[Wikipedia-l] A new source? (was Re: Are we running out of sources?)

[Mark Williamson]

Thanks!

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 3:46 PM, David Goodman<dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Brent,
>
> There are too many things here to respond to at once.  And that's the
> problem: people have a limited channel capacity. It can be high, but
> it remains limited. I can carry on 5 discussions of this sort, but not
> 50. Some few people can do 50, but  even they can't do 500. All group
> processes work only as long as the number of people involve remains
> limited enough to permit individual pairwise discussion.  It can
> extend to large numbers of people--but only if they remain observers.
> Plato shows Socrates talking to 1 or 2 people at a time, while a dozen
> stand around and watch--and Plato when he wrote it down (or composed
> it from scratch, as the case may be) knew that hundreds of others
> would read. It has scaled up to millions very easily: most observing,
> some starting separate dialogs of their own.
>
> I don't think any fundamental revolution is taking place. I think what
> we are see is just the opening and expansion of the previous world of
> literate communities. You will probably answer that changing the scale
> to this extent is revolutionary, but I think it just implies a
> necessary separation into working units of a manageable size.
>
> You have a major advantage over me in this discussion: I am not an
> academic expert in this, just someone looking for good ideas, and
> finding out how good they are by questioning them.   But I have some
> minor advantages, too: librarianship is an empirical profession. We
> will do whatever works, and we are accustomed to deal with a range of
> subjects  too wide for us to fully understand.
>
> I'm not particularly interested in the theory of consciousness, so
> it's not the best example for me. I'm not particularly interested in
> any psychological theories. I'm a biologist & a reductionist one at
> that. To the extent that experiment & predicted observation supports a
> theory, it can be used as correct.  Consensus has nothing to do with
> it, nor do surveys of opinion. We can all be wrong.
>
> What we need consensus for is going about those practical things of
> life in which we must cooperate and live together. To remain a group,
> we have to agree enough to remain in it. And we higher primates have
> evolved so that our major activity is living in groups and watching
> each other and trying to be more clever than the rest.
>
> There's one very good thing in canonizer, that shows you realize the
> same constraints as I do: its divided structure.  But while you seem
> to think of it as  atomizing the subjects to discuss, I see it as
> partitioning the participants.
>
>
> David,
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Brent Allsop<brent.allsop at canonizer.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> Thanks for the supportive comments about systems other than wikipedia.
>> We're doing all this via open source, and volunteer work, and all free,
>> much like wikipedia.  And those of us working on this system believe
>> something like this is desperately needed today.  And as I indicated
>> earlier, the goals and niche for canonizer.com are completely separate
>> from where Wikipedia is.
>>
>> I'm surprised to here you say you think that canonizer.com is
>> 'fundamentally a blog'.  I believe blogs and  the canonizer.com open
>> survey system are diametrically apposed extremes.
>>
>> There are millions of blogs.  And for that matter, there are also tens
>> of thousands of publications on the issue of consciousness as the now
>> 20K and growing number of entries in Chalmers Bibliography on the mind
>> proves.  (see: http://consc.net/mindpapers) The problem is all these
>> millions of blog postings and publications are all individual
>> testimonials, all using their own unique terminology.  There is no way
>> any common man can achieve a significant understanding or survey of even
>> a small portion of all this in one lifetime.  And all these blog posts
>> continue to get piled higher and deeper exponentially compounding the
>> problem.  We believe this is why this field of study is so mired in all
>> this thick mud and so failing to make any significant progress.  It is
>> currently completely failing to communicate just how much consensus
>> there really is on the important issues.  Nobody can see the revolution
>> some believe is taking place in this field as we speak, simply because
>> nobody has yet attempted to rigorously survey and measure for such.
>>
>> In the wikipedia article on qualia it appears there is just as many
>> qualophobe experts, as there are qualophiles.  And most of the world
>> believes this.  But many experts believe this is not only completely
>> wrong and misleading, but a wave of people are converting to the
>> qualophile camps - and that a scientific revolution is taking place as
>> we speak on what is accepted by the experts as the best theory of
>> consciousness.
>>
>> Some people attempt to, by themselves, survey and summarize the various
>> 'camps', and the problems they think exist with all other summarized
>> competing theories to their own, but most of such, since it is done by
>> an individual, can never be completely unbiased or an accurate survey of
>> all points of view.  Any attempts at such descriptions of the various
>> camps must include all the diverse terminology that the various
>> individuals use in a futile attempt to fully describe any competing camp
>> - yet another problem making easy communication in this field near
>> impossible.  And any such attempt to summarize the various camps by
>> individuals is certainly never quantitative - and never definitively
>> showing how many experts, and who, and when are in each camp.  The other
>> big problem of the way all these blogs, forums, seminar presentations,
>> publications and discussions is that they tend to all focus on what
>> everyone disagrees on.  Once any two people agree on anything, the
>> conversation completely stops.  They only talk about the minor
>> differences in their beliefs or terminology, and so on - resulting in
>> eternal yes it is, no it isn't back and forth forever - completely
>> failing to communicate to anyone what is most important and where the
>> consensus is.  The best you get is some statements along the lines of
>> some experts think one way, and some think another - with no indication
>> of how many and who are in each camp, and which camp is significantly
>> growing and revolutionizing the current 'thought' on any still
>> theoretical issue.
>>
>> Canonizer.com is designed to resolve all of this chaos, wiki edit wars,
>> and disagreement and to make a quantum leap in the ability of diverse
>> experts in diverse fields to easily communicate both amongst themselves,
>> to different fields of study, and to the rest of the world - concisely,
>> definitively and rigorously indicating what the current 'scientific
>> consensus' is.  The hierarchical 'camp' structure, and the way the
>> system rules work encourage everyone to work together, cooperatively,
>> and find what they all agree is most important.  Everyone can concisely
>> state this in the higher level camps where all that agree can support it
>> - rigorously, quantitatively, openly, and in completely equal or
>> unbiased ways for all theories.
>>
>> The best terminology to use is always what communicates the ideas the
>> best to the most people.  Efficient survey systems, and the way
>> canonizer.com is set up to encourage negotiation to win or convert
>> others in their camp, is what is desperately needed to rigorously
>> determine what is the best single terminology to use for any theoretical
>> idea or doctrine.
>>
>> Before canonizer.com, it always takes a huge amount of effort, and hours
>> and hours of back and forth discussion to find out what another
>> philosopher means by various terms and so on - before any good
>> communication can even start.  And in any one life time, you can only do
>> this with a limited number of people.   Now, with canonizer.com, you
>> just say I am in the concisely stated XYZ camp on this issue and all
>> camp members are working as a team on this theory.  And suddenly
>> communication between people in various diverse fields, and to the
>> general population, becomes trivially easy.  And this kind of
>> communication is what is required for any complex and still theoretical
>> field of study like this to get out of the mud and finally make any kind
>> of significant progress.
>>
>> I challenge anyone to find any place where even a few experts of this
>> stature, of the kind that have been joining, supporting, diligently
>> developing the 'Consciousness is Representational and Real camp' (see:
>> http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6) for several years now, can agree on
>> anything.  Show me any place where this many experts are able to
>> definitively agree on anything as concise and usefully descriptive as
>> the theories described in this camp statement - including the sub camp
>> structure concisely and quantitatively representing the still diversity
>> of beliefs about what the best theories about what, where, how, and why
>> qualia are.  Even when and individual gets an article to be published in
>> a leading peer reviewed journal, requiring a year or more, passing a
>> hand full of 'peer reviewers', you don't have near the amount of support
>> and rigorous editing and negotiation that  has gone on for many years
>> now to develop this camp.  And this camp (and all competing ones) are
>> just getting started.  As ever more experts participate, this camp
>> continues to improve at an increasing rate, and to extend its lead
>> compared to all other competing camps - all on a perfectly level and
>> unbiased playing field.
>>
>> Perhaps, going forward, some other camp will emerge as a new leader?
>> Perhaps some new scientific evidence will show that some now minority
>> camp is a much better way to think about things than the current
>> consensus?  If so, shouldn't we be rigorously watching, measuring and
>> monitoring this consensus in a real time and in a historical way going
>> forward?  Must everyone that agrees on a camp or theory at any time
>> publish similar papers stating such before anyone will count such?
>>
>> Also, I assume what you mean by a 'non scientific survey' is something
>> that has the goal of using statistics to find out what large numbers of
>> people believe, based on small 'random' samples.  Any time you use
>> something other than a 'random' selection of survey takers, it is 'not
>> scientific'.  Although some scientific or rational information could be
>> derived about all experts, from any subset of them participating in an
>> open survey such as this, whether this subset is random or not, non of
>> this is the goal of canonizer.com.  The goal of canonize.com is simply
>> to have a concise representation, and quantitative measure of what large
>> groups of all participators think.  If you have a hundred different blog
>> posts, each with a thousand comments, all using slightly different
>> terminology - that is completely useless to any one.  But if all their
>> points of view. especially the similar ones, are all unified and
>> concisely stated and quantitatively measured, this is powerful
>> information, and takes communication and debate about still
>> controversial theoretical issues to an entirely new level.
>>
>> Also, there are myriads of scientific problems with the traditional
>> 'scientific surveys' you are talking about here.  Such as once you ask
>> the first person to answer a survey question, the statement or answer
>> choice is locked in stone, and can never change.  You have the same
>> problem with signed petitions - once the first person signs, the
>> statement cannot ever change.  But the way canonizer.com is set up,
>> competing camps continually develop, change, and progress as new
>> arguments and scientific data continue to arrive.  Also, a 'scientific
>> survey' is just an instantaneous snapshot taken at a moment in time.
>> Usually the same questions are completely irrelevant a year later after
>> new scientific data comes in.  Canonizer.com is a real time rigorous and
>> quantitative measure of all the best theories and how their popularity
>> grows and wanes as ever more scientific data comes in, causing members
>> of disproved camps to jump to knew and improved camps.
>>
>> And saying canonizer.com is a much less reliable representation of
>> experts view than are their published works, I would disagree.  I have
>> had occasions where experts have claimed that David Chalmers no longer
>> believes in his 'Principle of organization invariance' which he
>> published a paper about long ago - as evidence by he hasn't published
>> anything significant on this since.  Amongst the growing number of
>> participators in this topic on the best theories of consiocusness, the
>> camp representing this idea is clearly the leading theory.  (see:
>> http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/8) But is David Chalmers after all
>> these years, still in this camp?  Many claim otherwise.
>>
>> Also,  the many diverse theories about consciousness can't all be
>> right.  All would agree that science will eventually prove which of the
>> many theories, if any, is THE ONE, and the demonstrable scientific data
>> will eventually prove which one it is.  The definitive measure of this
>> occurring being that everyone is forced, due to the scientific date, to
>> convert to THE ONE camp.
>>
>> The goal of canonizer.com is to rigorously measure this process in real
>> time.  If you wait for the years required for someone to get a
>> retraction to their previous publications published, how many will even
>> do this?  Must everyone in the previous consensus camp publish a similar
>> paper?  At canonizer.com, you can watch all this happen easily, and in
>> real time, and in a historically recorded way.  If people stay in the
>> 'wrong' camp to long, it can significantly damage their reputation,
>> which people can rigorously measure for using reputation based canonizer
>> algorithm in the future.
>>
>> I would argue there is no better system to definitively define, and more
>> importantly communicate concisely what someone currently believes,
>> compared to all others, than the canonizer.com open survey system where
>> people effectively 'sign' the dynamic petition stating what they
>> currently believe (including the history of what 'camp' there were in in
>> the past.).
>>
>>
>>
>> I guess my question at this point would be: have I converted you to the
>> canonizer.com can be a trusted reference definitively defining what and
>> how many participating experts currently believe on still theoretical
>> and controversial scientific issues such as this?
>>
>> If anyone is still not in the so far unanimous 'yes' camp represented here:
>>
>> http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/104/2
>>
>> It would sure be great to get your POV, and reasons for such
>> definitively 'canonized' so all can know why rigorously, concisely,
>> unbiased, and quantitatively.  And remember, when you join a camp, your
>> reputation is definitely on the line.  It will be very easy for people
>> to come up with and use canonizer algorithms in the future that simply
>> ignore people that were in the 'wrong' camps in the past for way too
>> long.  And those in the right camp, the soonest, before the herd, will
>> as they deserve, be the ones with all the influence in the system in the
>> future.
>>
>> Identity and reputation is everything at canonizer.com.
>>
>> Thanks!!
>>
>> Brent Allsop
>>
>>
>>
>> David Goodman wrote:
>>> No reason why people should not use other sources than Wikipedia. Our
>>> job is to improve Wikipedia, not to discourage other projects.
>>>
>>> But  as far as including content from this source in Wikipedia is
>>> concerned  the posts on what remains fundamentally a blog or
>>> non-scientific survey is a much less reliable representation of  the
>>> considered view of experts than are their published works.
>>>
>>> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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