussion is here - beware the heated and often incoherent ranting.

There is another, more subtle, question here. The 'market mechanism' assumes that what consumers want is what they actually need (or rather, it makes no distinction but wanting and needing). There is an older tradition, dating from at least Plato, that the ordinary mass of human beings don't really know what they need, or what is really good for them. The most recent proponent of this view was Lord Reith of the BBC, who believed that broadcasting should be 'an authoritarian system with a conscience', carrying to the greatest number of people everything that is 'best' in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement, and to avoid whatever is 'harmful'. He was criticised for not giving the public what it wanted but he replied that few people know what they want, and fewer still know what they need. I discuss that in an old post here.

*Except for paid editors, of course, who are employed by public relations agencies or rich individuals to embellish articles about their clients, or themselves. But that's another problem.

Wikipedia, Hayek and the marketplace

'Belette' comments here that "there is no marketplace on wiki". Well perhaps there isn't, but its founders certainly thought there is. Hayek's paper about market mechanisms "The Use of Knowledge in Society" is supposed by some, not least by Jimmy Wales himself, to be the model for Wikipedia. You can read the paper for yourself, but Hayek's central argument is that there are two types of knowledge, namely knowledge of the eternally true, scientific sort of stuff that you read about in books, and knowledge of "circumstance", i.e. of little facts peculiar to a time or place, knowledge of which "never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess." Hayek argues that all economic activity is planning, but all planning must be based on knowledge which is not initially available to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. Which is the best way of utilising this knowledge: central planning or the use of a price mechanism?

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply.

Wales claims (in an email to me) that this idea underpins his whole thinking about Wikipedia. Larry Sanger also had some similar ideas which he expressed in a mini-essay here in 2001.

Academia is sometimes compared to the marketplace of ideas. That's also an apt description of Wikipedia at present: it's unregulated (except for some basic ground rules), and anyone can come in and "set up shop" (write an article), but other "business owners" (contributors) can "compete" (improve the article) according to their understanding of what the facts are, what the best way to express them is, etc. Competition improves articles. Regulation tends to stifle free competition."

Why Wikipedia's Fans Shouldn't Gloat

A wonderful wonderful article in The Atlantic. It speaks for itself, no further comment required.

The 'one ring' theory of cranks

I'm still working on the Wikipedia book, looking today at the history of the 'three revert rule', introduced in November 2004. This says that “An editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period”, theoretically puts an end to the endless edit/revert cycle between warring editors.  In theory, it is a numbers game which gives the edge to subject matter experts. As I understand the rule (I'm sure Belette will correct me if I am wrong) it applies per player, not per group of players.  Two players working together can revert a single opponent up to six times a day, but the opponent, if on their own, can revert only three times.  Thus whoever has the largest number on their side, wins the edit war.

This seems to give the edge to subject matter experts because generally (though not always) they tend to agree, at least on the kind of slightly out of date knowledge that is appropriate for reference works.  Cranks, by contrast, have their own theory of everything which is peculiar to itself and inconsistent with every other crank theory of everything. The theory that the earth is flat and the theory that it is a cube are both opposed to the mainstream theory that it is roughly spherical, but they contradict each other too. Likewise for the theories that the moon is made of cheese, and that it is made of candy floss. Thus 3 experts can beat any number of cranks, so long as the cranks don't agree on anything.

However, neurologist Steven Novella makes an insightful observation here that brings this idea into question.

... cranks around the world have been able to form their own “alternative” community, publish their own journals, and have their own meetings. There is just one requirement in this alternative community – acceptance. All ideas are accepted (there is no chaff, all is wheat), that is except for one. Whatever is accepted by mainstream science is wrong [my emphasis]. That is “the one ring” of crank mythology, that brings all crank theories together and in the darkness of their community binds them together. Otherwise they are largely mutually incompatible. Each crank’s “theory of everything” is a notion unto itself, and is mutually exclusive to every other crank’s own theory of everything (unless there is some incidental overlap). So they get together, present their theories without criticism, and all agree that the evil conspiracy of mainstream science must be taken down. Of course, if any of them got their way and their ideas became accepted, they would instantly become rejected by the rest of the crank community as mainstream physics.

Correct.  My enemy's enemy is my friend, whatever my enemy believes.  I have seen this effect in Wikipedia a number of times.  Cranks unite to defeat the mainstream, orthodox view.  Orthodox editors get blocked or banned.  Cranks then war with each other, and get banned themselves. The orthodox editors mount appeals to the powers that be - the arbitration committee, none of whom have any expert credentials as far as I can see, and get unbanned.  Or they just open 'sockpuppet' accounts and start editing again under a different name. So do the cranks, and the whole nightmare begins again.  Another difficulty that Novella omits is 'mainstream' crankery.  That is, bad science or quackery that unites its practitioners by financial interest. Homeopathy and 'Neurolinguistic programming' are good examples of this.

This would not matter at all, if Wikipedia were not increasingly used as a 'reliable source' by students, and even some medical researchers, as I noted in an earlier post.

Jimmy Wales, civil servant

So Jimmy Wales is to become an advisor to the British government. Is he going to make the workings of government more like Wikipedia? Here are a few suggestions.

Remove all that stuff about qualifications, Oxbridge, classics education and all that fuddy duddy old world elitist nonsense. The first thing is that everyone should have an equal say in the way that the health service, the financial system, tax collection and so on are run. And why stop at the people who work there? Why not open the doors of government completely, on the lines of an 'open source' software collective? Remove those turnstiles, guards, doors, just let anyone walk in off the street and work at anyone's desk. Give them access to any kind of file they want. The only requirement is that they get a numbered ticket at the front door, which they must use to get in again. (Don't worry if they lose their tickets, they can simply ask for a new one).

Obviously this may result in the destruction or loss of confidential or important information. But that doesn't matter. Wikipedia managed with an elite corps of patrollers who can check instantly whether information, whatever it is, has been changed or destroyed. They will back up all the information and as soon as some common vandal comes in from the street and messes something up, they will restore things to the way they were before, and take away the entrance ticket of the vandal. (Of course, the vandal can easily get another ticket, but don't worry about that).

Angry disputes about how the country should be run are inevitable, so there should be a 'civility code' against shouting, politically incorrect insults and so forth. This is so important that it should be enforced by an elite hierarchy of administrators. In fact, the only role to promotion in the new Civil Service should be through this hierarchy. Again, forget that nasty old elitist thing about Oxbridge and education. The only thing that matters is the ability to break up fights and to punish those who seem to have started the fight. This does not require any knowledge or understanding of what the fight was about. You could go round asking the people who work at the doors of pubs or clubs, in case they are interested in a permanent job.

This way, the British Civil Service will become much more efficient.

The Encyclopedia Game

There's an fascinating new documentary in the making. The website is here with some promotional clips here.

"Wikipedia is a massive online free encyclopedia. It's one of the most visited sites on the web, with two billion hits every month. With the stated goal of compiling the sum of all human knowledge, it's the most used reference source in the world. Yet, at any given moment, it may contain information that is completely untrue and misleading. How can this be?

"The world of Wikipedia, which many assume to be a collegial community of experts collaborating to write an encyclopedia, often more closely resembles an arena in which personal conflict and gang warfare are standard operating procedures. Wikipedians are collaborating to write the world’s largest and most used encyclopedia, but their behaviors often more closely resemble those of a large group of anonymous characters playing a vast and intricate online game in which “writing an encyclopedia” merely provides the basic scenario and context within which the game is played".

That seems about right. I have identified the accounts in question, plus quite a few more that the site doesn't mention, and this is probably the most skilled 'sockmaster' I have ever seen. But to understand what a 'sockmaster' is I will have to explain one of the fundamental design flaws of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was set up in 2001 by free culture types, who believe that knowledge should be both free and open. Free means, well, free, and I can deal with that, and open means user-generated, which is more problematic. Having anyone edit means that anyone can open an account without restriction. Indeed, the same person can open as many accounts as they like without restriction. This is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia, and is unlikely ever to change, given the politics and ideology of the people who run the site. Add to this the premise that people generally edit for selfish reasons, as I argued here, and you have two nicely toxic ingredients. If you have some passionate belief in some piece of nonsense – it doesn't matter what the nonsense is – then you want the nonsense in Wikipedia. Given that other people may oppose the nonsense, then you will want to stack the argument with as many multiple accounts or 'sockpuppets' as you can create, defending the nonsense against all comers.

This takes some skill. Using sockpuppets to stack the vote is a (theoretically) a banning offence on Wikipedia, unless you are a highly influential member of the administration. So ideally at least one of your socks is an administrator, which this guy was*. In addition, the rest of the sockpuppets should not be 'single purpose'. If they all start to edit just the one article, you will normally be caught out pretty quickly. So you edit in many different and non-overlapping subject areas, occasionally editing the subject in dispute. At crucial moments you bring the socks together, usually to gain consensus, or stack a vote, or to bypass the '3RR'** rule. This all takes time and effort, but young people with an agenda and time on their hands can manage that. The achievement of Cognition was to add significant content in various contentious areas without being caught out. I haven't yet checked to see how much of the nonsense is still there, but it is likely to be significant. The main point, as the character says, is that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, and the skill required to participate in it are more aligned to John le Carre, than Diderot.

And he is still editing.

* I can imagine Belette's dorsal fins flapping here. No, not with the Cognition account.
** 3RR = three revert. If you revert someone's edit more than three times, you can be blocked.  So you get your socks to do some of the reverting.  Of course your opponent will be using socks too.  It is not uncommon to see what looks like a whole crowd of people arguing with each other, when in reality there are just two.  Sometimes there is only one!  Really skilled sockmasters will create good/bad hand accounts to increase the appearance of reality, often putting silly arguments in the mouths of the bad hand account in order to refute them more surely, and to make the opposition look foolish.

The medical condition known as glucojasinogen

Here is the lovely example, possibly the best yet, of what I have called Wikipedia faction.  This is where some nonsense information gets added to Wikipedia and stays there long enough for 'reliable sources' to pick it up, so that Wikipedia can then cite the reliable sources for the nonsense.

In 2007 an anonymous IP adds this entry to the Wikipedia article on diabetic neuropathy.

It is important to note that people with diabetes are more likely to develop symptoms relating to peripheral neuropathy as the excess glucose in the blood results in a condition known as Glucojasinogen. This condition is affiliated with erectile dysfunction and epigastric tenderness which in turn results in lack of blood flow to the peripheral intrapectine nerves which govern the movement of the arms and legs.

It's nonsense of course (we spent some time going through a medical dictionary to check).  The nonsense then got picked up by two journals: "Influence of Murraya koenigii on experimental model of diabetes and progression of neuropathic pain" by S.V. Tembhurne and D.M. Sakarkar, Journal of Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2010, and African Journals Online (which cites the same paper).  It is now visible in Google scholar.

It would have been more amusing if the sources actually had been added, to complete the circle.  But then it's not amusing at all, is it.  It's one thing to get most of the key facts about medieval philosophers completely wrong.  That just damages learning.  It's another to slander someone in public, under the umbrella of a supposedly comprehensive and reliable reference work.  That merely damages someone's reputation or even destroys their career.  But getting important medical information wrong can damage someone's health or life.  That's not amusing.  In fact none of it is amusing. 

The Wikipedians, by contrast, are having a bit of a laugh about it.  Another Wikipedia hoax. The IP editor even got a special 'barnstar'.  This is part of the frustration of the place.  If something goes desperately wrong, it's a bit of a giggle.  Challenge any of this from the outside, however, and you are immediately pointed in the direction of the famous 'Nature' article in 2005. "Wikipedia articles come close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopedia Britannica".

Logic Museum ban lowered

Somewhat to my surprise, the ban on Logic Museum Wikipedia links has been removed. However, plenty of absurdity still remains. It now has a special page to itself here. This means that a special team of Wikipedians, none of whom has any expertise in medieval Latin, to my knowledge, has been assigned to monitor any links to the museum added by a 'non trusted' person, and delete them. So anyone who added a link to this question by Duns Scotus, "Whether a material substance is individual through its actual existence" is in danger of being banned.

The oddity is that this kind of censorship doesn't bother Wikipedians, even though they are extremely bothered by other kinds of censorship. Thus this article on the pornographer Luke Ford has a number of links to porn sites, and this user managed to upload more than 25,000 pictures of porn stars onto Wikipedia's image repository.

What's so dangerous about medieval Latin, that Wikipedia readers are not allowed to see it?

Wikipedia article feedback

I have just been looking at the Wikipedia rating system. You go to the bottom of an article and click 'view ratings' to see what the crowd thinks of its trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness and quality of writing.

First of all, I don't understand the distinction between 'trustworthy' and 'objective'. Could an article be rated as objective, but utterly untrustworthy?  Or lacking any kind of objectivity, but entirely trustworthy?  In any case, I can make little sense of the results, when picking on articles that I know are poorly written, incomplete and untrustworthy, but which the system rates as well-written, complete etc.

For example, I've commented on the Ockham article many times, e.g. here.  There are many errors and many omissions, and the quality of the writing essentially depends on your view of how easy it is to combine paragraphs from the Catholic Encyclopedia with paragraphs of drivel. How are the lay public supposed to judge on the completeness of coverage of a subject when the whole point of an encyclopedia is to inform them about it?  How can they judge its objectivity? I agree that they might be able to judge the quality of the writing, but even this stinker, which has a quality template slapped on it, doesn't score that badly.

Interestingly this one, on Roscellinus, which I can see is a combination of the Catholic Encyclopedia and Britannica 1911, scores worse on quality of writing than the awful ones above.  But it's quite well-written, although the style is somewhat antequated. Perhaps the reason is its use of much longer sentences and paragraphs.  Perhaps the 4chan generation prefers articles with short paragraphs and short sentences.  So perhaps we can blame the internet yet again, he says, sounding like an old fart aged 70 who reads the Daily Mail.

(I had a look at 4chan yesterday but that is a subject for another vituperative, old fart kind of post).

Spamming in medieval Latin

The discussion continues on Wikipedia about whether links to the Logic Museum constitutes 'spam' or not.  It descends into ever deeper levels of absurdity.  E.g. "There is not much spamming in Medieval Latin these days".  Very true.

I see also that the article on Ockham's magnificient Summa Logicae has now been protected against vandalism.  When Wikipedia goes wrong, it goes very very wrong.

De dicto in Wikipedia

I'm glad to see that something may (possibly) be done about the current ban on links from Wikipedia to the Logic Museum. John Vandenberg, who is president of Wikimedia Australia, and who is slightly more sane and mature than the bunch of teenagers who run the place, has left a kind comment on the spam blacklist page, saying that "The Logic Museum is scholarly work, of exceptional quality and utility to Wikipedia".

Yes of course, John!  How else would readers of Wikipedia understand the use of Latin phrases like de dicto and de re?  I discussed this in an earlier post, but let's see what Wikipedia has to say about this important distinction.

De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark important distinctions in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinctions are most recognized in philosophy of language and metaphysics.

The literal translation of the phrase "de dicto" is "of (the) word", whereas de re translates to "of (the) thing". The original meaning of the Latin locutions is useful for understanding the living meaning of the phrases, in the distinctions they mark. The distinction is best understood by examples of intensional contexts of which we will consider three: a context of thought, a context of desire, and a context of modality.

This is horrible. Note the article doesn't have any warning sign that something is wrong (to preempt a complaint that William made about the Maverick post yesterday.  It is a mixture of the horribly clumsy and the horribly wrong.  The plural 'important distinctions' is merely clumsy, given that there is just one distinction.  So is "The distinctions are most recognized in philosophy of language and metaphysics", although it is not clear whether recognised is meant, as though writers outside those subjects are aware of the distinction, but refuse to recognise it, or whether made is intended, in the sense that writers outside those areas simply aren't aware of the distinction at all.

But some of it is just wrong.  The standard use of the term 'intensional' qualifies not a statement but a context.   See e.g. the more useful SEP article on this.  And the distinction itself is a distinction in reading or sense, which the introduction does not explain properly. Thus there is a de re reading of a particular sentence, or a de dicto.  And the worst bit is the explanation of the Latin 'original meaning'.  'De dicto' does not mean 'of the word', as my previous post made clear, and as another excerpt from the Logic Museum, this time from the Summa Logicae of pseudo-Aquinas (my hasty translation) makes clear.  A dictum is what we now call a 'that clause', which Latin expresses by combining an accusative with an infinitive - Socratem currere - 'Socrates's running' or 'that Socrates runs'.  In Latin such a construction can be the subject of a sentence, as in Socratem currere est necesse, where 'that Socrates runs' is the subject, and 'is necessary' is the predicate. We can say the same in English, although it sounds a bit old-fashioned, such as in 'that snow is white is a well-known fact'. In no way does 'dictum' mean a word, as Wikipedia says, possibly confusing it with 'dictio' which can mean a word, or an expression. It literaly means 'about (de) what is said (dicto).

As for de re, 'of the thing' is slightly better, although res in has a much richer semantics than the plain English 'thing'.  It is sometimes translated as 'about reality' or 'about the reality'.  Note the two letters that begin the word 'reality', which is not a coincidence.

Here is the link to the Summa Logicae.  Don't try inserting it in Wikipedia: it will get you banned. Needless to say, Google returns the Wikipedia article first, on a search for de dicto.

Latin

English

Ad sciendum autem earum quantitatem, notandum quod quaedam sunt propositiones modales de dicto, ut, Socratem currere est necesse; in quibus scilicet dictum subiicitur, et modus praedicatur: et istae sunt vere modales, quia modus hic determinat verbum ratione compositionis, ut supra dictum est. Quaedam autem sunt modales de re, in quibus videlicet modus interponitur dicto, ut, Socratem necesse est currere: non enim modo est sensus, quod hoc dictum sit necessarium, scilicet Socratem currere; sed huius sensus est, quod in Socrate sit necessitas ad currendum.

Now for knowing about their [i.e. modal propositions'] quantity, it should be noted that some modal propositions are de dicto, such as "that Socrates runs is necessary", namely those in which the dictum [i.e. the clause "that Socrates runs"] is the subject and the mode [i.e. 'is necessary'] is the predicate, and these are truly modals, for the mode here determines the verb by reason of composition, as was said above.  And some are modals de re, namely in which the mode is interposed in dictum, e.g. "Socrates necessarily is running", for the sense is not now that the dictum is necessary, namely 'that Socrates runs', but the sense of it is that in Socrates there is 'necessity towards running'.

Should you trust Wikipedia?

Sounds like one of mine, but actually one of the Maverick's, over here.  Recommended, as always.