Sheldrake notes how his Wiki bio was taken over by a team of organized "skeptics" soon after Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers whipped up their fan base in an attack on Sheldrake resulting in the TEDx talk he'd been invited to give being removed from its website. According to Sheldrake, even with counter-editing the Wikipedia article about him is totally unreliable and inaccurate. Being somewhat familiar with Sheldrake's CV and the history of several of the attacks made on him, it is clear that the article is seriously inaccurate and incomplete, obviously having been edited to discredit him to casual readers*.
There is only one thing I disagree with in Rupert Sheldrake's post, I don't see any way for Wikipedia to be made less vulnerable to ideological manipulation. Its very method of generating content is an open invitation to inaccuracy, its methods of "correction", of "editing" puts that in the hands of anonymous people and organized groups of no knowable reliability or responsibility. Every problem that traditional encyclopedias is magnified by the Wikipedia model. Those haven't been corrected in the 12 years of its existence, as can be seen in groups such as the Guerrilla "skeptics" and who knows what other organized groups that don't trumpet their ideological war against objectivity.
In the post Sheldrake notes an Oxford based study of the most actively "edited" topics on Wikipedia in a number of languages. The list contains several that should be deeply troubling to everyone.
The most controversial topics across all the 10 editions analysed were:
- Israel
- Adolf Hitler
- The Holocaust
- God
When I first ran across the "Guerrilla Skeptics" one of the first things I thought of was the rather astounding amount of neo-Nazi content you find in word searches online.** I have no doubt that there likely is organized neo-Nazi editing on Wikipedia and no doubt that there are anti-Nazi groups that would be alert to that. But any person who looks up a topic on Wikipedia sees whatever which of the warring sides puts up at the time that they read the article. Given the reality of Holocaust denial as an active feature of today's politics by real Nazis with real aspirations to power here and in countries where they might have a better chance of exercising influence, I'd really rather not have a "reference work" that is open to the possibility of it being a part-time propaganda venue for them. And that is just one group of highly organized ideologues and, let's be honest, criminals who could turn any kind of thing with "open sourced" content into their tool, as the Guerrilla Skeptics proudly call Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the most important tool for skepticism that exists today
Well, is it their tool instead of a reliably objective reference work? Clearly, yes.
I don't think Wikipedia can be fixed and remain Wikipedia and I don't think something generated and structured as Wikipedia is can avoid becoming an ideological propaganda tool. It was based on a rather superstitious belief that some unseen hand will correct it, as if there is some kind of natural force that will balance for the truth, for reality, that is bound to win out in the end. That superstition seems to come up over and over again in society, it is the same superstitious belief that the "more speech" and "the market" are based on. It is a lazy, reality denying slack off.***
Human history shows that entirely untrue and malicious propaganda is extremely potent and able, unimpeded by this fictitious governor, proceed to create a disaster, over and over again. The truth has to be actively promoted, it has to be protected against lies, it has to be protected against the lazy refusal to take an active and responsible stand that prevents the propagation of lies. Everything about this is rather ironic, a "reference work" having to be criticized for its refusal to take responsibility for its content, ideologues calling themselves "skeptics" crowing about their hijacking of it and turning it into an ideological tool for their scientistic materialism.... Wikipedia is a mess of wildly varied reliability and no way for anyone to sort the good articles from the entirely bad ones. And there is no evidence, whatsoever that it will ever not be one. In one final and supreme irony the "Guerrilla Skeptics" claim to believe that "evidence is cool."
* If I were in the business of "editing" Wikipedia articles, I'd go into that within the month of the Coyne-Myers attack on Sheldrake, one of the major issues they brought up, whether or not the speed of light was variable, was addressed without attacks by them in two published scientific papers which supported Sheldrake's suspicions that the speed of light may not, after all, be a constant value. I have not seen any correction issued by Coyne or by his fellow materialist ideologue, Sean Carroll noting that their assertions on that point would seem to be in serious trouble. If there is one thing I've learned from my research into and encounters with these "skeptics" is that their assertions about being interested in objective accuracy are a complete and total hoax.
** I am sure that some idiot will start shouting "Godwin's Law" just about now. The creation and propagation of the empty headed locution, "Godwin's Law," is one of the stupidest things in idiot pop-culture today. That there are real Nazis, here and in countries where they have a good chance of having a real effect on things is obvious to anyone with a working mind who has ever done much googling or doing that quaint, old-fashioned thing, reading the news.
*** You might want to read this to see how the grotesquely irresponsible "custodian" of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales sees his total mess of a "reference work" having a major effect in the world. I almost choked on my coffee when I came to this passage, But he says it remains uncertain whether universities will be ready to change. "There's a certain inertia in the system." Yeah, Jimmy, now's that open "editing" problem getting fixed? Or are you relying on open editing to fix that too?
"Godwin's Law" is like the invocation of any "logical fallacy" (How can a fallacy be logical? Never have figured that out.): it is usually invoked incorrectly and merely to shut down the discussion.
ReplyDeleteWhich, ironically, is the point of "Godwin's Law:" that discussion ends when someone drops the rhetorical nuclear bomb of "NAZI!" Misusing the term rather than the practice it describes, of course, is meant to cut off real discussion, especially about real Nazis. Then again, a "real discussion" in public discourse is usually just a pointless shouting match, so the sooner it is cut off, the better.
As for Jimmy Wales: he was home schooled, and so loves home schooling. Big surprise. He also finds some professors boring. Well, it's true, they are. Acquiring knowledge sometimes takes more than being entertained. And education can't come down to that "one professor" that "everybody loves." Any more than it can come down to just watching recordings of lectures on MOOCs.
But now I have an insight into why he doesn't value scholarship and the hard work of assembling the kind of information universities are supposed to trade in. Better it should be what different people think and controlled by an invisible hand which, out of conflict, will reveal "truth."
Or we could just have college professors battle to the death, and the winner is the one we should learn from. Eliminate all these middle men and get down to what Wales is really advocating, while taking away all the abstract gobbledegook and replacing it with something real.
"It's remarkable that people now have the opportunity. It's not a Utopian state, but people have the possibility to do their own research."
Starting from a source that relies not on research but the raw assertion of power, and leads not to research but just to simplistic conclusions. I had an encyclopedia in my home. I stopped using it after elementary school, and didn't really learn the place of encyclopedias in research until I studied research and bibliography in graduate school. And the first thing I learned was: encyclopedias were a relic of the 19th century, and except for the Britannica of the '50's, not worth bothering with.
And even the Britannica was pretty outdated by then. But it was the issue that was recognized as the work of truly fine scholars, and contained truly reliable scholarship. Information is just data, or worse, gossip. Scholarship is something else entirely; but Jimmy Wales doesn't understand that, does he?
I read though the entire Encyclopedia Americana and the World Book when I was a kid, we didn't get that many channels and the library was too far to walk. They were a good place to start but a bad place to finish. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is too often a bad place to start and as far as it goes.
ReplyDeleteStudent evaluations of teachers is undependable, easy teachers with attractive personalities or bodies are bound to be more popular than really difficult teachers who are homely or have poor social skills. Luckily, in the few times when I could be so evaluated, it didn't matter. Applied teachers are hired by their students, most of whom want to learn how to really do something instead of regurgitating stuff back on a test. One of my best teachers was, as another student put it, "a castrating bitch," though only when someone wasted the classes and her time. I always thought of her as a tough cooky - she was from Chicago, her father was a "liquor dealer" in the period immediately after prohibition so I assume he may have been a boot legger before. She was really hard on us but she was a great teacher whose teaching I have passed on far more often than teachers who gave me an easier time. As she said of one of her composer-mentors, "He was a real son of a bitch but I loved him."