In light of the Cunctator's keen observations....
I wonder what people mean when they say "most scientists believe X". This has a bearing on how we write about non-mainstream ideas such as alternative medicine.
1. What is a majority view?
If indeed 51% of scientists (or doctors holding a Western M.D. degree, or moviegoers, or Linux enthusiasts) BELIEVE A CERTAIN THING, then the article should simply report that the indicated proportion of the group in question adheres to that POV.
If the majority is larger than 51% - say, 95% - we can safely call that an "overwhelming majority". If it is 99.8% we can say "virtually all". (Note that some published writers might considered 2/3 to be "overwhelming", but that is just THEIR POV! If as many as 1/3 of a group disagree with something, our readers are better served by telling them that 2/3 of the group believe it, and that 1/3 of the group disbelieve it).
Having stated the general principle, I wonder how many are still with me? Getting bored? Angry? . . .
2. Chiropractic as an example
I'd L-O-V-E to know what proportion of Western M.D. "health professionals" give credence to any of the "alternative" practices our Wikipedia articles are starting to describe.
In two out of two cases I know of (admittedly not a 'scientific' sample), men with severe back pain got immediate, lasting relief via chiropractic. One was a soldier who said he wrenched his back when he stepped into a hole on a road march; muscle relaxants and so on tried by military doctors didn't help him at all, he said; he wound up spending his entire monthly salary on chiropractic treatment, which he said "worked".
The other case was me: I suffered a muscle spasm when I bent over to plug in a computer; after getting my back cracked at a chiropractor's office I immediately felt better and didn't even need aspirin.
Perhaps we can distinguish chiropractic's effectiveness at treating back pain, from its more general claims; there might be a part of the system which can be proven to work, even if other parts remain dismissed by M.D.'s as pseudoscientific quackery.
3. Approaches to alternative medicine
Can we generalize from how we talk about chiropractic (which seems to work for SOME complaints) to how we ought to describe other "alternative" approaches?
How about acupuncture? I've read anecdotal reports that inserting needles at certain points can dull pain, even that as intense as a woman experiences in childbirth. Surely this has been the object of controlled studies.
I just read last month about a study on Echinacea, comparing its effectiveness vs. placebo. Well, can't we report those study results?
4. Conclusion
Some people believe surgery and synthetic drugs are "bad for you" and are looking for other ways to treat ailments. I suggest we report NEUTRALLY on their motives and results.
Uncle Ed
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
[I'm using Ed's email as a starting point for some thoughts I've been attempting to put into an intelligible form over the last few weeks, & perhaps add to the article on [[NPOV]].]
In light of the Cunctator's keen observations....
I wonder what people mean when they say "most scientists believe X". This has a bearing on how we write about non-mainstream ideas such as alternative medicine.
- What is a majority view?
If indeed 51% of scientists (or doctors holding a Western M.D. degree, or moviegoers, or Linux enthusiasts) BELIEVE A CERTAIN THING, then the article should simply report that the indicated proportion of the group in question adheres to that POV.
If the majority is larger than 51% - say, 95% - we can safely call that an "overwhelming majority". If it is 99.8% we can say "virtually all". (Note that some published writers might considered 2/3 to be "overwhelming", but that is just THEIR POV! If as many as 1/3 of a group disagree with something, our readers are better served by telling them that 2/3 of the group believe it, and that 1/3 of the group disbelieve it).
Having stated the general principle, I wonder how many are still with me? Getting bored? Angry? . . .
Despite my own populist & leftist sympathies, I can't help but be suspicious of any argument that attempts to determine what is "truth" by a vote. And I can't help finding any such statement worthless.
First, let me define one point here. When talking about any issue, I think it is fair to say that the viewpoints expressed will come from one of three groups:
*Professionals -- by this I mean scientists, scholars, medical doctors, priests or pastors, accountants, &c. These are the people whose lives revolve around researching, formulating & expressing opinions on issues.
*Informed non-professionals, or amateurs -- these are the folks who don't make their living from researching, formulating & expressing opinions, but do so on their own dime. The professional groups sneer at their opinions, & condescendingly call them "amateurs" -- forgetting that the original meaning of the word comes from describing people whose work is a labor of love. Much like all of us on Wikipedia. (Well, me at least; if Jimbo is distributing checks to everyone for their contributions, mine have been consistently getting lost in the mail.)
*Uninformed non-professionals. These are the people who aren't informed about a given issue, & tend to repeat what they hear without any significant understanding. This is the realm of Urban Legends, Superstition, Crackpot Theories, & similar ilk -- but it is also fair to say all of us in one topic or another fit into this group. Can we be sure that, at any given moment, we could defend our views on every conceivable topic? About Abortion? About the existence of God? Concerning Israel? Whether or not Democracy is the best form of government? If Tolstoy is a better author than Mickey Spillone?
I think it is fair to say that ideas from this last group face the hardest time from those of us who care about Wikipedia: unless it can be shown that one of these ideas are held belongs to a significant group or a tradition, it will get removed rather promptly from Wikipedia. The consensus is that the ramblings of Joe Blow you might meet in a bar is not as interesting as the opinions of Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky or Plato (to pick at random some examples), & labelled "quackery" & gets voted off Wikipedia.
Okay, end of my digression concerning catagories; let me proceed to my argument.
Too often on Wikipedia, it appears that we are looking for some kind of ex cathedra decision of what the professionals think about an issue. We want the professionals to say, "This is truth." Except for those who want to be able to say, "The professionals think A, but they are wrong & it is clear that the truth is B." But as I reflect on how knowledge is achieved, this kind of paradigm rarely occurs.
Explaining the views of the professionals on an issue, I feel sometimes that I am confronting a situation best explained by the decisions of the US Supreme Court: sometimes they issue decisions unanimously, in a single opinion; sometimes they make a decision where the vote is 8-1, 7-1, 6-3, or 5-4, & there are two opinions; sometimes the vote is equally split, but where almost every justice issues her or his own opinon about the case argued before them. In the latter case, for Wikipedia to report that "55% percent of the professionals believe A" grossly misrepresents the various POVs.
If you follow me so far, then you see how vital it is to explain the reasons why there are different POVs in an article. Sometimes this divergence is due to yet insufficient evidence; other times it is due to other reasons (e.g., professional A vehemently argues for his POV because that is the same POV of his employer; professional B argues for her POV because it is the opposite of the POV of her ruling party).
So what I try to do is state what is the _consensus_ concerning a given issue. The scientific consensus is that the Earth is round -- a fact even the Flat-Earthers will admit. The consensus of historians is that Columbus made a voyage in 1492, & reported to the rest of Europe the existence of a continent, which was later known to be the Americas, & was widely known -- a fact even those who claim that the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Iberians or the aboriginal hunter-gathers who crossed over the Bering Sea into those continents some 50 millenia before will admit.
Every argument needs a starting point; no topic should be treated as a game of Calvinball where the score is 23 to Q.
My POV on this matter is that we need to report the arguments of the various POVs concerning an issue in understandable detail, rather than count noses & report the result. And further, we should not restrict ourselves to the consensus of the professionals; too often their consensus is based on non-rational opinions. To quote the example of Lysenko on the study of genetics in the Soviet Union is an extreme case, & too many people are likely to say that it would never happen in a free environment; more apt, & suggestive of just how wrong the consensus on an issue could be is the case of deciphering Mayan inscriptions. Due to the fiercely-held opinion of the pre-eminent (yet very learned) Mayanologist Sir Eric Thompson, the understanding of these Native American inscriptions made no headway until _after_ his death! Progess on this problem could only be made outside of the professional establishment, in this case, amongst scholars & professionals in the Soviet Union who were isolated from the mainstream.
I remember a saying from the early 20th-century physicists: "The only way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all of the opponents to die."
This is not to say that we must give more weight to evey anti-establishment viewpoint than to that held by the establishment. Frankly, I feel it is important to set forth what might be called the "convential thinking" about a subject, just because it what any reader of Wikipedia expects to find. Right now I'm attempting to set forth the consensus of Biblical scholars on the actual dates when the various books of the New Testament were written; & yet I feel the articles are not as strong as they could be because I don't know (& frankly don't care to do the research to find out) what the traditional views on authorship are. I don't feel it is useful to have an article about the _Epistle to the Hebrews_ that states that many religious writers since Origen doubted St Paul ever wrote that work, without explaining why millions of Christians believed for centuries that he had; it unfairly makes anyone who argues the later viewpoint look stupid & ill-informed.
I could continue on, but I've already spent a couple hours writing the text above. Is this a worthwhile extension of the concept of NPOV to be worth discussion, or is this merely my peculiar historigraphic approach to the subject, without much interest to anyone except myself?
Response on or off the list is welcome.
Geoff
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
In light of the Cunctator's keen observations....
I wonder what people mean when they say "most scientists believe X". This has a bearing on how we write about non-mainstream ideas such as alternative medicine.
It's a fallacious argument. It ascribes omniscience to all scientists. "Most scientists" keep busy in their own little corner of science, and have no background or experience in controversial topics unrelated to their little corner.
- What is a majority view?
If indeed 51% of scientists (or doctors holding a Western M.D. degree, or moviegoers, or Linux enthusiasts) BELIEVE A CERTAIN THING, then the article should simply report that the indicated proportion of the group in question adheres to that POV.
If the majority is larger than 51% - say, 95% - we can safely call that an "overwhelming majority". If it is 99.8% we can say "virtually all". (Note that some published writers might considered 2/3 to be "overwhelming", but that is just THEIR POV! If as many as 1/3 of a group disagree with something, our readers are better served by telling them that 2/3 of the group believe it, and that 1/3 of the group disbelieve it).
It's still playing a numbers game.
Despite my own populist & leftist sympathies, I can't help but be suspicious of any argument that attempts to determine what is "truth" by a vote. And I can't help finding any such statement worthless.
And dangerous.
First, let me define one point here. When talking about any issue, I think it is fair to say that the viewpoints expressed will come from one of three groups:
*Professionals -- by this I mean scientists, scholars, medical doctors, priests or pastors, accountants, &c. These are the people whose lives revolve around researching, formulating & expressing opinions on issues.
So does their income.
*Informed non-professionals, or amateurs -- these are the folks who don't make their living from researching, formulating & expressing opinions, but do so on their own dime. The professional groups sneer at their opinions, & condescendingly call them "amateurs" -- forgetting that the original meaning of the word comes from describing people whose work is a labor of love. Much like all of us on Wikipedia.
*Uninformed non-professionals. These are the people who aren't informed about a given issue, & tend to repeat what they hear without any significant understanding. This is the realm of Urban Legends, Superstition, Crackpot Theories, & similar ilk -- but it is also fair to say all of us in one topic or another fit into this group. Can we be sure that, at any given moment, we could defend our views on every conceivable topic? About Abortion? About the existence of God? Concerning Israel? Whether or not Democracy is the best form of government? If Tolstoy is a better author than Mickey Spillone?
There is no single process to distinguish original from crackpot thinking. A fair review of an original thought requires a serious amount of thought for which few of us have the time. If the particular thought threatens long held prejudices, we are also unwilling to spend that time when we already have an easy response.
I think it is fair to say that ideas from this last group face the hardest time from those of us who care about Wikipedia: unless it can be shown that one of these ideas are held belongs to a significant group or a tradition, it will get removed rather promptly from Wikipedia. The consensus is that the ramblings of Joe Blow you might meet in a bar is not as interesting as the opinions of Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky or Plato (to pick at random some examples), & labelled "quackery" & gets voted off Wikipedia.
Rand's supporters often tend to label Chomsky's ideas as quackery, and vice versa.
Too often on Wikipedia, it appears that we are looking for some kind of ex cathedra decision of what the professionals think about an issue. We want the professionals to say, "This is truth." Except for those who want to be able to say, "The professionals think A, but they are wrong & it is clear that the truth is B." But as I reflect on how knowledge is achieved, this kind of paradigm rarely occurs.
Even more relevant to this point is the way some Wikipedians anticipate that the mailing list or Jimbo will issue the definitive edict that will prove them right. This is also reflected in the wider society, when proponents of "democracy" are apathetic to such a simple task as voting.
Explaining the views of the professionals on an issue, I feel sometimes that I am confronting a situation best explained by the decisions of the US Supreme Court: sometimes they issue decisions unanimously, in a single opinion; sometimes they make a decision where the vote is 8-1, 7-1, 6-3, or 5-4, & there are two opinions; sometimes the vote is equally split, but where almost every justice issues her or his own opinon about the case argued before them. In the latter case, for Wikipedia to report that "55% percent of the professionals believe A" grossly misrepresents the various POVs.
There's also a need to keep in mind the story of "Twelve Angry Men".
If you follow me so far, then you see how vital it is to explain the reasons why there are different POVs in an article. Sometimes this divergence is due to yet insufficient evidence; other times it is due to other reasons (e.g., professional A vehemently argues for his POV because that is the same POV of his employer; professional B argues for her POV because it is the opposite of the POV of her ruling party).
And in certain subjects both claim to be objective scientists.
So what I try to do is state what is the _consensus_ concerning a given issue. The scientific consensus is that the Earth is round -- a fact even the Flat-Earthers will admit. The consensus of historians is that Columbus made a voyage in 1492, & reported to the rest of Europe the existence of a continent, which was later known to be the Americas, & was widely known -- a fact even those who claim that the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Iberians or the aboriginal hunter-gathers who crossed over the Bering Sea into those continents some 50 millenia before will admit.
Before a consensus can be expressed we need to know what the subject is. The proponents need room to define what they're talking about before the opponents jump in to discredit it.
Every argument needs a starting point; no topic should be treated as a game of Calvinball where the score is 23 to Q.
What's Calviball?
My POV on this matter is that we need to report the arguments of the various POVs concerning an issue in understandable detail, rather than count noses & report the result.
And to do it in an orderly manner.
And further, we should not restrict ourselves to the consensus of the professionals; too often their consensus is based on non-rational opinions. To quote the example of Lysenko on the study of genetics in the Soviet Union is an extreme case, & too many people are likely to say that it would never happen in a free environment; more apt, & suggestive of just how wrong the consensus on an issue could be is the case of deciphering Mayan inscriptions. Due to the fiercely-held opinion of the pre-eminent (yet very learned) Mayanologist Sir Eric Thompson, the understanding of these Native American inscriptions made no headway until _after_ his death! Progess on this problem could only be made outside of the professional establishment, in this case, amongst scholars & professionals in the Soviet Union who were isolated from the mainstream.
Or there was the complex of games that led to an unconscionable in the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, based partly on turf wars or even fears that without "proper" professional guidance the public might use the information to question established interpretations of the Bible.
I remember a saying from the early 20th-century physicists: "The only way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all of the opponents to die."
It was Max Planck:
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents.... Its opponents gradually die out and the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning.
This is not to say that we must give more weight to evey anti-establishment viewpoint than to that held by the establishment. Frankly, I feel it is important to set forth what might be called the "convential thinking" about a subject, just because it what any reader of Wikipedia expects to find.
Certainly, but it needs to be made clear that it is conventional thinking, and that there are often other ways of lookin at the matter.
Right now I'm attempting to set forth the consensus of Biblical scholars on the actual dates when the various books of the New Testament were written; & yet I feel the articles are not as strong as they could be because I don't know (& frankly don't care to do the research to find out) what the traditional views on authorship are. I don't feel it is useful to have an article about the _Epistle to the Hebrews_ that states that many religious writers since Origen doubted St Paul ever wrote that work, without explaining why millions of Christians believed for centuries that he had; it unfairly makes anyone who argues the later viewpoint look stupid & ill-informed.
An old established lie is tougher to dispel than a recent one. Few contemporary Christians have ever heard of Origen, and you need to begin by disambiguating him from "origin" Establishing the cannon was a political process. I don't see anything unfair about making centuries full of theologians appear ill-informed when in fact they were. It goes with the territory of being a professional. At the same time I can appreciate the position that Doestoevsky's grand inquisitor finds himself in when, having realized that he is faced with a reincarnated Christ, he concludes that he must do the same as was done to the original Christ.
I could continue on, but I've already spent a couple hours writing the text above. Is this a worthwhile extension of the concept of NPOV to be worth discussion, or is this merely my peculiar historigraphic approach to the subject, without much interest to anyone except myself?
Response on or off the list is welcome.
If we're going to elevate the discussion it has to be on-line. :-) Ec
(I'm snipping a lot of what Ray & I wrote just to focus on a few points. This does not mean what is not quoted is not important, only that I have thought of responses to what I have quoted.)
On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
[snip]
First, let me define one point here. When talking about any issue, I think it is fair to say that the viewpoints expressed will come from one of three groups:
*Professionals -- by this I mean scientists, scholars, medical doctors, priests or pastors, accountants, &c. These are the people whose lives revolve around researching, formulating & expressing opinions on issues.
So does their income.
You touch on a point as old as Plato, who reports how Socrates criticized his fellow philosophers for teaching in return for money. Socrates, one of Plato's contemporaries responded that he thought that philosophers had as much right to eat as anybody.
Frankly, I feel that the argument that corporations or businesses buy experts to support their POV all of the time has gotten worn to being threadbare. No inteligent professional is going to sell her/his credibility for a paycheck; what they are going to do is find an employer whose POV most matches their own. Much in the fashion no one who has doubts about the infallibility of the Pope will become a Jesuit. To ignore this is to promote an _ad hominem_ attack in disguise.
Maybe I've become a little more cunning in the last few years, but when people start stating slogans, buzzwords & irrelevant facts when they should be explaining the facts & their logical relationships I begin to suspect that even they know their arguments are weak at that point.
*Informed non-professionals, or amateurs -- these are the folks who don't make their living from researching, formulating & expressing opinions, but do so on their own dime. The professional groups sneer at their opinions, & condescendingly call them "amateurs" -- forgetting that the original meaning of the word comes from describing people whose work is a labor of love. Much like all of us on Wikipedia.
*Uninformed non-professionals. These are the people who aren't informed about a given issue, & tend to repeat what they hear without any significant understanding. This is the realm of Urban Legends, Superstition, Crackpot Theories, & similar ilk -- but it is also fair to say all of us in one topic or another fit into this group. Can we be sure that, at any given moment, we could defend our views on every conceivable topic? About Abortion? About the existence of God? Concerning Israel? Whether or not Democracy is the best form of government? If Tolstoy is a better author than Mickey Spillone?
There is no single process to distinguish original from crackpot thinking. A fair review of an original thought requires a serious amount of thought for which few of us have the time. If the particular thought threatens long held prejudices, we are also unwilling to spend that time when we already have an easy response.
For the purpose of Wikipedia, I think we have 3 useful rules to keep most of what I believe all of us can agree on is crackpot thinking. Two of them have been mentioned from time to time:
* Wikipedia does not accept original research.
From what I've read of Wikipedia, it seems fair to say that what we are
trying to do is report & summarize in a useful fashion other people's writings. And one test that I've seen repeated on this mailing list (well, okay, I've repeated it once or twice) is the insistence on materials that have been published -- preferably by a commercial publisher, but at least some entity that insists that a third party has reviewed the manuscript for things like accuracy, importance, grammar & spelling.
If someone can get her/his manuscript published about their theory concerning Special Relativity, the Kennedy Assassination, or the Atlantian origin of the Egyptians, then that argues it has enough public interest to warrant at least a stub on Wikipedia.
* Wikipedia does not accepts vanity contributions.
I'm not quite sure why, but some people believe that a decent write-up on Wikipedia will boost their careers. Or provide them with fame. IMNSHO, if an article on Wikipedia will have that much effect on your standing, then you really aren't all that important.
And I suspect that by excluding vanity contributions, we will also discourage the kind of person who insists on submitting her/his own, er, idiosyncratic viewpoints.
The third rule, I propose, is this one:
* All contributions to an article must be clearly relevant.
The reason for this point comes from a recent exchange I had with a possible kook contributor over the article [[Sea Peoples]]. For reasons I still don't understand, he insisted on inserting irrelevant material about David M. Rohl's Revised Chronology into the article.
(Not to say there shouldn't be some mention of Rohl's theories on Wikipedia; but his proposals concerning a Revised Chronology for Egypt, ancient Palestine, & the rest of the Near East are better located under specific articles such as Shoshenq I & Ramesses II. Rohl doesn't even mention the Sea Peoples in his book, _Pharaohs and Kings, a Biblical Quest_.)
I guess I offended him by constantly insisting that he provide proof of his theories, because he stopped contributing to Wikipedia a week ago. I still don't understand why he considered it not only a fact -- but an essential fact -- that the Sea Peoples spoke an Indo-European language.
[snip]
Too often on Wikipedia, it appears that we are looking for some kind of ex cathedra decision of what the professionals think about an issue. We want the professionals to say, "This is truth." Except for those who want to be able to say, "The professionals think A, but they are wrong & it is clear that the truth is B." But as I reflect on how knowledge is achieved, this kind of paradigm rarely occurs.
[snip]
I remember a saying from the early 20th-century physicists: "The only way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all of the opponents to die."
It was Max Planck:
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents.... Its opponents gradually die out and the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning.
Thanks. I was quoting from memory.
[snip]
Response on or off the list is welcome.
If we're going to elevate the discussion it has to be on-line. :-)
Well, when I think I've been rambling more than discussing, I'd rather have that fact confirmed offline, please. ;-)
Geoff