On 7/26/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of France so far have kept their activities secret. If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite. -- Peter in Canberra

On 7/26/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Whether the earth is flat or spherical is a reasonably easy argument, and cites may be found to back up the common knowledge. But other "common knowledge" views may be quite erroneous: * Queen Elizabeth II is Queen of England. * In the biblical story Delilah cut Samson's hair, making him weak. * Trams do not run down Flinders Lane in Melbourne. All of these are incorrect, but there would be any number of Wikipedia editors who would get upset if asked to provide sources for such "common-sense" views. Some editors get quite narky if their views are challenged. Some editors are unwilling to admit of any error. -- Peter in Canberra

Yes, I agree, but in areas other than science, almost any contention can become the greater issue rather than the insignificant one--a very small group of violent extremists, for example, can disrupt things far beyond their representation. The point is that "original research" isnt really the issue, as much as rational versus irrational writing--of which writing skill is a substantial factor. Contrary to what some may say, its *not* POV to say that a view is considered "irrational" by most people, and putting things in that context helps to rectify the problems of marginal views promoting themselves out of their element (irrationality) even if they are Using the Flat Earth example again, the FES's notions are generally unclear in terms of whether they are actually sincere (still), or that they might be speaking metaphorically, or IMHO from the POV of human experience. Thus it can rather ridiculous to talk in terms of science, without explaining what their actual point is, which might be something like: 'Thinking about the Earth as round is only a conceptual construct which also requires thinking along notions of complex relativity-- in real life, we intrinsically think of the world as Euclidian, and therefore, "flat." The FES might just be claiming that the religious view that all souls be on the same plane, or else that in personal terms, thinking in global terms is just a waste of precious time. IOW: While its easy to call such people stupid, its hard to say exactly objectively what such group actually represents. Skpeptical "science" (ie. science POV) doesnt offer insight into this basic aspect. The articles talk about FES "models" of the Earth, assuming that models are the actual *point* of the group--the physical descriptions may be quite irrelevant. SV --- Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote: __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

That is very interesting and you may be right that they are arguing from a metaphysical perspective. Maybe you would even start to believe so after reading the Flat Earth Society's website? But, IMHO, a great loss is that you cannot state that in Wikipedia. While Wikipedia allows you to use facts drawn from sources, it does not allow you to interpret sources. You can write that the FES states that the earth is flat, but you can not say that they are using a metaphysical perspective. Same thing with Daniel P.B. Smith's example: "The earth is approximately an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles.... For many navigational purposes the earth is assumed to be a sphere, without intolerable error." That you can write that the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office say. But you cannot write that the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office says that the earth is round because that would require you to interpret the source. Because of these things, many editors resort to using no sources at all, because a statement without a source is often percieved as less controversial than the same statement drawn from interpreting a source. -- mvh Björn

Then what is it a matter of? I still fail to understand your position. Do you or do you not want a statement about the near-spherical shape of the Earth to be qualified as "just one point of view" on Wikipedia? Regards, Haukur

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Ray Saintonge wrote: I think you might run foul of both the Flat Earth Society and the Systematic Bias folks for those statements :) It should also be noted that the sphericity of the Earth only applies on a macroscopic scale; the hills and valleys don't seem to spherical to me ;) Oh, and did anyone mention the fact that the sphericity of the Earth is distorted by the tides? - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

On Jul 27, 2005, at 5:08 AM, Phil Boswell wrote: A billiard ball the size of the Earth would have mountains 50 miles high. Fred

"Alphax" <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:42E78E9D.1090002@gmail.com... YM an "edit" button to click on. WikiWorld, here we come...:-) -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

Alphax wrote: The novel "Bridge on the Drina" by Ivo Andric has a lovely description of the way that the Turks practised impalement. Maybe they could find a way to be nominated for a Darwin Award. :-) Ec

On 7/28/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: That'd be the pits. -- Peter in Canberra

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Sphericity =/= Smoothness ? :) SV This thread went from POV diputes to Flat Earth to yeesh/OMG... in just two days. Sorry I brought it up! Next topic: Reproductive rights and abortion !! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

I don't think so. It's a human, it moves, it must be alive. I think it would be POV to say that it is entitled to universal human rights and stuff though. There's still people that don't think females, blacks, whatever are entitled to universal human rights! On 7/27/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: -- signature

steve v wrote: This is a pretty complex question to sum up easily, and there's a huge body of writing on it from all sides (not just political advocates either; there's a huge body of literature in applied-ethics philosophy journals). Some opinions agree that it's a "human life" but argue that "human rights" is a misnomer and ought to be "personhood rights", and not granted automatically to humans but only to persons; others dispute that a fetus is "human" in the sense that the term is generally meant, and instead will only grant it is "of the species homo sapiens" or something similar. There is a whole *other* body of literature on what exactly "personhood" is and means, and once you've established that, still another body of literature on what sort of ethics ought to apply to people who have been deemed "persons" in the relevant sense (fifty flavors of utilitarians, Kantians, and all the rest). Basically there's nothing Wikipedia can say about this subject that has a consensus anywhere, other than some very basic medical facts like "a fetus is genetically of the species homo sapiens". There is, however, a lot of stuff other people say about it that would be nice to summarize. -Mark

On 7/28/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Well, you'd hope so. But when instead we are talking about legal issues, I'm not too sure that doctors get the final word. Or vice versa. Who do you want performing your vasectomy? A surgeon with a scalpel and anaesthetics, or a judge with his gavel? -- Peter in Canberra

On 7/28/05, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Thanks for that. A well-considered, almost lyrical summary. From a woman's point of view on a topic where far too many men don't have a clue. -- Peter in Canberra

At 05:22 PM 7/27/2005, steve v wrote: This has been debated by philosophers for centuries, so yes, it is POV. This question is much deeper than the current US American pro-life/pro-choice debate. For example, Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes were on opposite ends of this debate (Thomas - no, Descartes - yes), even though they were both devout Catholics. Chl

At [[Human]], we wrote (though I see it's been changed): "Human life begins at conception ... As the zygote grows through successive stages inside the female's uterus over a period of 38 weeks, it is called an embryo, then a fetus. At birth, the fully grown fetus, now called a baby, is expelled from the female's body, and breathes independently for the first time. At this point, most modern cultures recognize the baby as a person entitled to the full protection of the law, though some jurisdictions extend personhood to human fetuses while they remain in the uterus." I would say it's NPOV to say that a fetus is human life (what other kind of life could it be if it's a human fetus?), but it's POV to attribute personhood to the fetus, which is a legal issue only indirectly tied to the biological one. Sarah

--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: Degrees, yes--as others have pointed out, its a spectrum. But in the context of consensus, that "spectrum" is also a bell curve, with the two extremes representing the vocal minorities, while most people might agree to some fetal age a pragmatic compromise. I dont own a polling company, so this is not sourced. In this case, however the extremes appear to be split along absolute/binary lines, while in reality most understand the middle ground. Hence the extremes are almost reflexively represented as majorities rather than as minorites,(1) and this inverse logic effects how our articles are written and debated. IMHO It's incorrect for a general bell curve consensus to be represented as simply exclusively a bunch of "minorities"(2) just because there are different degrees. IOW, to claim that an intuited 'general compromise POV' is merely a group of conceptual, unrelated, and distict POVs is not correct, as even a 'conceptual consensus'(3) = rationality == NPOV. With representation for all the conceptual and political degrees of course. Fn 1 minorities (though certainly there's a political split point) 2 (Perhaps so because there is yet no definitive popular consensus yet on where the line is, other than that represented in Roe.) 3 ...consensus, (as opposed to segmentalism on the particulars)... SV Apologies for U.S.-centrist language and footnotes. ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

steve v wrote: You say that "personhood" is a social/legal definition, but I don't think that's the best way to describe it in this context. When you talk about things like moral obligation, and what we are morally obligated to and what we aren't, you are using a philosophical definition of "person". And in that sense, it seems clear to me that a fetus is not a person. It's coincedental that I'm in the middle of a rewrite of [[Categorical imperative]] because I can give you an example of a view of an eminent moral philosopher on this very issue, that is, the view of Immanuel Kant: "Beings whose existence depends, not on our will, but on nature, have none the less, if they are non-rational beings, only a relative value as means and are consequently called /things/. Rational beings, on the other hand, are called /persons/ because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves--that is, as something which ought not be used merely as a means--and consequently imposes to that extent a limit on arbitrary treatment of them." Kant was talking mainly about animals in the above passage, but the it works just as well for the unborn. His conclusion (the argument is around 90 pages long) more or less boils down to this: The only objective basis for moral obligation comes from respect of the autonomously rational powers of a person. If you aren't rational, you're not a person, and therefore you exist only as a means to some other end. So feelings of moral obligation to /things/ must be tied up with some subjective considerations, like your personal feelings about the matter. It's not different from being sentimental about a family heirloom, or crying when a beatiful work of art is destroyed. It's a sense of loss, but it has no moral content, because it is not a person. So Kant would be another person who agrees that an unborn fetus a part of a woman's body, not a person, and not a thing to which anyone is morally obligated in any way. Whether you agree with this argument or not isn't my point: What I'm pointing out here is that this is a moral problem, and is therefore more in the realm of philosophy than of law. If you want to support the notion that we are morally obligated to non-persons because they have human DNA, or because they might some day become a person, you're going to have to come up with a rational and binding philosophical argument to that effect that isn't based on anyone's feelings. And yes, it would be intensely POV to make the jump from (human tissue) -> (person) -> (moral obligation). As I understand it, the consensus among moral philosophers these days is that such a jump would be ridiculous. - Ryan

--- steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Yes it is since the term is loaded, not unlike 'partial-birth abortion' vs 'intact dilation and extraction' or using the term 'unborn baby' instead of fetus/embryo/zygote. The reason; the non-medical terms were designed to confer a value judgment. 'Human life' is also an odd term to use in this context since any cell from a human is by definition human life. 'Independent human life' is another thing altogether but in terms of gestation, would only include a viable fetus. -- mav ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

--- steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: The medical terms were not created with value judgments on what they are describing in mind, while terms like 'partial-birth abortion' deliberately *were*. That = POV. Abortionists might. But a doctor would call it a fetus, embryo or zygote depending on its gestational stage. Of course the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (gestation is all about putting all those parts together to form an independent human life). Yet almost every cell in a human body is functioning and has a full complement of unique human genes (mature red blood cells being the most notable exception). That makes them both alive and human. False. They belong to different species; that's not a 'little' thing at all. Chimps also have 24 sets of chromosomes, while humans have 23. Further, about 30,000 human genes make about 150,000 human proteins. So pure genetic correspondence between species is a simplistic argument to allude to since it is the complex interactions of those genes with each other and their products that create the real differences. This list is not about this, so this will be the last message I send or even read in this thread. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Of course it is. Whether or not a fetus is "human", or at what point it becomes "human", is at the heart of the abortion debate. Stating the anti-abortion/pro-life position as fact is the antithesis of NPOV. Jay.

In this debate the most commonly heard voices are all "extreme". *Extreme minority* positions can be marginalized without violating NPOV, but when those extreme voices represent a significant number of people (in this case numbering in the millions), their view must be presented as well. Referring to it as "a human fetus" (as opposed to, say, "a chimpanzee fetus") is non-controversial. Referring to is a "a human", quite obviously is. Jay.

As opposed to "a foetus in a womb is chimpanzee"? "A foetus in womb is inhuman"? Frankly, I can't see a meaningful usage which wouldn't imply personhood. The example you provide doesn't give any useful information, and, in fact, if found in an article would appear to be promoting exactly that, personhood. Jay.

Using the word "viable" in this context is dubious ;) The problem with making a stink out of the subtle nuances of the English language should be obvious to anyone who tries their best to write in ways which are clearest and most easily translated. "Implication" of "personhood" seems to be the Crux of the Biscuit here... Though we agree: a fetus = "human", (unless its 'tarded, of cs..) and "human" ~ person... yet fetus =/= person, and even: "fetus" ~/~ "person," ...and this contractory logic is supposed to be the basis for: fetus = "human" is thus POV, hence fetus =/= human is thus NPOV ?? ...and "just in this context"? I hope people can see how ridiculous that is. Follow the logic problem. Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: So, "why say it, if its going to be controversial?" Even though not saying "human" would be an endorsement of one view, which de-"human"izes the fetus? The point, again, is that even ardent pro-Choicers can agree that a fetus = human, then why say "that would be POV", "implies personhood" and hence "should be avoided." There is some linguistic overlap between the uses of "human" and "personhood" as social and legal concepts, and therefore simply avoiding them doesnt really clarify anything. Sincere regards, SV __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Haukur Þorgeirsson a écrit: Which makes an article title such as [[foetus personhood]] unacceptable, since disputer. For the record... at my last medical check-up, we discussed several pain-relief methods for birth, and one of the proposal made by the medical team was 100% homeopathy based ...

steve v a écrit: I agree. And this is precisely exactly why I say it is disputed... And it is not because Delirium says that there are entire books written on the issue of fetal personhood that it will make it less disputed; and it is not because Delirium agrees with you that he is correct either. No one is "correct" here. No one can be correct. There are only perceptions and it is perfectly alright that perceptions are different. You asked us our opinions. We gave them. Now, the right thing to do is to accept that all opinions are acceptable; not to take the opinion of one person as a tool to hint others opinions might be erroneous. Imho.

On 7/31/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: FWIW, the clippings off my toe nails are also, by definition, human. Human doesn't equal life. Whether or not a featus is a life - that was the question, right? /Habj

steve v a écrit: On a related note, the article on morality and legality of abortion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_and_legality_of_abortion is just of very low quality. If anyone feels courageous enough to try to improve this hot potato, he will be most welcome :-) ant

Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote: Wow! The choice is between accepting the indignities of modern medicine, or accepting that childbirth is God's punishment for being a woman. There are no alternatives because you don't believe in them. That sounds like pretty fucked-up thinking. We all know about your obsession against homeopathy. Even if homeopathic medicines turn out to be inert placebos, placebos still have a level of effectiveness that exceeds doing nothing. It is far too easy to dismiss the powers of the mind in our attempts to build a purely rationalistic model of medical practice. Ec

Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote: IIRC you were the one carrying on about childbirth being "punishment for Eve's transgression" Achnowledging a possible state where homeopathy might not work is different the inflexible POV that it has already happened. Your, "What would it take for you to be convinced that..." attitude suggests inflexibility. There can be no consensus if you prejudge the result. Your link redirects me to an nih site on nucleic acids and the word "placebo" does not appear there at all. I certainly can neither deny nor confirm that there is a one-third response to placebos; my best guess would be that the rate would vary with the medical condition involved. Without a belief in the placebo effect referring to it in clinical trials would be meaningless. We would do just as well comparing the medicine being tested with doing nothing at all, or with a medicine that has an established track record. I certainly don't doubt that investigating the placebo effect would be difficult and expensive. "Unrewarding" suggests that whatever tests are undertaken would not result in big financial rewards to the pharmaceutical industry; they are not in the business of funding pure science. If the data on the placebo effect is of such poor quality it does not strike me as scientific to novertheless use it as a reference standard. How does the "effect in the placebo arm" differ from the "placebo effect"? Ec

Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote: Quoting the Bible in a context about science has its pitfalls. :-) When you begin from the premise that something must be "debunked" you make an assumption that that is the inevitable goal of the discussion. I have never claimed to have ever used homeopathy, and I really don't know what I would do if the occasion ever arose. Under those circumstances it doesn't matter to me whether the tests would fail. If you show me conclusively that a particular homeopathic medicine is ineffective it's still not rational to extrapolate that result to all the other such medicines. Neither am I ready to make the kind of study that would satisfactorily bring me to a specific stand on either the validity or invalidity of homeopathy. I can imagine myself arguing in the same way as I am now if your views were completely the opposite to what they actually are. It's not homeopathy that interests me; it's the rigorous application of the scientific method no matter where it leads me. The fact that a "science", to use the term broadly, has not been proven does not mean that it has been proven false. The burden of proof remains with the person who claims that it is valid. The person who isists that something is false manages to shif that burden to himself when it is not necessary to do so. That statement is self contradictory. To be meaningful it would require invoking the concept of negative probability. Perhaps you are not using the term "probability" in a mathematical sense. Apart from his harmless confusion between the different psychic phenomena, I have no problem with this story. He has made a probabilistic determination that the person is a "mind reader"; he has not proven it (The actual phenomenon involved would likely be precognition, or less likely psychokinesis. There is no "mind reading" unless the knowledge is gained from what someone else already knew through normal means. This error is harmless in these circumstances.) Thanks, I may look for it. If that's their argument I support it. The do-nothing group is yet another reference group, but IIRC placebo groups often tend to do better if only because those receiving the placebo believe that they are getting real medicine. This gets us into questions about the healing power of one's own mind. Ec

Ryan Delaney wrote: There's a bit of this at [[person]]. It could probably be improved/expanded, of course, but that's probably the right place to put this sort of discussion. -Mark

"Life" in this context can be easily (or purposefully) to be interpretted as something other than "biological life". To say that a fetus is "a human life" is not the same thing for most people as saying, "a fetus is made of living human cells." The latter is NPOV, the former represents a specific POV ("a fetus is a person") and needs to be *attributed* as such. If you mean it only in the strict biological definition of life (one which does not conform necessarily to legal, ethical, or intuitive definitions of "a human life"), it needs to be carefully worded to reflect that, because "a human life" is generally interpretted to mean something else. FF On 7/27/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Chris Lüer wrote: I'm glad you like my approach :) - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

"William M Connolley" <wmc(a)bas.ac.uk> wrote in message news:Pine.GSO.4.55.0507271627390.14710@bsucena... On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Chris [iso-8859-1] Lüer wrote: [snip] YM "human" :-) HTH HAND -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

Delirium Bad papers get published - no surprise there. It would be a surprise if they rose high up the citation statistics. The comparison with political rhetoric breaks down right there, doesn't it? Simplistic political stuff generally gets far more attention than carefully-crafted leaders and columns in the quality press. Could be the people who use 'quote your sources' as a way to win arguments, rather than improve the encyclopedia? Charles

On 7/28/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: Odd you should mention this, David. One particular user attached ten spurious references in a VfD, none of which back him up. But he pretends they do. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/De_f… -- Peter in Canberra

On 7/28/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: He bends over, who am I to resist a poke? But no, it's a poke at spurious arguments from any source. We all know the logical fallacies and the debating flaws, the argument ad homonym and so on. If an editor claims to be an expert and then offers up dodgy references in supposed support, I'm inclined to think the expertise lies more in the field of self-promotion than shining the light of knowledge upon Wikipedia. -- Peter in Canberra

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote: Well, that does it for me. I'm going to stick {{unreferenced}}, {{NPOV}}, {{disputed}} and {{whatwereyousmokingwhenyouwrotethis}} on as many articles as possible :) Or start nominating some FAs for VFD as being uncyclopedic. Starting with [[Xenu]]... - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

On 7/28/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: She could stand on the turtle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down -- Pete, noting that this article is well-sourced

Ryan Delaney wrote: "Commonly held beliefs", "'correct' beliefs", and expert consensus are three different frames of mind, and all three can still be wrong. Often, but certainly not always, the professionals have it right; that's reason enough to leave open the avenues for criticizing science. "Correct" beliefs are often promulgated by people with a political end in mind, and they have no qualms about bending facts if it will help their cause The general public, and thus our editors are often in the difficult position of having a limted basis for making a decision. The need to cite sources should apply equally to the scientists and to those who express commonly held beliefs; the scientists have an advantage here because that practice has been a part of their experience. Science is very poorly reported to the general public. An understanding of what's going on is incompatible with the 15-second sound bite. Look at the evolution of a long established publication like "Popular Science". In its early days, shortly after the US Civil War it had a lot of articles designed to get everybody to think about science; since then it has managed to evolve into something far more gadgety. Much of science has retreated into the ivory tower. This is great for the protection of scientific sinecures, but is terrible for the promotion of scientific understanding by the general public. One of the greatest things that Wikipedia could accomplish would be to produce a generation of critical thinkers with both the tools and the confidance to question any kind of established truth wherever they can find it. It's a challenge. The statistics say what they say - nothing more, nothing less. The statistics thenselves are unconcerned about how anyone misinterprets them. People don't usually understand what statistics are all about, and are quick to draw conclusions that are not warranted. This subject matter is a good example where we can look for creative ways to build consensus. Simply telling the public that they are wrong and that they should pay attention to their academic betters will get us nowhere except into a never ending flame war. Somewhere along the way the scientists dropped the ball. Lewis Terman was respected as a scientist in his day when he worked to develop the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests. He wrote in his 1916 book, "The Measurement of Intelligence" (pp. 91-2) -- "It is interesting to note that [the two subjects] represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the familyn stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture. Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding." Terman was from the academic community. How is a general public that has been instilled with the principle of respecting scientists to deal with such comments? For other academics to say, "He's not really a scientist," doesn't help us with a public that may only see that as bickering between scientists. If either side in that debate is believed, respect for academics will have been undermined. If Terman's view are to be criticised on the basis that they reflect thinking from 89 years ago the public deserves an explanation of how we got from there to here. "Correct" too easily becomes "politically correct". It's too easy to become emotionally attached to one's "correct" beliefs. There is great normalizing power to effective consensus building. Scientists would do better by judiciously planting seeds in Wikipedia's great fractal Mendelbrot. Ec

On 7/28/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've found that "learned experts" on WP sometimes use themselves as references to push their own POVs, and if you then ask them for sources, they provide impressive-looking material that doesn't actually address the issue. NOR applies just as much to self-proclaimed experts as anyone else. -- Peter in Canberra

Ryan Delaney wrote: In such cases, where there are mostly-irreconcilable differences of opinion held by various groups, it makes sense to simply describe the opinion of each group, properly attributed. In this case, there could be a section on academic viewpoints, and one on how the issue plays out in the political sphere. Of course, political groups who attack the academic consensus should have their POV reported as well and properly attributed. Sometimes there might be more than two sections as well---the areas on psychiatry/psychology/mental-illness could use a revamping to better attribute and cover the range of: 1) medical consensus [e.g. what the _DSM_ says]; 2) scientific consensus of current research [often not the same as #1]; 3) philosophical consensus opinion [e.g. on the definition of "mental illness"]; and 4) public/political opinion. So long as all opinions are properly attributed to who holds them, rather than presented as "the right opinion", I don't see why these can't all co-exist. -Mark

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Delirium wrote: Well put, Mark. Often I explain NPOV to non-Wikipedians sometimes resolving to an agreement between different parties to disagree: e.g., some people think George Bush is a good president of the US, some think he is a bad one. As Mark points out here, often NPOV is best served when there are multiple POVs on a subject by explaining the argument & how these various groups came to their conclusions. All groups involved should embrace this approach in their own best interest, & exert themselves to make sure the POVs of groups opposed to them are accurately explained for one good reason. Although I usually prefer to use the language John Milton expressed it Areopagitica, Sun Tzu might have expressed it in a way that will convince more Wikipedians, that you must know your enemy to defeat him. Geoff

Jimmy Wales wrote: Part of the problem is that the people raising the flat earth argument are not themselves falt earthers. Hypothesizing arguments that aren't being made, and generating well-reasoned and documented counter-arguments are the essence of straw man reasoning. Without being disrespectful to them we should wait until we hear from genuine flat-earthers before documenting the alternate view. While we are waiting for them may I hypothesize that the edges of our flat earth are decorated by a fringe of trolls waiting for the unwary. :-) Ec

On 8/3/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Why not? We put a bit of effort into debunking the Apollo hoax people, and they are equally round the bend wacko. There's a lot of material on wikipedia that is aimed at countering laughable notions. Take a look at Papal Tiara, for example - a featured article, apparently, yet it goes into some detail in countering the VFD claim - namely that there is an inscription on the Pope's crown which adds up to 666. This is just bizarre - there's no writing on the tiara and even if you could tot it up and get 666, then so bloody what? It's not just a cite, either. This thing has its own article, complete with photographs and circles and arrows and notes on the back explaining what the circles and arrows mean. Perhaps rather than voicing opposition to a notional cite, you should look into what sort of rubbish is appearing on your own site. If you want to appear consistent, that is. -- Peter in Canberra

I had read that the 666 was on *The Queen's Tiara. :\ SV --- Skyring <skyring(a)gmail.com> wrote: ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs