On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 5:25 PM, John Jackson strangetruther@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-latest...
...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.