Marc Riddell wrote:
On 07/10/2007, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/10/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
It is not an acceptable policy for a rational community.
on 10/7/07 11:04 AM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Then the community isn't rational - that doesn't really surprise me.
Wikipedia is an emotional community - not a rational one. Whether this is acceptable is up to the Community itself.
There's a very important dynamic to be balanced between the emotional and the rational. That part of the community which is rooted in computer technology tends too much toward the rational side of the equation. I was reading the "Artificial Intelligence" entry in the Geek's Glossary that is appended to the October issue of "Wired" where they remark that robots still fail in a lot of tasks which are relatively obvious for humans. Seeing what needs to be done when you have a sink full of dishes is not a task that a robot easily recognizes. They have a great deal of difficulty with the ambiguities of life, with puns and with cultural allusions. Even chess-playing computers depend on brute force analysis which they can do better than any human.
We need the rational to keep the train on the track, but we also need the emotional to look at opportunities for new tracks. The effects are often subtle. Our massive use of templates gives the impression of order, but it also reduces options. A person with a more intuitive approach who wants to suggest alternatives that might very well be improvements needs to be ready to work his way through a cloud of virtual insect repellent. Getting through to the egg needs pretty tough sperm.
Ec