On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 5:25 PM, John Jackson <strangetruther(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi again – I'm just throwing in comments now, The
Business has...
forked... as I think you would say :-/
"It's pretty simple, publish original work elsewhere first."
Good – so you do, then people who know nothing about anything announce
another requirement. Usually, it's that you ask them or some other
self-serving gatekeeper all over again.
It's useful that "peer review" is so commonly mentioned. It helps
warn the real people quickly of those who think it's more than a
political game, so we can avoid them/make plans for them. It might be
less ludicrous if PR supporters expected a Phi. of Sci expert on each
review board. Without that it's an obvious farce.
There is only this in some form or another:
http://sciencepolice2010.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sciencepolice-14-lates…
...and politics in some form or another, usually Wizard of Oz'd to the full.
Fact: Popper never even MENTIONED peer review in either of his most
notable Phi. of Sci. books. Don't expect others to assume Popper's
view is automatically wrong; don't assume either that those with a
good handle on how to make robots think scientifically, would expect
those robots to need multi-stage publication reviews before they
accept any useful new belief.
Peer review is a method of preventing thorough consideration of a
theory, not of ensuring it. ...AS I EXPLAIN THOROUGHLY IN MY BOOK
WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD A HUNDRED TIMES THIS WEEK BY PEOPLE WHO WILL
NEVER KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO ALTER THE FABRIC OF SCIENCE, NEEDS TO
PASSED BY OTHERS LIKE THEM BEFORE IT COUNTS AS SCIENCE.
Thanks to those who are also expressing doubts about PR!
I realise most people are talking about what Wiki is or should be, and
that is more of a live topic for me at the moment.
I'm most struck though, by the way my situation always seems to be
projected into what others expect it to be. People are desperate to
believe that I can't verify/confirm (whatever the ridiculous word is)
what I'm saying. I guessed within a minute of first investigating
Wiki that people would be obsessing about this, which is why I made
sure I could satisfy the rules no matter what I thought of them. But
it's just another "but this goes up to eleven" thing, with them
keeping on saying "you haven't verified it".
Cordially,
JJ
I understand where you're coming from, but this is a philosophical dispute.
Wikipedia is, *in this particular*, a conservative collection of
information, where we assert no special judgement over the accuracy of
other sources, and rely on yet other sources (peer review, of some
sort, or editorial review by publishers, or some equivalent) to
establish that, and then we report what others claim or report.
What you're asking for is not what Wikipedia is here to do. You can
object to that, but this is one of our core functional values, that we
will not attempt to do that and that it's wrong for us to attempt it
in this case.
This is very clearly stated up-front in the core values (5 pillars,
and connected policy documents and philosophy essays). You're free to
disagree that it's right for us to do, but it's the only practically
maintainable philosophical foundation we've found we're able to
establish and work with and defend as consistent and maintainable.
If you have a better suggestion for how we can, in a real and tangible
project, do things differently, I think we'd all like to hear it. But
we're not dumb, and nothing that works has emerged from prior
philosophical discussions. It's wrong to assert that nothing will
emerge from new discussions just because nothing came out of previous
ones, but it's not like we haven't tried and considered alternatives.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com