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.
On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Brent Allsop<brent.allsop(a)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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