Don't - don't, don't, don't - go to Wikipedia for insight. Wikipedia is not an academically respectable source, as your institution should itself have told you. It is shot through with mistakes. Nothing on there is subject to proper peer review. If you are at a university then read from proper peer-reviewed sources - that is, academic articles and books by respectable academic presses (not books by philosopher-wannabes with no academic credentials in the area).
Every phrase in Wikipedia is attributed or attributable.
That is much more than you can say of the average academic textbook, which is just one more way to part a fool and his money.
Furthermore, peer review is just mutual back patting. "I have your back and you have mine." It is very prone to corruption and that is why most peer-review processes are effectively corrupt. Just look at the scandalous academic journals for a good example. They are a corrupt business platform for trading citations. I cite you, you cite my friend, and my friend cites me. It is absolutely trivial to game that system.
In technology, the free and open-source software movement utterly rejects any attempt by the academia to prevent collaboration by re-appropriating copyrights with a view on funnelling them to corporate overlords.
We detest these people, seriously.
Shunning the academia from the knowledge industry is a sheer necessity. Therefore, support Wikipedia.
Only reference open-access research and ignore everything else. The academia are involved in an impossible pile of bullshit with their closed-access journals, and we do not want to have any part in that.
Ignore research published under proprietary corporate copyrights. Join the open-source and open-access movements and reject the academia's self-serving mentality.
EcharmionSeptember 14, 2019 at 16:10#3286810 likes
I cite you, you cite my friend, and my friend cites me. It is absolutely trivial to game that system.
I have an anecdote about that. I once discovered a citation circle. Several publications referenced each other for support, but none actually contained the original argument nor a citation of an original source. Worse, the only non-circular citation was to an article that argued the exact opposite.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 01:08#3291430 likes
Reply to alcontali Wikipedia is not peer reviewed and no respectable university will be happy with anyone citing wikipedia in student essays.
Wikipedia has its uses, of course - but so do chats down the pub.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 01:13#3291440 likes
Wikipedia is not peer reviewed and no respectable university will be happy with anyone citing wikipedia in student essays. Wikipedia has its uses, of course - but so do chats down the pub.
The academia are certainly not an absolute reference with regards to knowledge.
On the contrary, their detestable practices concerning locking up publicly-funded research in copyrighted journals make the academia the least appropriate standard for the dissemination of knowledge. We despise their wide-ranging corruption and we view their practices with contempt only.
As I wrote before, only open-source and open-access should be considered as reference material. Seriously, we are justified to spit on the academia and their detestable ways.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 01:30#3291470 likes
I think your beef is with the publishers who make lots of money off peer review publications. And, perhaps, with the disney disciplines who publish each other's work without subjecting it to proper peer review.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 03:52#3291720 likes
I think your beef is with the publishers who make lots of money off peer review publications. And, perhaps, with the disney disciplines who publish each other's work without subjecting it to proper peer review.
No, my beef is with the academia in general, and their obnoxious mentality.
A very typical example of what is totally wrong with their mentality, is the Tanenbaum versus Torvalds debate.
Tanenbaum pointed to his endless list of PhDs and other worthless credentialist dead-tree paperwork to argue that he knew better about operating systems than Torvalds, and that his debile mimix joke of an imbecile piece of crap was better linux.
Tanenbaum did not want to compete on the merits of his work. No, he only wants to compete based on the corrupt citation carousel that he is so proudly engaged in.
But for heaven's sake, whose work powers Android and therefore 80% of the world's mobile phones? Isn't the proof simply in the pudding? Is it linux or his stupid mimix? Seriously, that is the problem with the academia, the vast majority of whom have nothing to show for, besides imbecile paperwork and ridiculous citation carousels. Even though they have nothing to show for, they still know everything better. Seriously, it is so obvious that they know fuck all about operating systems. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.
Criticism from the academia on Wikipedia is of exactly the same nature.
Where is their alternative for knowledge dissemination? They simply don't have one! Knowledge is all about arrows. According to the JtB doctrine, i.e. Justified ([s]true[/s]) Belief, it is the following modus ponens that powers it all:
Hence, arrows, i.e. links, are the essence of knowledge. Wikipedia supplies us with the ability to link straight to the mainstream knowledge narrative, which in turn, links straight to the original sources that justify it. This is exactly how knowledge is supposed to work.
What alternative do the academia propose? None. They do not have one. Their outdated dead-tree text books and libraries are absolutely unusable in this context. They cannot handle new technology and therefore try to stop its progress. They simply have become an impediment to progress.
The academia sound exactly like the erstwhile middle managers in corporations who complained about the introduction of new technology, couldn't handle it, couldn't work with it, but still insisted that they knew everything better. Corporations, however, tend to smarter than universities. The corporations just fired them all. They terminated their contracts and threw them out of the window. There is no other solution for people who know everything better but objectively have nothing to show for and hence know nothing at all.
Idiots who criticize Wikipedia are more often than not just a bunch of losers who almost surely know nothing, and have nothing to show for, but still insist that they know everything better. They are worthless. Technology just keeps moving ahead while these idiots will sooner or later just get thrown off a cliff.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 03:58#3291750 likes
Reply to alcontali Ah, I think you've been drinking. Wikipedia is written by people who like pub quizzes, not experts. For instance, consider something you know a lot about. Look up a wikipedia entry on that subject, whatever it may be. Then notice all the mistakes.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:03#3291790 likes
h, I think you've been drinking. Wikipedia is written by people who like pub quizzes, not experts.
There are no experts. There are only justified knowledge claims. Seriously, if it matters who says it, then what he says, cannot possibly matter.
The concept of "expert" is just a ploy to mislead and manipulate the gullible populace. The cognoscenti do not care about who says it. The bitcoin paper was published by an anonymous author. Does it matter? No. What the paper says, is provable from number theory. That is all that matters.
The academia are mostly populated with clowns and circus monkeys, who believe that we should be impressed by their imbecile PhD paperwork and stupid citation carrousels. Sorry, we are not. We only care about justification. We do not care about who says it. We only care about how it is said: justified or not.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:07#3291810 likes
Reply to alcontali No, there are experts. If your doctor - an expert on the human body and what can go wrong with it - says that the mole on your arm looks dodgy and you should get it checked out, then you're a fool if you think his/her judgement provides you with no better justification for believing it to be dodgy than your mechanic friend's judgement that "it is fine - nothing to worry about" provides you with justification for believing that it is nothing to worry about.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:21#3291820 likes
No, there are experts. If your doctor - an expert on the human body and what can go wrong with it - says that the mole on your arm looks dodgy and you should get it checked out, then you're a fool if you think his/her judgement provides you with no better justification for believing it to be dodgy than your mechanic friend's judgement
No, there are no "expert" doctors. There are only justified diagnoses. It does not matter who came up with a diagnose. All that matters, is that it is justified. The only purpose of the entire system of so-called "experts" is to mislead the gullible populace, and to part the fool with his money.
Nassim Nicolas Taleb writes extensively about IYIs, i.e. Intellectuals Yet Idiots, i.e. the academia, the credentialist idiots they produce, and their bullshit ways.
Example: The Intellectual Yet Idiot. What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
Another example: Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says it’s neither. It’s because these authorities face the wrong incentives. They are rewarded according to whether they look good to their superiors, not according to whether they are effective. They have no skin in the game.
The entire "expert" concept is bullshit. The USA are bankrupting themselves on exactly that problem in health care. If you believe in that concept, you will simply go bust.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:23#3291850 likes
Reply to alcontali Like I say, if your doctor says the mole is cancerous you are justified in believing it to be cancerous, whereas if your mate Tom says it is cancerous, you are not justified in believing it to be cancerous (even if it is).
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:27#3291860 likes
Reply to alcontali Needless to say, when experts start talking outside their areas of expertise - so, when a neuroscientist starts talking about free will or a biologist starts talking about metaphysics - then you are no more justified in believing what they say than your baker's opinion on these matters.
But if you want to know how to bake a loaf of bread, then listen to a baker.
If you want to know about what's up with that weird looking mole on your arm, see a medical doctor.
If you want to know if you've got free will, consult a philosopher.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 04:39#3291890 likes
Needless to say, when experts start talking outside their areas of expertise - so, when a neuroscientist starts talking about free will or a biologist starts talking about metaphysics - then you are no more justified in believing what they say than your baker's opinion on these matters. But if you want to know how to bake a loaf of bread, then listen to a baker. If you want to know about what's up with that weird looking mole on your arm, see a medical doctor. If you want to know if you've got free will, consult a philosopher.
Every practitioner of a knowledge discipline faces the threat posed by the Church-Turing thesis:
"A problem belongs to the knowledge domain of beliefs, if there exists a purely mechanical procedure that can reach its solution."
Therefore, if what you do, is based on only knowledge, then what you do, will sooner or later be done by a computer, and you will be replaced by software. The medical profession knows that too. No matter how much political clout they think that they have, we are going to liberally destroy their jobs; and that is a done deal already. Every fake intellectual IYI will have to contend with the same problem.
At the same time, knowledge discovery is protected by Gödel's Incompleteness theorems, by Alan Turing's Halting problem, and by the third millenium problem. So, if your job consists of discovering new knowledge as opposed to merely applying existing knowledge, you will still be relevant in the future.
You see, nothing will stop us from disrupting and destroying, as we please. With cryptocurrencies (i.e. bitcoin) we are kicking out the central banksters, and the commercial fiat banksters, which is another bunch of IYI idiots.
Who can stop us from doing that?
Unless they are protected by the aforementioned limitations, these so-called "experts" are out already. We do not respect merely rehashing existing knowledge, and we shouldn't. These parrots are simply arrogant idiots.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 05:26#3292080 likes
Like I say, if your doctor says the mole is cancerous you are justified in believing it to be cancerous, whereas if your mate Tom says it is cancerous, you are not justified in believing it to be cancerous (even if it is).
The justification for "the mole is cancerous", is never "who" says it, but "how" he says it: justified or not. If the justification for that claim falls within the realm of knowledge, then sooner or later Tom will be a computer system and trivially defeat your doctor. If it is not pure knowledge -- that depends on the precise epistemic context -- then neither an "expert" nor a computer system can systematically be counted on to reach the correct conclusion.
Therefore, this question is not decidable within this context.
There are trivial counterexamples for the type of argument you are making. If Carl is an accountant who believes that the sum is 12535 after adding up a list of numbers, but Tom which is software and which has actually produced the list of numbers, says that it is 11978, then we will believe Tom and not "expert" Carl.
Pure knowledge jobs are shaky things. They were condemned in 1936 already, by the Church-Turing thesis. You must produce something else than the mere application of existing knowledge, in order to stay relevant.
Reply to Bartricks Many people are naive about information. They do not have the experience to assay information for accuracy and reliability that they come across in the newspaper, television, internet, or down at the pub. I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so myself, but I'm in my 70s and have a couple of degrees and have spent decades engaged in (mostly personal, some professional) study.
In 1983 I was naive about AIDS. There were all sorts of facts and concepts I either had wrong or did not have at all. I could say "retrovirus" but I really didn't know what the "retro" part meant. When I first started to do AIDS prevention work, I had to bring myself up to speed. It took a couple of years to acquire, absorb, and integrate the unfamiliar information I needed.
I met a college student the other day working as a check-out at a local grocery store who explained he didn't know how credit cards worked (a customer was having difficulties with her card). He went on to explain that he didn't know how checking or banks worked either. Very naive about financial information. Sad, but quite curable.
From my experience, Wikipedia (and a lot of stuff on the Internet) is good, solid information -- BUT one MUST bring at least moderate skill in recognizing garbage. A lot of people don't have that skill. No matter where they get their information from, the naive will have difficulty judging quality.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 05:52#3292210 likes
Reply to alcontali I don't really know what you're talking about now. To know something is to have a true belief about it, whatever else it involves. And computers cannot have beliefs.
So I don't see what problem you're highlighting or why you think expert testimony counts for no more or less than the testimony of an idiot.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:07#3292280 likes
I don't really know what you're talking about now. To know something is to have a true belief about it, whatever else it involves. And computers cannot have beliefs.
A machine can know something, because it can store any knowledge declaration P => Q along with a proof R in first-order logic that proves that Q necessarily follows from P. Therefore, the two-tuple (P=>Q,R) is a justified belief, i.e. knowledge.
So I don't see what problem you're highlighting or why you think expert testimony counts for no more or less than the testimony of an idiot.
If the idiot looks up the tuple (P=>Q,R) in a knowledge database, there is no way in which the expert can refute this tuple. He simply knows nothing more about P=>Q, simply, because there is nothing more to know.
If you believe P=>Q because an expert tells you, then your belief is NOT justified. There is absolutely no reason why it would be knowledge. If you believe P=>Q because an idiot provides you with the two-tuple (P=>Q,R), then your belief is effectively justified. The only legitimate reason why it is justified has been supplied to you, i.e. the tuple (P=>Q,R).
I have an anecdote about that. I once discovered a citation circle. Several publications referenced each other for support, but none actually contained the original argument nor a citation of an original source.
How does that work? An earlier publication referencing a later publication?
TheMadFoolSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:29#3292340 likes
Wikipedia is not peer reviewed and no respectable university will be happy with anyone citing wikipedia in student essays.
Wikipedia has its uses, of course - but so do chats down the pub.
Good call. I've been relying heavily on wikipedia these last few years. I haven't had time nor the resources to crosscheck facts but by and large there seems to some agreement, serving as validation, between wikipedia and other "independent" sources.
From what I gather access to knowledge is restricted and requires a certain combination of dollar digits to unlock. I have nothing against that. People must protect their intellectual property and need money to put food on the table. However, the value of knowledge increases when it's propagated among an audience. If it continues to be restricted to only those who pay then it's likely to degenerate into something like the caste system of India, only pundits having access to knowledge.
Of course it could be said that only people who're deeply interested and ergo will make contributions will have the motivation to part with their money. To that I agree.
As for wikipedia I think it serves as a "least worst" option for those who want to learn but lack the funds. It's not that bad a source of information. I've noticed some of the articles are cut-and-paste jobs but I can't confirm which is the primary source and which the copy.
Even if wikipedia fails and is inaccurate it's a first step and therefore laudable towards a free education to those who can only afford an internet connection.
EcharmionSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:42#3292380 likes
How does that work? An earlier publication referencing a later publication?
Who knows. Those were legal commentaries, so a lot of different authors work on them, and they get overhauled every couple of years. It's possible there was originally a source, but someone dropped it, thinking it was superfluous since all other commentaries said the same thing, so why not quote them. It's also possible someone just completely misunderstood the one article that was actually cited and everyone else just copied the outcome, citing each other.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:49#3292430 likes
From what I gather access to knowledge is restricted and requires a certain combination of dollar digits to unlock. I have nothing against that. People must protect their intellectual property and need money to put food on the table.
Current technology is driven by open-source software, most of which is freely accessible on platforms such as github.com. If hoarding knowledge were a requirement to put food on the table, then how do you explain that? Are these millions of software developers starving?
In technology, the concept of "intellectual property" is considered to be rather an impediment to progress than to be of any benefit.
Wikipedia pages are attributed. You can always find the original source in the foot notes. Wikipedia's no original research policy is strictly enforced. That is much more than you can say about the average academic text book.
If you add up the billions of dollars spent on public libraries and university ones around the world, do they produce even a fraction of a fraction of the value that Wikipedia gives away free of charge?
It reminds me of the silly debate in Europe. The governments there want to tax Google, so that they can fund, at great cost, outdated and expensive alternatives to Google search, that cannot possibly compete with Google search, while Google provides its search engine free of charge to its users. They even try to defend that on moral grounds using arguments that invariably end in infinite regress ...
I would personally even pay real money for the privilege of using Google search, while I would never pay a dime for the crap produced by these European governments.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:53#3292470 likes
Reply to alcontali Like I say, a machine cannot know something because a machine does not have mental states and beliefs are mental states and knowledge essentially involves having them.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:57#3292510 likes
Like I say, a machine cannot know something because a machine does not have mental states and beliefs are mental states and knowledge essentially involves having them.
Knowledge as a justified ([s]true[/s]) belief is a tuple of two language expression: the knowledge claim along with its justification. A machine can perfectly store that. It can also perfectly use it in an inference engine to reach conclusions based on this knowledge.
Knowledge is not restricted to humans. On the contrary, according to the 1936 Church-Turing thesis a problem is only decidable in knowledge if there exists a purely mechanical procedure for doing so.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:58#3292530 likes
Reply to alcontali So if you're looking up something in philosophy, which is better - Wikipedia or Stanford Encyclopedia? It is Stanford hands-down. Why? It is written by academics - experts in their field.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 06:59#3292540 likes
Reply to alcontali Knowledge requires a belief, machines do not have beliefs, therefore machines do not have knowledge.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:03#3292570 likes
Knowledge requires a belief, machines do not have beliefs, therefore machines do not have knowledge.
Such belief must be expressed in language. Ineffable beliefs cannot possibly be knowledge.
A machine can store language expressions and use them in inference rules.
Hence, a machine can use knowledge.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:06#3292590 likes
Reply to alcontali You're changing your position. Knowledge involves having a justified true belief, whatever else it involves (actually, I'm sceptical it has to involve that - but it has to involve a true belief). Beliefs are mental states. Machines don't have mental states. Therefore they do not have knowledge.
Now you're saying they use knowledge. Well that's different. I used a bus to get home, but I don't have a bus.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:11#3292630 likes
So if you're looking up something in philosophy, which is better - Wikipedia or Stanford Encyclopedia? It is Stanford hands-down. Why? It is written by academics - experts in their field.
I have to interject the Church-Turing thesis to your comparison of both sources. Your evaluation is legitimate knowledge only if there exists a purely mechanical procedure to reach that conclusion. Where can we find the description for the epistemically-sound method that you have used to reach that conclusion? We need this in order to supply it to a machine and verify if it reaches the same conclusion as yourself.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:12#3292650 likes
You're changing your position. Knowledge involves having a justified true belief, whatever else it involves (actually, I'm sceptical it has to involve that - but it has to involve a true belief). Beliefs are mental states. Machines don't have mental states. Therefore they do not have knowledge.
Beliefs that are not expressed in language or not possible to express in language are ineffable. They are not part of knowledge. You must be able to express the belief, or else it is not knowledge. Hence, legitimate knowledge can always be represented by using language expressions. We do not need undocumented, internal, mental states for that purpose.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:15#3292670 likes
If your conclusion is knowledge, then a machine must be able to reach the same conclusion. Otherwise, it is not knowledge.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:15#3292680 likes
Reply to alcontali No, if there are beliefs that cannot be expressed in a language that's irrelevant to whether they will qualify as items of knowledge.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:16#3292690 likes
Reply to alcontali No, that's just a bizarre claim that I see no reason to think is true
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:19#3292700 likes
Reply to alcontali And even in the extremely unlikely event that your bizarre claim is true, it would do nothing to show that machines can have knowledge. Although perhaps you were talking about experts and expertise - I am a bit lost now.
But machines can't have knowledge (not unless they can have minds). And if an expert in a field says something then you've reason to think it is true (other things being equal - as usual).
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:21#3292730 likes
And if an expert in a field says something then you've reason to think it is true (other things being equal - as usual).
No, that means that you trust him. You trust that he has a justification. On what grounds would you trust him?
We do not trust. We verify.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:24#3292770 likes
Reply to alcontali If a random stranger with no expertise in medicine says that my mole is cancerous, and then another random strange with no expertise in medicine says that my mole is cancerous, have they verified each other? And do you think that, because they have both said the same thing, I now have good reason to think the mole is cancerous?
TheMadFoolSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:31#3292800 likes
You don't have to verify that a belief is knowledge before it qualifies as knowledge. After all, if you did you'd get a regress.
You have the knowledge claim and then you have evidence/justification that supports it. We are talking about two different documents. For example, document 1 claims that water boils at 100C. Document 2 is test report in which they made water boil a few times and consistently measured its temperature.
It is necessary to verify that document 2 at least exists. Otherwise, you can seriously question what is written in document 1. On what grounds do they even write it?
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:40#3292850 likes
If a random stranger with no expertise in medicine says that my mole is cancerous, and then another random strange with no expertise in medicine says that my mole is cancerous, have they verified each other? And do you think that, because they have both said the same thing, I now have good reason to think the mole is cancerous?
It does not work like that.
Document 1. "Your mole is cancerous".
Document 2. Evidence for document 1.
So, where is document 2?
I only work with documents. I do not work with strangers babbling about arbitrary subjects. I want document 1 and document 2. They must first commit to paper what it is about. Otherwise, the proposition is not even receivable.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:41#3292860 likes
Reply to alcontali You're confusing verifiability with truth and justification.
To be justified in a belief is for there to be normative reason for you to believe what you believe (whether you have to be aware of the reasons is another matter).
You can be justified in a belief in the absence of verification. After all, as I have just noted above, if every belief, to be justified, required verification, we'd have a regress and no belief would be justified.
For example, if I am alone in the world I am nevertheless justified in believing I exist, even though my belief is not verifiable.
And I am justified in thinking I just drank a beer because I seem to remember doing so, even if I cannot travel back in time and verify it. And so on.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:42#3292870 likes
Reply to alcontali Well, that's nice for you - but your random and unjustified assertions do not determine what's true in this area. Not unless you're an expert, that is (joke).
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:49#3292890 likes
You're confusing verifiability with truth and justification.
No, not at all. I did not say that the justification had to be some kind of extensive verification. I only said that I wanted to verify the justification, which could perfectly well rest on falsifiability, or on witness depositions, depending on what it is about.
There needs to be a document that contains the justification, and I will verify, i.e. read or peruse, that justification. It is not that I would subscribe to verificationism. I am perfectly happy to accept justification in the form of a falsifiable test report.
Well, that's nice for you - but your random and unjustified assertions do not determine what's true in this area. Not unless you're an expert, that is (joke).
There is pretty much a good consensus on the three core, formal knowledge-justification methods: axiomatic, scientific, and historical.
Furthermore, these methods do not guarantee that any claim would be correspondence-theory "true".
The reason why we need to agree on the existence and suitability of these three epistemic methods, is that we need somewhere a starting point. Otherwise, it becomes an exercise in infinite regress.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:55#3292920 likes
Reply to alcontali You realize there's a consensus that verificationism is false?
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 07:56#3292930 likes
Reply to alcontali Plus, I thought you didn't value what experts think - why are you suddenly into consensuses?
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:00#3292940 likes
Does the random non-expert's cancer diagnosis verify the other random non-expert's cancer diagnosis? If not, why not?
Verification in this context means that the method was correctly applied. It does not mean that the results are correct.
Since a diagnosis does not seek to refer to another diagnosis, I do not see how that would work. In what way does one diagnosis verify if the method was correctly applied in another diagnosis?
In the end, knowledge is subject to a bureaucracy of consistency-maintaining formalisms. We just verify if the procedures were properly followed. The result could still be wrong, but that does not matter. In the end, nobody cares about that. If a doctor follows all procedures required, the professional-liability insurance company will not cancel his cover. That is the same principle.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:02#3292950 likes
Reply to alcontali So, basically, long story short, a big bunch of no-nothings can create knowledge by writing a Wikipedia page, yes?
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:03#3292970 likes
You realize there's a consensus that verificationism is false?
It is not about verificationism. It is about verifying that all formalisms and procedures were followed. Furthermore, verificationism is not accepted in science because impossible. So, science revolves around falsificationism. Mathematics, however, is staunchly verificationist. Unlike the scientific method, the axiomatic method does not allow for mere sampling of random cases. So, verificationism is only rejected in the scientific method.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:05#3292980 likes
Plus, I thought you didn't value what experts think - why are you suddenly into consensuses?
Epistemology is not mathematics nor science. It has its own requirements and procedures. Consensus does not matter in mathematics. In principle, it also does not matter in science. It does matter, however, in epistemology.
BartricksSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:08#3293000 likes
Reply to alcontali So, again, two no-nothings say the same thing and suddenly we have verification and knowledge, yes? Only, no, no, no.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:10#3293010 likes
Wikipedia articles must not contain original research. The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist.[a] This includes any analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a conclusion not stated by the sources. To demonstrate that you are not adding OR, you must be able to cite reliable, published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and directly support the material being presented.
Your remark suggest that you are not even properly familiar with the core of the epistemic method that governs Wikipedia.
StreetlightSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:11#3293020 likes
Wikipedia is a good first stop: a place to go to find out where to go next. It's also better for some things than others - it's fantastic for history and biography and anything 'factual' (geography, landmarks, basic science) - but once you get into more abstract things, like maths, high-level science, and philosophy in particular, it becomes almost more a hindrance and a help.
The entries on philosophy are particularly poor, and the IEP and the SEP are a great deal better. This is largely not the 'fault' of Wiki itself, but the very medium: philosophy is not well suited to 2-3 paragraph summaries, and in most cases having incomplete information is even worse than having no information. And IEP and SEP have the opposite problem of being very, very dry, and not all that great for popular consumption. Podcasts and Youtube videos I think are far more effective mediums for popular consumption of philosophy.
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:14#3293030 likes
So, again, two no-nothings say the same thing and suddenly we have verification and knowledge, yes? Only, no, no, no.
Verification only occurs when the second no-nothing uses a sound procedure to double check the first no-nothing's justification. We do not ask the verifier to produce a new claim. We also do not ask him if he likes the results of the original claim. We only ask the verifier to verify if the original conclusion necessarily follows from the original evidence.
unenlightenedSeptember 16, 2019 at 08:27#3293090 likes
Wikipedia has faults and limitations. And so does academia. Even doctors have as institution spent many years doing completely useless and therefore dangerous and damaging operations. Philosophical critiques of academia - Kuhn, Feyerabend etc along with the various scandals indicate that perfection is unobtainable, and alas the perfection of machine knowledge is also a fantasy. The search for God continues to yield no result. Trust no one completely and everyone provisionally.
Citing Francis Galton of all people on the wisdom of the masses - who'd a' thunk it?
Wikipedia is great. I donate to their yearly fundraiser. I’ve edited a few articles and even created one. Of course it’s not an authoritative source but it’s often handy to grab a snippet to illustrate a point. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best things about the Internet.
Pattern-chaserSeptember 16, 2019 at 09:00#3293120 likes
Wikipedia is not an academically respectable source, as your institution should itself have told you. It is shot through with mistakes. Nothing on there is subject to proper peer review.
So, will you continue to create your truth by repetition only, as modern 'truth'-tellers do, or will you accept actual facts, according to the old-fashioned way of truth-telling?
Pattern-chaserSeptember 16, 2019 at 09:07#3293130 likes
For instance, consider something you know a lot about. Look up a wikipedia entry on that subject, whatever it may be. Then notice all the mistakes.
Yes. I just did that. I looked at the page describing audio power amplifiers. There are always ways in which any article could be improved, but the article in Wikipedia is as good as one could hope, and contains no obvious mistakes.
Just like all your other comments, this one proves to be entirely without foundation. :roll: :roll: :roll:
Pattern-chaserSeptember 16, 2019 at 09:18#3293140 likes
So, basically, long story short, a big bunch of no-nothings can create knowledge by writing a Wikipedia page, yes?
Empirical investigation says otherwise. Your assertion is false. Most Wikipedia pages are well-written, reliable and accurate, so those who wrote them are presumably reasonably knowledgeable. In contrast, your comments don't seem to be accurate, well-written or true.
Ah, I think you've been drinking. Wikipedia is written by people who like pub quizzes, not experts. For instance, consider something you know a lot about. Look up a wikipedia entry on that subject, whatever it may be. Then notice all the mistakes.
The trick is to look at the references section to see where the information is coming from.
Wikipedia is written by people who like pub quizzes,
Nothing like The Philosophy Forum, which is an assembly of experts from all over the world, whose opinions are invariably supported by profound insights into that of which they speak.
SophistiCatSeptember 16, 2019 at 10:08#3293260 likes
Reply to alcontali You have very naive, black-and-white notions both about academia and about open-access publishing. The best of open-access journals are very much a part of the academic world that you so despise, just with a somewhat different business model than pay-for-access journals. The worst are crackpot publications like Journal of Cosmology, and what must be by far the largest open-access sector, so-called Predatory publishing - fake online journals with no real editorial or peer review that, for a modest fee, will publish pretty much any submission from naive authors who don't bother to check the journal's credentials, or unscrupulous grad students and young careerists who just want to pad their publication lists. (Do take a look at the second Wiki link for some sobering perspective.)
Like Reply to Bitter Crank, Reply to StreetlightX and Reply to unenlightened said, there are good and bad sides to Wikipedia and open-access publishing, as well as academic publishing and institutional science. Neither condemning them in toto nor unconditionally endorsing anything "open-source" like a bright-eyed fanatic is reasonable. You need to get informed and use good judgement.
Beliefs that are not expressed in language or not possible to express in language are ineffable. They are not part of knowledge. You must be able to express the belief, or else it is not knowledge. Hence, legitimate knowledge can always be represented by using language expressions.
Tacit (implicit empirical) knowledge is difficult to communicate because it is only partially codifiable, or uncodifiable. It is processed in an automatic, or intuitive (as opposed to a controlled, or cogitative), manner. Types include motor sequences (e.g., driving a car), skills (e.g., hammering a nail), and schemata (e.g., primary social interactions).
So tacit knowledge (which is ineffable) is not actually knowledge, or better: is illegitimate knowledge?
alcontaliSeptember 16, 2019 at 13:35#3293720 likes
Tacit (implicit empirical) knowledge is difficult to communicate because it is only partially codifiable, or uncodifiable. It is processed in an automatic, or intuitive (as opposed to a controlled, or cogitative), manner. Types include motor sequences (e.g., driving a car), skills (e.g., hammering a nail), and schemata (e.g., primary social interactions).
So tacit knowledge (which is ineffable) is not actually knowledge, or better: is illegitimate knowledge?
Well, it is obviously legitimate. I should have said that they are not part of "formal knowledge".
Well, it is obviously legitimate. I should have said that they are not part of "formal knowledge".
Fair enough.
Obviously, tacit knowledge is not beyond the capacity of AI (e.g., self-driving vehicles, robotic manufacturing, etc).
So, I'm surprised that we are not dropping JTB as a general definition of knowledge, and substituting it with something after Floridi (e.g., factual and/or logical semantic information).
Like ?Bitter Crank, ?StreetlightX and ?unenlightened said, there are good and bad sides to Wikipedia and open-access publishing, as well as academic publishing and institutional science. Neither condemning them in toto nor unconditionally endorsing anything "open-source" like a bright-eyed fanatic is reasonable. You need to get informed and use good judgement.
This seems like a reasonable thing to say, moderation in all things, but I think is insufficient to properly address @alcontali's concerns.
Granted, the little waskel has spiwit -- I said spiwit! Bravado, a touch of derring-do. He dares to raid us. But I think such passion for the truth and it's sharing should be first commended and any counter arguments fleshed out in the flesh.
I agree there are serious problems with many of @alcontali's position -- such as believing bitcoin is some serious threat to government currency schemes and that bitcoin itself is somehow independent of governments being so gracious as to maintain a global internet, as well as believing logical rules and theorems somehow imply inevitable empirical affects in the real world such as mass-automation (again, that depends on governments being so gracious as to maintain a sophisticated global economy) -- and if your claim of naivity is focused on these aspects, then I agree; rarely do I come across a branch not only so close to being cut by the person resting atop it but doing the cutting so vigorous a fashion.
However, these things mentioned in the above paragraph, as much as they betray a fool's completely misunderstanding and ignorance of the real world, are adjacent to the core contention of @alcontali's grasp of formal arguments and, though unstated, Kantian moral argument.
I will do my best here to state this unstated argument, for the benefit not only of alcontali but your own, so that you too may emerge from a naive black and white view of the world where things are either in moderation, and so good, or then not, and so naive.
Is fanaticism for justice a moral blemish? Is thirst for the truth savagery?
For if we bring in a moral theory, such as Kantianism, then alcontali's position becomes very understandable. He is not saying all open source material is by definition is good, he is saying academia has failed in their duties to society insofar as they create knowledge through occulted schemes of copulation with corporations. The academic claims to have a duty to the truth and society, to teach and to guide, and the corporation claims to have a duty to money, for themselves, and to take value from society whenever possible. True, some academics see this as intrinsic tension, and some do not. But what is the argument of those academics that say "there is nothing to see here" and to put their money where their mouth is, we won't even let you see for you to judge for yourself.
For instance, certainly, many an economist sees no problem with a private central bank with an ambiguous and opaque connection to the public sphere with the power to create money backed by the government. And, though I doubt bitcoin is going to change this, is this really a well reasoned position? Or, is the real position of the status-quo economist "well, at the end of the day, central bankers rub me the right way, so I rub them the right way, we all come into a lot of money; it's an exchange, I service them and in return look out for their interests, and that's what economics is all about; QED little padawan, QED".
In other words, status-quo economists, the "experts" appealed to whenever the status quo comes into question, have no "document 2" in the parlance of alcontali.
However, where alcontali diverges from the true-true about this social story, is that it's not resolved in formalism alone. Though the formalism of the claim and the justification for the claim, is the context, unjustified claims of experts do have a "document 2" which is just appeal to their own expertise; which alconti's aware of, as references their reference to their own papers, but just is not so astute in the ways of logic to realize these papers can always substitute for "document 2"
The real issue is whether a "document 2" of just citing their own expertise is a valid justification for whatever they claim.
Sometimes yes, but nearly all these cases that I can think of (and exceptions don't justify much hidden research), will have time constraints involved, and the expert and their document 1, the claim, and their document 2, paper trail of expertise of some sort, is the best we can do.
But if there is no time constraint, such as justifying a claim where we can sit all day waiting for the document justifying it to accumulate both argument and empirical data, then as soon as the academic starts citing papers that are not accessible to the general population, the general population can reasonably doubt whether such research is carried out honestly by people who feel a duty to the truth and duty to society and a duty to tell the truth to society. If we can doubt their motives, then we can doubt the quality of their expertise.
For, formalism, that we can fortunately come to understand apart from any experts claims about it, informs us another important thing, that from any contradictory statement anything can be proven. And although networks of empirical evidence may have more robustness to such errors than formal mathematics, we are well-suited to doubt that the subtlest mistake can be used to arrive at, not only a false conclusion, but a verifiable absurd conclusion. If those mistakes are hidden behind paw-walls, and there is simply not enough honest people that have access to be able to spot such mistakes, then we cannot be sure that the expert is making a recommendation that has a coherent document 2 (one that we can at least check for internal consistency) or even any document 2 other than their own expertise (which has no special relationship to their claim in question but can be attached to any and all claims).
Why do experts tolerate and provide non-evidence, non-good-reasoning based arguments for occult research, research that is not accessible and occulted by pay-walls, is I believe for exactly the reasons alconti is proposing: anyone can check. If data is analysed to come to a conclusion, it really is as alconti says: anyone with a computer can check if that analysis was done correctly. Statistics is difficult, it's not even an expectation that most academics can even properly wield statistics as otherwise there would only be a handful of them around, almost statistically unnoticeable, so the best that can be done is to open up research and data so that anyone can check, with few exceptions.
Why isn't this done? To shift liability to unaccountable panels of experts to arrive at public policy driven by ulterior motives than what is true.
For instance, corporations want to put their products on the market as soon as possible, then set the bar of "proving the product is for sure dangerous" as high as possible both in terms of scientific evidence and legally. But to get permission from the government, some sort of indication that it's safe is required, if "experts" can be called on to give an unaccountable, perhaps biased by explicit or implicit conflicts of interest, this is the best scenario; the second best scenario is being allowed to submit studies that have improper statistical analysis or that are straightup fraudulent and no one bothers to check for both internal inconsistencies as well as conflicts with other published papers, as no one has time for that. In terms of profit motive, these are the plans we'd reasonably expect to be executed. The problem in this system of getting society's approval to put a product in the environment or people's bodies is that if "someone, out there" does have time to check.
A recent scandal that shows just how vulnerable this system of occult research and expert opinion is, is the opioid crisis. How many experts from government, to hospitals, to every doctor being themselves a supposed expert, adopted the claim that opioids can be prescribed in abundance without a second document justifying this, other than other experts seeming to claim this? It turns out the precious "peer reviewed research by a high-credibility and therefore costly and pay-walled journals" justifying opioids for wide use didn't even exist. Ok, sure, science eventually caught up and realized whatever experts were involved in creating the crisis were full of shit and had no document 2 justifying the policies (other than their supposed expertise), but far after the fact, after far more money was made than will ever be recovered or commensurate with the social damage, and arguably more financial damage than would cost to just "buy the universities into open publication and open data" for if it's money they want why not just give them their 40 pieces of silver if it would avoid things like the opioid crisis.
More serious, the excuse "well, science will catch up even if there are systematic weaknesses in the system" itself has only the document "well, experts say so" to back it up, and there is no time constraint where this is the best we can do. If such systemic weakness lead not only to things like the opioid crisis but to the destruction of civilization, perhaps all of humanity, how will science "catch up and correct the problem eventually"?
And such catastrophic damage can come from two directions from this system. First, like as above, inconsistencies in "document justification for claims" that are not noticed because academics are too busy or too cowardly to verify important expert claims upon which critical public policy is based. Formalism informs us the implications of a single mistake is, if not proving all statements, is at least unknowable to it's extent of proving further false statements. Now, we cannot avoid all mistakes, but we can avoid avoidable mistakes by maximizing the checking of claims for, at at least, internal consistency. For instance, experts hatch a plan for geo-engineering that goes horribly wrong that turns out, though science is no longer around to learn from it, had subtle analytical mistakes in it's formulation, that unfortunately for us could have been spotted but weren't spotted due to a history of making such spotting as difficult as possible.
The second catastrophic damage that can occur is that due to the occult nature of enlightenment based science today, avoidable mistakes are made due to conflicts of interest and people lose faith in the whole system and so even when there are documents that really are open to justify a claim, such that climate change is happening and is a serious problem, people are so in the habit of doubting experts, because they've seen the ulterior motives play out before that they apply the same (completely reasonable expectation) to these new claims. The claim that climate scientists have ulterior motive really is backed up by scientists having ulterior motives before (cough, cough, tabacco). In other-words, systemic weaknesses in institutional science undermine the public trust in institutional science overtime and scientists shouldn't complain about that because they only have themselves to blame. They want to classify all such criticism as word salads ... but they don't want to apply the same standard to their grant proposals.
What can the scientist do to separate themselves from the reasonable suspicion of ulterior motives. There is only one thing: open data and analysis accessible to anyone who wants to check.
SophistiCatSeptember 17, 2019 at 18:24#3299400 likes
Is fanaticism for justice a moral blemish? Is thirst for the truth savagery?
Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beautiful and (obviously) naked young woman, apparently in order to ensure that the visceral (or whatever) truth of the allegory would be felt by every (or at least every male) viewer:
But the naked, unadorned truth is that truth in most nontrivial matters is far too messy and ambiguous and not infrequently unattractive (if not to say ugly), belying the seductive allegory. Passion is a double-edged sword (there is that dull moderation and evenhandedness again...) What a "fanaticism for justice" and "thirst for truth" often stand for is a passion for simplistic but attractive narratives - like conspiracy theories about corrupt whoever and big bad whatever - and easy fixes - "open source" this and "blockchain" that (or, to quote an earnest cri du coeur of a John Dos Passos character from much further back in time, "Why not social revolution?")
Me, I would prefer mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, or barring that, admit ignorance and impotence, than be taken for a ride by phantoms. Maybe I am revealing my age too much here. But hey, if conspirology and populism feel right to you, then sky is the limit - or at least the so-called "most powerful office in the world," as has now been demonstrated.
Why do experts tolerate and provide non-evidence, non-good-reasoning based arguments for occult research, research that is not accessible and occulted by pay-walls, is I believe for exactly the reasons alconti is proposing: anyone can check. If data is analysed to come to a conclusion, it really is as alconti says: anyone with a computer can check if that analysis was done correctly.
The thing is, those who have the qualifications and the interest to check published research, for the most part can already do this, through their affiliation with institutions that provide subscriptions and library services. It's been a long time since I was at a university, but even back then I could get just about any paper, even from some obscure typewritten conference proceedings, if not from our own library or an online subscription, then through inter-library copy service. What makes modern science an "occult" institution is not so much physical access to scientific publications as the often high bar of competence and professionalism that is required to be even a good critic, let alone a good practitioner. Lacking that competence and professionalism, we get these "citizen scientists" posting detrended temperature graphs to prove that global warming is a hoax. (That's not an argument for hiding science from the unwashed masses behind paywalls, by the way.)
I am well aware that there exist legitimate criticisms of scientific institutions and of the publishing industry, but, for better or for worse, those criticisms usually aren't easily packageable into slogans and don't invite easy solutions.
Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beautiful and (obviously) naked young woman, apparently in order to ensure that the visceral (or whatever) truth of the allegory would be felt by every (or at least every male) viewer:
Nice card to pull out in a completely irrelevant context. But duly noted, you do have this card to play in a game where it doesn't matter.
My aces beat your ... snake eyes? I guess that's a good move when you're lost anyways.
What a "fanaticism for justice" and "thirst for truth" often stand for is a passion for simplistic but attractive narratives
Often, but not always by your own definition.
For those blindly following a priest or guru or a leader promising nice things without critical thinking, I agree they should be focused on the often part of your message. For others, perhaps the not always part is the more useful extension of your message.
Me, I would prefer mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, or barring that, admit ignorance and impotence, than be taken for a ride by phantoms.
Well, I don't see any mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments, so, yes, please go ahead and admit ignorance of the subject matter and impotence with regard your truth symbolism.
But hey, if conspirology and populism feel right to you, then sky is the limit - or at least the so-called "most powerful office in the world," as has now been demonstrated.
You really believe a completely corrupt buffoon occupies "most powerful office in the world" as you say, and there was no conspiracies along the way, no conspiracies since, no conspiracies right now to defraud the public purse, dismantle oversight, undermine the rule of law, and many other things?
Though I'm not so conspiratorial minded to believe Trump works directly for Putin and a couple of hundred thousand dollars spent by Russians in advertisement to an American firm operating under American regulation (and anything else Putin maybe imagined to have done) is significant compared to the billions of dollars of advertising freely provided by the American media operating under American regulation and hundreds of millions spent in "money is speech / corruption is de facto legal" election framework, but I do wonder why there are "conspiracy" laws on the books if they never happen and any case ever brought involving a conspiracy charge we should understand to imply that the judge and / or jury are "conspiracy theory" quacks and the detectives just over-imaginative hacks.
This isn't really relevant here, but if you want to sling this sort of mud, I'm willing to get a little dirty to clear the air.
The thing is, those who have the qualifications and the interest to check published research, for the most part can already do this, through their affiliation with institutions that provide subscriptions and library services.
There is about an order of magnitude, possibly 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, more people that could contribute to evaluating data and analysis than have free access for being a student, much less the researchers themselves.
All these people's potential contributions aren't relevant to you?
What makes modern science an "occult" institution is not so much physical access to scientific publications as the often high bar of competence and professionalism that is required to be even a good critic, let alone a good practitioner. Lacking that competence and professionalism, we get these "citizen scientists" posting detrended temperature graphs to prove that global warming is a hoax. (That's not an argument for hiding science from the unwashed masses behind paywalls, by the way.)
Ok, you don't actually have an argument against my point. I meant occult to mean simply "hidden from view behind a paywall". I used this particular word to also place in relief the ideals of the enlightenment, fighting against occult religious organization of society, and the current system, likewise wanting to organize society from an occulted place.
As to your meaning, even if you really do believe the high bar of competence and professionalism provided by university education is a pre-requisite to check documents for internal consistency, I am not arguing the untrained will be able to do much. I believe the untrained should be welcome to try, but if you ask me "who's able to do this extra checking" it is exactly those competent professionals you're referring to that are now outside the university system: highly educated people doing management jobs, teaching yoga, rock climbing or photography, or, indeed, the retired, who could contribute gladly spare time to minimize the gaming of the system by those in the system who are susceptible to corruption, incentivization or censorship in one form or another working in networks large and small to slip-in profit maximizing premises, omissions or spin to serve private interests in political processes rather than true premises for public interest in political processes.
You are very wrong to assume students and other researchers have a big incentive to point out shoddy work of the big shots. Random people on the internet, however, this is who they fear, and why the paywalls stay even if there is simply no argument to place public funded research behind private paywalls.
I am well aware that there exist legitimate criticisms of scientific institutions and of the publishing industry, but, for better or for worse, those criticisms usually aren't easily packageable into slogans and don't invite easy solutions.
Many political problems the solutions aren't easy and the slogans misleading at best and absurd at worst.
However, in this case the solution is pretty easy, get rid of the pay-walls, open the research, disregard the interests of corporations that profit off the system in favour of the public good (which is a simple case of passing legislation that any publicly funded research must be made publicly available - the data and the analysis) one country at a time; and in the meantime, put pressure on researches (by making the coherent moral arguments and making sure they know there's people out there like @alcontali that disdain them; i.e. that they really are losing the trust of society that they require to be relevant, and not just "the idiots" but people who know a bit about formal reasoning too), to practice open research anyways (even if it's inconvenient because the incentives aren't setup that way, there is a categorical imperative to not be a dick).
"Public funds for public data" simply makes a lot of sense to me, but prey tell explain why it's a step towards Trumpian populism. Extra marks if you realize our current system didn't prevent Trump and climate denialism and many other insane policies (we've run the current system straight to Trump and you want to use the specter of a potential Trump to scare people away from criticizing too harshly the current system?) and so maybe it's partly to blame.
Game, set, match — checkmate.
SophistiCatSeptember 20, 2019 at 06:25#3310660 likes
Ok, you don't actually have an argument against my point. I meant occult to mean simply "hidden from view behind a paywall".
Yes, that was what I understood you to mean. It isn't so much paywalls that separate the masses from the latest scientific research, but years of training and immersion in the field. I take your point about people with some scientific education, some even degreed and with a bit of professional experience, who at some point left universities, research institutes and R&D departments where they had access to scientific publications in their field (indeed, I am one of those people). But I think you overestimate their numbers and their willingness and ability to actively engage in reviewing the latest research. Very few retirees, decades out of practice, would be able to polish their rusty education, however much of it they had in the first place, get up to speed with everything that's been done and published in the intervening years, and get back into the thick of it. (And, by the way, those who live close to a good university can often get a library access for their personal research, free of charge, not to mention municipal and national libraries. I have taken advantage of that at some point.)
And this is leaving aside the absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that you have going about scientists hiding their research behind paywalls so that outsiders, untainted by special interests, would not be able to check their work. For one thing, scientists don't have much to do with the publishing industry. They don't get to decide the business model of the journals in their field, and few of them even care. Generally, they'll try to submit their work to the highest-profile journal that will accept it, other considerations being secondary (and among those secondary considerations are publication fees, which can be much higher in open access journals, for obvious reasons). The only examples of authors exhibiting a preference among traditional vs. open access publishing that I know are actually in favor of the latter, driven by grievances against traditional publishing or ideological considerations along the lines of alcontali's.
And then of course there are all the reasons why such an insanely massive conspiracy, involving millions of researchers and even more students all around the world, working together and in absolute secrecy for many decades, could not possibly hold together. Honestly, I feel silly even arguing about this.
I will come back to the "how many people are there really" question in my next post, as it's just irrelevant apologetics: doesn't actually lead to a conclusion that public funded research, and research affecting public policy, should not both be publicly available.
Moreover, it's not a scientific argument! We can't emperically compare a global knowledge system with the least amount of barriers possible to one with the current barriers. As I said, these arguments supporting the current system are all just reducible "nothing to see here".
And this is leaving aside the absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that you have going about scientists hiding their research behind paywalls so that outsiders, untainted by special interests, would not be able to check their work.
I do not say there's one giant conspiracy, I say there's an incentive structure which does not exclude local conspiracies on occasion.
This is why the opioid crisis is blowing up: there was no basis in science for it! it was not an honest mistake yet there is massive harm to the public. The "experts" with "years of training and immersion in the field", from the researchers on opioids to the government oversight to the doctors themselves.
Consider one aspect of it, the policy to outsource the licensing of fentynol prescriptions (who gets to prescribe fentynol) to the pharmaceutical companies themselves who outsourced it to a pharmaceutical distributor.
How do you explain this decision as "the best expertise can come up with".
If you don't, then:
If it was obviously corruption of the government why didn't experts in academia sound the alarm and make some protest to stop it? Or, why didn't doctors themselves "self-organize" to mitigate the affects of this corruption (police themselves)?
If we don't expect our experts to have any expertise (i.e. people prescribing opioids don't know anything about opioids) or then we don't expect them to overcome incentive structures that promote self-censorship, then how do you avoid the conclusion:
Making knowledge systems more open so that ordinary people can check the basis of policy decisions is an additional safety backstop to avoid poor policy decisions and accelerates awareness when the affects of poor policy decisions start to be felt.
In my next post I'll get into the positive reasons why we should expect transparency to have large affects (that expert networks are vulnerable to corruption, self-censorship, insufficient time to police themselves for mistakes, incentivization of various other kinds, and group-think), and it's a question of both availability and barriers to access, and any fixes to these problems must come, by definition, from outside the expert-networks themselves. Now we can't know what lowering the barriers to checking will do, but we don't know the cost of errors going unnoticed: if one such error is an existential threat then open research is justified as opening publicly funded research is neither difficult nor an existential threat (it's just basic risk-analysis).
Thomas BaileyDecember 20, 2021 at 20:16#6332130 likes
Thank you for such a valuable information. I was looking for a long time detailed explanation. Really appreciate your reply!
There doesn't seem to be any current interest in this topic, so I'll make a few observations, then let the thread fizzle away.
I have some expertise in two areas: mathematics and a certain outdoor sport. Articles I have read in Wikipedia of advanced topics in math have generally been very good, excellent at times. Usually these are written by experts in the areas, and when they make mistakes other experts chime in. Articles on more elementary topics, however, sometimes demonstrate the limitations of amateurish contributions. And articles on advanced topics of very limited interest may also be less dependable than one would hope.
I have published papers in a number of international refereed math journals, and I have found that peer review has its limitations as well. Topics that are popular in a particular clique, particularly breakthroughs, are usually well-vetted, but those not as popular might receive cursory reviews. Also, if the researcher is respected in a community their paper might not be as rigorously inspected as an unknown, reviewers assuming the known colleague has a history of making few if any mistakes.
Every day between 100 and 135 new math research papers arrive at ArXiv.org. Lots of them have errors. Eventually some will be corrected. Most are destined for publication.
As for the outdoor sport, Wikipedia is much softer and too often relies on books and articles on both the sport and its participants for verification, when these references may have numerous flaws. Rumor may become fact over time.
Agent SmithDecember 21, 2021 at 06:21#6334750 likes
Wikipedia is ok. It's not the best I'm told (very often) but hey, something's better than nothing, right?
Plus, who knows, its detractors, the anti-Wikipedia brigade, may be on the payroll of for-profit encyclopedias. Cui bono? Follow the money (trail).
Free knowledge is what Wikipedia and its ilk (free encylcopedias) stands for and in this regard it is a philosopher and not a sophist which other paid-for knowledge sources are.
Bret BernhoftDecember 22, 2021 at 05:05#6337870 likes
I attended an anniversary party for the tenth year since Wikipedia's founding, where I met the inventor of the Wiki. That night I understood how powerful and important Wikipedia (and the Wiki more generally) had become/was, remains and will be.
Wikipedia represents (as a single instance) the general global population's (humanity's) attempt to educate and fortify itself through open and accessible information. An effort that has not only been successful, but has been integrated (as a foundational VIP) into other everyday technologies; such as Google Search.
It's fine if other (more exclusive) bodies of information don't want to participate with Wikipedia, it always has been okay. That isn't what Wikipedia is for. Wikipedia is (free) for the average person. There are as few barriers to entry and is feasible and sustainable for the platform.
Of course it would be a dramatic improvement if other (more exclusive) bodies of knowledge wished to merge with Wikipedia, or offer their data and expertise. But that is a topic for another thread. What matters is that Wikipedia is an open, useful, reliable and outwardly referencing body of knowledge; some might even say wisdom.
Indispensable. I donate monthly. Of course it is fallible but it's also editable, which has to make up for that. It's incredibly useful even if only because you can harvest all of the references for many of the articles. One of the great ideas of the Internet.
Agent SmithJanuary 14, 2022 at 18:57#6430090 likes
I'm sure everyone here knows the value of knowledge, a teacher, Wikipedia is both.
However, ignoring the cost of an internet connection, the cost of Wikipedia = $0.00.
Comments (80)
Every phrase in Wikipedia is attributed or attributable.
That is much more than you can say of the average academic textbook, which is just one more way to part a fool and his money.
Furthermore, peer review is just mutual back patting. "I have your back and you have mine." It is very prone to corruption and that is why most peer-review processes are effectively corrupt. Just look at the scandalous academic journals for a good example. They are a corrupt business platform for trading citations. I cite you, you cite my friend, and my friend cites me. It is absolutely trivial to game that system.
In technology, the free and open-source software movement utterly rejects any attempt by the academia to prevent collaboration by re-appropriating copyrights with a view on funnelling them to corporate overlords.
We detest these people, seriously.
Shunning the academia from the knowledge industry is a sheer necessity. Therefore, support Wikipedia.
Only reference open-access research and ignore everything else. The academia are involved in an impossible pile of bullshit with their closed-access journals, and we do not want to have any part in that.
Ignore research published under proprietary corporate copyrights. Join the open-source and open-access movements and reject the academia's self-serving mentality.
I have an anecdote about that. I once discovered a citation circle. Several publications referenced each other for support, but none actually contained the original argument nor a citation of an original source. Worse, the only non-circular citation was to an article that argued the exact opposite.
Wikipedia has its uses, of course - but so do chats down the pub.
The academia are certainly not an absolute reference with regards to knowledge.
On the contrary, their detestable practices concerning locking up publicly-funded research in copyrighted journals make the academia the least appropriate standard for the dissemination of knowledge. We despise their wide-ranging corruption and we view their practices with contempt only.
As I wrote before, only open-source and open-access should be considered as reference material. Seriously, we are justified to spit on the academia and their detestable ways.
I think your beef is with the publishers who make lots of money off peer review publications. And, perhaps, with the disney disciplines who publish each other's work without subjecting it to proper peer review.
No, my beef is with the academia in general, and their obnoxious mentality.
A very typical example of what is totally wrong with their mentality, is the Tanenbaum versus Torvalds debate.
Tanenbaum pointed to his endless list of PhDs and other worthless credentialist dead-tree paperwork to argue that he knew better about operating systems than Torvalds, and that his debile mimix joke of an imbecile piece of crap was better linux.
Tanenbaum did not want to compete on the merits of his work. No, he only wants to compete based on the corrupt citation carousel that he is so proudly engaged in.
But for heaven's sake, whose work powers Android and therefore 80% of the world's mobile phones? Isn't the proof simply in the pudding? Is it linux or his stupid mimix? Seriously, that is the problem with the academia, the vast majority of whom have nothing to show for, besides imbecile paperwork and ridiculous citation carousels. Even though they have nothing to show for, they still know everything better. Seriously, it is so obvious that they know fuck all about operating systems. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.
Criticism from the academia on Wikipedia is of exactly the same nature.
Where is their alternative for knowledge dissemination? They simply don't have one! Knowledge is all about arrows. According to the JtB doctrine, i.e. Justified ([s]true[/s]) Belief, it is the following modus ponens that powers it all:
justification statement [math]\Rightarrow[/math] knowledge conclusion
Hence, arrows, i.e. links, are the essence of knowledge. Wikipedia supplies us with the ability to link straight to the mainstream knowledge narrative, which in turn, links straight to the original sources that justify it. This is exactly how knowledge is supposed to work.
What alternative do the academia propose? None. They do not have one. Their outdated dead-tree text books and libraries are absolutely unusable in this context. They cannot handle new technology and therefore try to stop its progress. They simply have become an impediment to progress.
The academia sound exactly like the erstwhile middle managers in corporations who complained about the introduction of new technology, couldn't handle it, couldn't work with it, but still insisted that they knew everything better. Corporations, however, tend to smarter than universities. The corporations just fired them all. They terminated their contracts and threw them out of the window. There is no other solution for people who know everything better but objectively have nothing to show for and hence know nothing at all.
Idiots who criticize Wikipedia are more often than not just a bunch of losers who almost surely know nothing, and have nothing to show for, but still insist that they know everything better. They are worthless. Technology just keeps moving ahead while these idiots will sooner or later just get thrown off a cliff.
There are no experts. There are only justified knowledge claims. Seriously, if it matters who says it, then what he says, cannot possibly matter.
The concept of "expert" is just a ploy to mislead and manipulate the gullible populace. The cognoscenti do not care about who says it. The bitcoin paper was published by an anonymous author. Does it matter? No. What the paper says, is provable from number theory. That is all that matters.
The academia are mostly populated with clowns and circus monkeys, who believe that we should be impressed by their imbecile PhD paperwork and stupid citation carrousels. Sorry, we are not. We only care about justification. We do not care about who says it. We only care about how it is said: justified or not.
No, there are no "expert" doctors. There are only justified diagnoses. It does not matter who came up with a diagnose. All that matters, is that it is justified. The only purpose of the entire system of so-called "experts" is to mislead the gullible populace, and to part the fool with his money.
Nassim Nicolas Taleb writes extensively about IYIs, i.e. Intellectuals Yet Idiots, i.e. the academia, the credentialist idiots they produce, and their bullshit ways.
Example: The Intellectual Yet Idiot. What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
Another example: Charlatans & economists use logical flaw: because a pilot is expert, they are experts. But Pilots are selected via skin-in-the-game mechanisms. Plumbers, dancers, dentists, mathematicians, snipers, pastry chefs are experts. Not this @kaushikcbasu. Economists BS for a living.
Another example: Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says it’s neither. It’s because these authorities face the wrong incentives. They are rewarded according to whether they look good to their superiors, not according to whether they are effective. They have no skin in the game.
The entire "expert" concept is bullshit. The USA are bankrupting themselves on exactly that problem in health care. If you believe in that concept, you will simply go bust.
But if you want to know how to bake a loaf of bread, then listen to a baker.
If you want to know about what's up with that weird looking mole on your arm, see a medical doctor.
If you want to know if you've got free will, consult a philosopher.
Every practitioner of a knowledge discipline faces the threat posed by the Church-Turing thesis:
"A problem belongs to the knowledge domain of beliefs, if there exists a purely mechanical procedure that can reach its solution."
Therefore, if what you do, is based on only knowledge, then what you do, will sooner or later be done by a computer, and you will be replaced by software. The medical profession knows that too. No matter how much political clout they think that they have, we are going to liberally destroy their jobs; and that is a done deal already. Every fake intellectual IYI will have to contend with the same problem.
At the same time, knowledge discovery is protected by Gödel's Incompleteness theorems, by Alan Turing's Halting problem, and by the third millenium problem. So, if your job consists of discovering new knowledge as opposed to merely applying existing knowledge, you will still be relevant in the future.
You see, nothing will stop us from disrupting and destroying, as we please. With cryptocurrencies (i.e. bitcoin) we are kicking out the central banksters, and the commercial fiat banksters, which is another bunch of IYI idiots.
Who can stop us from doing that?
Unless they are protected by the aforementioned limitations, these so-called "experts" are out already. We do not respect merely rehashing existing knowledge, and we shouldn't. These parrots are simply arrogant idiots.
The justification for "the mole is cancerous", is never "who" says it, but "how" he says it: justified or not. If the justification for that claim falls within the realm of knowledge, then sooner or later Tom will be a computer system and trivially defeat your doctor. If it is not pure knowledge -- that depends on the precise epistemic context -- then neither an "expert" nor a computer system can systematically be counted on to reach the correct conclusion.
Therefore, this question is not decidable within this context.
There are trivial counterexamples for the type of argument you are making. If Carl is an accountant who believes that the sum is 12535 after adding up a list of numbers, but Tom which is software and which has actually produced the list of numbers, says that it is 11978, then we will believe Tom and not "expert" Carl.
Pure knowledge jobs are shaky things. They were condemned in 1936 already, by the Church-Turing thesis. You must produce something else than the mere application of existing knowledge, in order to stay relevant.
In 1983 I was naive about AIDS. There were all sorts of facts and concepts I either had wrong or did not have at all. I could say "retrovirus" but I really didn't know what the "retro" part meant. When I first started to do AIDS prevention work, I had to bring myself up to speed. It took a couple of years to acquire, absorb, and integrate the unfamiliar information I needed.
I met a college student the other day working as a check-out at a local grocery store who explained he didn't know how credit cards worked (a customer was having difficulties with her card). He went on to explain that he didn't know how checking or banks worked either. Very naive about financial information. Sad, but quite curable.
From my experience, Wikipedia (and a lot of stuff on the Internet) is good, solid information -- BUT one MUST bring at least moderate skill in recognizing garbage. A lot of people don't have that skill. No matter where they get their information from, the naive will have difficulty judging quality.
So I don't see what problem you're highlighting or why you think expert testimony counts for no more or less than the testimony of an idiot.
A machine can know something, because it can store any knowledge declaration P => Q along with a proof R in first-order logic that proves that Q necessarily follows from P. Therefore, the two-tuple (P=>Q,R) is a justified belief, i.e. knowledge.
Quoting Bartricks
If the idiot looks up the tuple (P=>Q,R) in a knowledge database, there is no way in which the expert can refute this tuple. He simply knows nothing more about P=>Q, simply, because there is nothing more to know.
If you believe P=>Q because an expert tells you, then your belief is NOT justified. There is absolutely no reason why it would be knowledge. If you believe P=>Q because an idiot provides you with the two-tuple (P=>Q,R), then your belief is effectively justified. The only legitimate reason why it is justified has been supplied to you, i.e. the tuple (P=>Q,R).
How does that work? An earlier publication referencing a later publication?
Good call. I've been relying heavily on wikipedia these last few years. I haven't had time nor the resources to crosscheck facts but by and large there seems to some agreement, serving as validation, between wikipedia and other "independent" sources.
From what I gather access to knowledge is restricted and requires a certain combination of dollar digits to unlock. I have nothing against that. People must protect their intellectual property and need money to put food on the table. However, the value of knowledge increases when it's propagated among an audience. If it continues to be restricted to only those who pay then it's likely to degenerate into something like the caste system of India, only pundits having access to knowledge.
Of course it could be said that only people who're deeply interested and ergo will make contributions will have the motivation to part with their money. To that I agree.
As for wikipedia I think it serves as a "least worst" option for those who want to learn but lack the funds. It's not that bad a source of information. I've noticed some of the articles are cut-and-paste jobs but I can't confirm which is the primary source and which the copy.
Even if wikipedia fails and is inaccurate it's a first step and therefore laudable towards a free education to those who can only afford an internet connection.
Who knows. Those were legal commentaries, so a lot of different authors work on them, and they get overhauled every couple of years. It's possible there was originally a source, but someone dropped it, thinking it was superfluous since all other commentaries said the same thing, so why not quote them. It's also possible someone just completely misunderstood the one article that was actually cited and everyone else just copied the outcome, citing each other.
Current technology is driven by open-source software, most of which is freely accessible on platforms such as github.com. If hoarding knowledge were a requirement to put food on the table, then how do you explain that? Are these millions of software developers starving?
In technology, the concept of "intellectual property" is considered to be rather an impediment to progress than to be of any benefit.
Quoting TheMadFool
Wikipedia pages are attributed. You can always find the original source in the foot notes. Wikipedia's no original research policy is strictly enforced. That is much more than you can say about the average academic text book.
If you add up the billions of dollars spent on public libraries and university ones around the world, do they produce even a fraction of a fraction of the value that Wikipedia gives away free of charge?
It reminds me of the silly debate in Europe. The governments there want to tax Google, so that they can fund, at great cost, outdated and expensive alternatives to Google search, that cannot possibly compete with Google search, while Google provides its search engine free of charge to its users. They even try to defend that on moral grounds using arguments that invariably end in infinite regress ...
I would personally even pay real money for the privilege of using Google search, while I would never pay a dime for the crap produced by these European governments.
Knowledge as a justified ([s]true[/s]) belief is a tuple of two language expression: the knowledge claim along with its justification. A machine can perfectly store that. It can also perfectly use it in an inference engine to reach conclusions based on this knowledge.
Knowledge is not restricted to humans. On the contrary, according to the 1936 Church-Turing thesis a problem is only decidable in knowledge if there exists a purely mechanical procedure for doing so.
Such belief must be expressed in language. Ineffable beliefs cannot possibly be knowledge.
A machine can store language expressions and use them in inference rules.
Hence, a machine can use knowledge.
Now you're saying they use knowledge. Well that's different. I used a bus to get home, but I don't have a bus.
I have to interject the Church-Turing thesis to your comparison of both sources. Your evaluation is legitimate knowledge only if there exists a purely mechanical procedure to reach that conclusion. Where can we find the description for the epistemically-sound method that you have used to reach that conclusion? We need this in order to supply it to a machine and verify if it reaches the same conclusion as yourself.
Beliefs that are not expressed in language or not possible to express in language are ineffable. They are not part of knowledge. You must be able to express the belief, or else it is not knowledge. Hence, legitimate knowledge can always be represented by using language expressions. We do not need undocumented, internal, mental states for that purpose.
If your conclusion is knowledge, then a machine must be able to reach the same conclusion. Otherwise, it is not knowledge.
But machines can't have knowledge (not unless they can have minds). And if an expert in a field says something then you've reason to think it is true (other things being equal - as usual).
They are formally not knowledge because it will be impossible to verify their justification.
No, that means that you trust him. You trust that he has a justification. On what grounds would you trust him?
We do not trust. We verify.
You have the knowledge claim and then you have evidence/justification that supports it. We are talking about two different documents. For example, document 1 claims that water boils at 100C. Document 2 is test report in which they made water boil a few times and consistently measured its temperature.
It is necessary to verify that document 2 at least exists. Otherwise, you can seriously question what is written in document 1. On what grounds do they even write it?
It does not work like that.
Document 1. "Your mole is cancerous".
Document 2. Evidence for document 1.
So, where is document 2?
I only work with documents. I do not work with strangers babbling about arbitrary subjects. I want document 1 and document 2. They must first commit to paper what it is about. Otherwise, the proposition is not even receivable.
To be justified in a belief is for there to be normative reason for you to believe what you believe (whether you have to be aware of the reasons is another matter).
You can be justified in a belief in the absence of verification. After all, as I have just noted above, if every belief, to be justified, required verification, we'd have a regress and no belief would be justified.
For example, if I am alone in the world I am nevertheless justified in believing I exist, even though my belief is not verifiable.
And I am justified in thinking I just drank a beer because I seem to remember doing so, even if I cannot travel back in time and verify it. And so on.
No, not at all. I did not say that the justification had to be some kind of extensive verification. I only said that I wanted to verify the justification, which could perfectly well rest on falsifiability, or on witness depositions, depending on what it is about.
There needs to be a document that contains the justification, and I will verify, i.e. read or peruse, that justification. It is not that I would subscribe to verificationism. I am perfectly happy to accept justification in the form of a falsifiable test report.
Quoting Bartricks
Yes, but this is not formal knowledge.
There is pretty much a good consensus on the three core, formal knowledge-justification methods:
axiomatic, scientific, and historical.
Furthermore, these methods do not guarantee that any claim would be correspondence-theory "true".
The reason why we need to agree on the existence and suitability of these three epistemic methods, is that we need somewhere a starting point. Otherwise, it becomes an exercise in infinite regress.
Verification in this context means that the method was correctly applied. It does not mean that the results are correct.
Since a diagnosis does not seek to refer to another diagnosis, I do not see how that would work. In what way does one diagnosis verify if the method was correctly applied in another diagnosis?
In the end, knowledge is subject to a bureaucracy of consistency-maintaining formalisms. We just verify if the procedures were properly followed. The result could still be wrong, but that does not matter. In the end, nobody cares about that. If a doctor follows all procedures required, the professional-liability insurance company will not cancel his cover. That is the same principle.
It is not about verificationism. It is about verifying that all formalisms and procedures were followed. Furthermore, verificationism is not accepted in science because impossible. So, science revolves around falsificationism. Mathematics, however, is staunchly verificationist. Unlike the scientific method, the axiomatic method does not allow for mere sampling of random cases. So, verificationism is only rejected in the scientific method.
Epistemology is not mathematics nor science. It has its own requirements and procedures. Consensus does not matter in mathematics. In principle, it also does not matter in science. It does matter, however, in epistemology.
They do not create knowledge. Read Wikipedia's No original research page.
Wikipedia articles must not contain original research. The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist.[a] This includes any analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a conclusion not stated by the sources. To demonstrate that you are not adding OR, you must be able to cite reliable, published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and directly support the material being presented.
Your remark suggest that you are not even properly familiar with the core of the epistemic method that governs Wikipedia.
The entries on philosophy are particularly poor, and the IEP and the SEP are a great deal better. This is largely not the 'fault' of Wiki itself, but the very medium: philosophy is not well suited to 2-3 paragraph summaries, and in most cases having incomplete information is even worse than having no information. And IEP and SEP have the opposite problem of being very, very dry, and not all that great for popular consumption. Podcasts and Youtube videos I think are far more effective mediums for popular consumption of philosophy.
Verification only occurs when the second no-nothing uses a sound procedure to double check the first no-nothing's justification. We do not ask the verifier to produce a new claim. We also do not ask him if he likes the results of the original claim. We only ask the verifier to verify if the original conclusion necessarily follows from the original evidence.
Wikipedia has faults and limitations. And so does academia. Even doctors have as institution spent many years doing completely useless and therefore dangerous and damaging operations. Philosophical critiques of academia - Kuhn, Feyerabend etc along with the various scandals indicate that perfection is unobtainable, and alas the perfection of machine knowledge is also a fantasy. The search for God continues to yield no result. Trust no one completely and everyone provisionally.
Citing Francis Galton of all people on the wisdom of the masses - who'd a' thunk it?
Quoting Bartricks
Peer-review on Wikipedia
So, will you continue to create your truth by repetition only, as modern 'truth'-tellers do, or will you accept actual facts, according to the old-fashioned way of truth-telling?
Yes. I just did that. I looked at the page describing audio power amplifiers. There are always ways in which any article could be improved, but the article in Wikipedia is as good as one could hope, and contains no obvious mistakes.
Just like all your other comments, this one proves to be entirely without foundation. :roll: :roll: :roll:
Empirical investigation says otherwise. Your assertion is false. Most Wikipedia pages are well-written, reliable and accurate, so those who wrote them are presumably reasonably knowledgeable. In contrast, your comments don't seem to be accurate, well-written or true.
Wikipedia - 1
@Bartricks - 0
The trick is to look at the references section to see where the information is coming from.
Nothing like The Philosophy Forum, which is an assembly of experts from all over the world, whose opinions are invariably supported by profound insights into that of which they speak.
Like , and said, there are good and bad sides to Wikipedia and open-access publishing, as well as academic publishing and institutional science. Neither condemning them in toto nor unconditionally endorsing anything "open-source" like a bright-eyed fanatic is reasonable. You need to get informed and use good judgement.
Tacit (implicit empirical) knowledge is difficult to communicate because it is only partially codifiable, or uncodifiable. It is processed in an automatic, or intuitive (as opposed to a controlled, or cogitative), manner. Types include motor sequences (e.g., driving a car), skills (e.g., hammering a nail), and schemata (e.g., primary social interactions).
So tacit knowledge (which is ineffable) is not actually knowledge, or better: is illegitimate knowledge?
Well, it is obviously legitimate. I should have said that they are not part of "formal knowledge".
Fair enough.
Obviously, tacit knowledge is not beyond the capacity of AI (e.g., self-driving vehicles, robotic manufacturing, etc).
So, I'm surprised that we are not dropping JTB as a general definition of knowledge, and substituting it with something after Floridi (e.g., factual and/or logical semantic information).
This seems like a reasonable thing to say, moderation in all things, but I think is insufficient to properly address @alcontali's concerns.
Granted, the little waskel has spiwit -- I said spiwit! Bravado, a touch of derring-do. He dares to raid us. But I think such passion for the truth and it's sharing should be first commended and any counter arguments fleshed out in the flesh.
I agree there are serious problems with many of @alcontali's position -- such as believing bitcoin is some serious threat to government currency schemes and that bitcoin itself is somehow independent of governments being so gracious as to maintain a global internet, as well as believing logical rules and theorems somehow imply inevitable empirical affects in the real world such as mass-automation (again, that depends on governments being so gracious as to maintain a sophisticated global economy) -- and if your claim of naivity is focused on these aspects, then I agree; rarely do I come across a branch not only so close to being cut by the person resting atop it but doing the cutting so vigorous a fashion.
However, these things mentioned in the above paragraph, as much as they betray a fool's completely misunderstanding and ignorance of the real world, are adjacent to the core contention of @alcontali's grasp of formal arguments and, though unstated, Kantian moral argument.
I will do my best here to state this unstated argument, for the benefit not only of alcontali but your own, so that you too may emerge from a naive black and white view of the world where things are either in moderation, and so good, or then not, and so naive.
Is fanaticism for justice a moral blemish? Is thirst for the truth savagery?
For if we bring in a moral theory, such as Kantianism, then alcontali's position becomes very understandable. He is not saying all open source material is by definition is good, he is saying academia has failed in their duties to society insofar as they create knowledge through occulted schemes of copulation with corporations. The academic claims to have a duty to the truth and society, to teach and to guide, and the corporation claims to have a duty to money, for themselves, and to take value from society whenever possible. True, some academics see this as intrinsic tension, and some do not. But what is the argument of those academics that say "there is nothing to see here" and to put their money where their mouth is, we won't even let you see for you to judge for yourself.
For instance, certainly, many an economist sees no problem with a private central bank with an ambiguous and opaque connection to the public sphere with the power to create money backed by the government. And, though I doubt bitcoin is going to change this, is this really a well reasoned position? Or, is the real position of the status-quo economist "well, at the end of the day, central bankers rub me the right way, so I rub them the right way, we all come into a lot of money; it's an exchange, I service them and in return look out for their interests, and that's what economics is all about; QED little padawan, QED".
In other words, status-quo economists, the "experts" appealed to whenever the status quo comes into question, have no "document 2" in the parlance of alcontali.
However, where alcontali diverges from the true-true about this social story, is that it's not resolved in formalism alone. Though the formalism of the claim and the justification for the claim, is the context, unjustified claims of experts do have a "document 2" which is just appeal to their own expertise; which alconti's aware of, as references their reference to their own papers, but just is not so astute in the ways of logic to realize these papers can always substitute for "document 2"
The real issue is whether a "document 2" of just citing their own expertise is a valid justification for whatever they claim.
Sometimes yes, but nearly all these cases that I can think of (and exceptions don't justify much hidden research), will have time constraints involved, and the expert and their document 1, the claim, and their document 2, paper trail of expertise of some sort, is the best we can do.
But if there is no time constraint, such as justifying a claim where we can sit all day waiting for the document justifying it to accumulate both argument and empirical data, then as soon as the academic starts citing papers that are not accessible to the general population, the general population can reasonably doubt whether such research is carried out honestly by people who feel a duty to the truth and duty to society and a duty to tell the truth to society. If we can doubt their motives, then we can doubt the quality of their expertise.
For, formalism, that we can fortunately come to understand apart from any experts claims about it, informs us another important thing, that from any contradictory statement anything can be proven. And although networks of empirical evidence may have more robustness to such errors than formal mathematics, we are well-suited to doubt that the subtlest mistake can be used to arrive at, not only a false conclusion, but a verifiable absurd conclusion. If those mistakes are hidden behind paw-walls, and there is simply not enough honest people that have access to be able to spot such mistakes, then we cannot be sure that the expert is making a recommendation that has a coherent document 2 (one that we can at least check for internal consistency) or even any document 2 other than their own expertise (which has no special relationship to their claim in question but can be attached to any and all claims).
Why do experts tolerate and provide non-evidence, non-good-reasoning based arguments for occult research, research that is not accessible and occulted by pay-walls, is I believe for exactly the reasons alconti is proposing: anyone can check. If data is analysed to come to a conclusion, it really is as alconti says: anyone with a computer can check if that analysis was done correctly. Statistics is difficult, it's not even an expectation that most academics can even properly wield statistics as otherwise there would only be a handful of them around, almost statistically unnoticeable, so the best that can be done is to open up research and data so that anyone can check, with few exceptions.
Why isn't this done? To shift liability to unaccountable panels of experts to arrive at public policy driven by ulterior motives than what is true.
For instance, corporations want to put their products on the market as soon as possible, then set the bar of "proving the product is for sure dangerous" as high as possible both in terms of scientific evidence and legally. But to get permission from the government, some sort of indication that it's safe is required, if "experts" can be called on to give an unaccountable, perhaps biased by explicit or implicit conflicts of interest, this is the best scenario; the second best scenario is being allowed to submit studies that have improper statistical analysis or that are straightup fraudulent and no one bothers to check for both internal inconsistencies as well as conflicts with other published papers, as no one has time for that. In terms of profit motive, these are the plans we'd reasonably expect to be executed. The problem in this system of getting society's approval to put a product in the environment or people's bodies is that if "someone, out there" does have time to check.
A recent scandal that shows just how vulnerable this system of occult research and expert opinion is, is the opioid crisis. How many experts from government, to hospitals, to every doctor being themselves a supposed expert, adopted the claim that opioids can be prescribed in abundance without a second document justifying this, other than other experts seeming to claim this? It turns out the precious "peer reviewed research by a high-credibility and therefore costly and pay-walled journals" justifying opioids for wide use didn't even exist. Ok, sure, science eventually caught up and realized whatever experts were involved in creating the crisis were full of shit and had no document 2 justifying the policies (other than their supposed expertise), but far after the fact, after far more money was made than will ever be recovered or commensurate with the social damage, and arguably more financial damage than would cost to just "buy the universities into open publication and open data" for if it's money they want why not just give them their 40 pieces of silver if it would avoid things like the opioid crisis.
More serious, the excuse "well, science will catch up even if there are systematic weaknesses in the system" itself has only the document "well, experts say so" to back it up, and there is no time constraint where this is the best we can do. If such systemic weakness lead not only to things like the opioid crisis but to the destruction of civilization, perhaps all of humanity, how will science "catch up and correct the problem eventually"?
And such catastrophic damage can come from two directions from this system. First, like as above, inconsistencies in "document justification for claims" that are not noticed because academics are too busy or too cowardly to verify important expert claims upon which critical public policy is based. Formalism informs us the implications of a single mistake is, if not proving all statements, is at least unknowable to it's extent of proving further false statements. Now, we cannot avoid all mistakes, but we can avoid avoidable mistakes by maximizing the checking of claims for, at at least, internal consistency. For instance, experts hatch a plan for geo-engineering that goes horribly wrong that turns out, though science is no longer around to learn from it, had subtle analytical mistakes in it's formulation, that unfortunately for us could have been spotted but weren't spotted due to a history of making such spotting as difficult as possible.
The second catastrophic damage that can occur is that due to the occult nature of enlightenment based science today, avoidable mistakes are made due to conflicts of interest and people lose faith in the whole system and so even when there are documents that really are open to justify a claim, such that climate change is happening and is a serious problem, people are so in the habit of doubting experts, because they've seen the ulterior motives play out before that they apply the same (completely reasonable expectation) to these new claims. The claim that climate scientists have ulterior motive really is backed up by scientists having ulterior motives before (cough, cough, tabacco). In other-words, systemic weaknesses in institutional science undermine the public trust in institutional science overtime and scientists shouldn't complain about that because they only have themselves to blame. They want to classify all such criticism as word salads ... but they don't want to apply the same standard to their grant proposals.
What can the scientist do to separate themselves from the reasonable suspicion of ulterior motives. There is only one thing: open data and analysis accessible to anyone who wants to check.
Quoting boethius
Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beautiful and (obviously) naked young woman, apparently in order to ensure that the visceral (or whatever) truth of the allegory would be felt by every (or at least every male) viewer:
But the naked, unadorned truth is that truth in most nontrivial matters is far too messy and ambiguous and not infrequently unattractive (if not to say ugly), belying the seductive allegory. Passion is a double-edged sword (there is that dull moderation and evenhandedness again...) What a "fanaticism for justice" and "thirst for truth" often stand for is a passion for simplistic but attractive narratives - like conspiracy theories about corrupt whoever and big bad whatever - and easy fixes - "open source" this and "blockchain" that (or, to quote an earnest cri du coeur of a John Dos Passos character from much further back in time, "Why not social revolution?")
Me, I would prefer mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, or barring that, admit ignorance and impotence, than be taken for a ride by phantoms. Maybe I am revealing my age too much here. But hey, if conspirology and populism feel right to you, then sky is the limit - or at least the so-called "most powerful office in the world," as has now been demonstrated.
Quoting boethius
The thing is, those who have the qualifications and the interest to check published research, for the most part can already do this, through their affiliation with institutions that provide subscriptions and library services. It's been a long time since I was at a university, but even back then I could get just about any paper, even from some obscure typewritten conference proceedings, if not from our own library or an online subscription, then through inter-library copy service. What makes modern science an "occult" institution is not so much physical access to scientific publications as the often high bar of competence and professionalism that is required to be even a good critic, let alone a good practitioner. Lacking that competence and professionalism, we get these "citizen scientists" posting detrended temperature graphs to prove that global warming is a hoax. (That's not an argument for hiding science from the unwashed masses behind paywalls, by the way.)
I am well aware that there exist legitimate criticisms of scientific institutions and of the publishing industry, but, for better or for worse, those criticisms usually aren't easily packageable into slogans and don't invite easy solutions.
Nice card to pull out in a completely irrelevant context. But duly noted, you do have this card to play in a game where it doesn't matter.
My aces beat your ... snake eyes? I guess that's a good move when you're lost anyways.
Quoting SophistiCat
Completely agree, never said it was a single edge sword.
Quoting SophistiCat
Often, but not always by your own definition.
For those blindly following a priest or guru or a leader promising nice things without critical thinking, I agree they should be focused on the often part of your message. For others, perhaps the not always part is the more useful extension of your message.
Quoting SophistiCat
Well, I don't see any mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments, so, yes, please go ahead and admit ignorance of the subject matter and impotence with regard your truth symbolism.
Quoting SophistiCat
You really believe a completely corrupt buffoon occupies "most powerful office in the world" as you say, and there was no conspiracies along the way, no conspiracies since, no conspiracies right now to defraud the public purse, dismantle oversight, undermine the rule of law, and many other things?
Though I'm not so conspiratorial minded to believe Trump works directly for Putin and a couple of hundred thousand dollars spent by Russians in advertisement to an American firm operating under American regulation (and anything else Putin maybe imagined to have done) is significant compared to the billions of dollars of advertising freely provided by the American media operating under American regulation and hundreds of millions spent in "money is speech / corruption is de facto legal" election framework, but I do wonder why there are "conspiracy" laws on the books if they never happen and any case ever brought involving a conspiracy charge we should understand to imply that the judge and / or jury are "conspiracy theory" quacks and the detectives just over-imaginative hacks.
This isn't really relevant here, but if you want to sling this sort of mud, I'm willing to get a little dirty to clear the air.
Quoting SophistiCat
There is about an order of magnitude, possibly 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, more people that could contribute to evaluating data and analysis than have free access for being a student, much less the researchers themselves.
All these people's potential contributions aren't relevant to you?
Quoting SophistiCat
Ok, you don't actually have an argument against my point. I meant occult to mean simply "hidden from view behind a paywall". I used this particular word to also place in relief the ideals of the enlightenment, fighting against occult religious organization of society, and the current system, likewise wanting to organize society from an occulted place.
As to your meaning, even if you really do believe the high bar of competence and professionalism provided by university education is a pre-requisite to check documents for internal consistency, I am not arguing the untrained will be able to do much. I believe the untrained should be welcome to try, but if you ask me "who's able to do this extra checking" it is exactly those competent professionals you're referring to that are now outside the university system: highly educated people doing management jobs, teaching yoga, rock climbing or photography, or, indeed, the retired, who could contribute gladly spare time to minimize the gaming of the system by those in the system who are susceptible to corruption, incentivization or censorship in one form or another working in networks large and small to slip-in profit maximizing premises, omissions or spin to serve private interests in political processes rather than true premises for public interest in political processes.
You are very wrong to assume students and other researchers have a big incentive to point out shoddy work of the big shots. Random people on the internet, however, this is who they fear, and why the paywalls stay even if there is simply no argument to place public funded research behind private paywalls.
Quoting SophistiCat
Many political problems the solutions aren't easy and the slogans misleading at best and absurd at worst.
However, in this case the solution is pretty easy, get rid of the pay-walls, open the research, disregard the interests of corporations that profit off the system in favour of the public good (which is a simple case of passing legislation that any publicly funded research must be made publicly available - the data and the analysis) one country at a time; and in the meantime, put pressure on researches (by making the coherent moral arguments and making sure they know there's people out there like @alcontali that disdain them; i.e. that they really are losing the trust of society that they require to be relevant, and not just "the idiots" but people who know a bit about formal reasoning too), to practice open research anyways (even if it's inconvenient because the incentives aren't setup that way, there is a categorical imperative to not be a dick).
"Public funds for public data" simply makes a lot of sense to me, but prey tell explain why it's a step towards Trumpian populism. Extra marks if you realize our current system didn't prevent Trump and climate denialism and many other insane policies (we've run the current system straight to Trump and you want to use the specter of a potential Trump to scare people away from criticizing too harshly the current system?) and so maybe it's partly to blame.
Game, set, match — checkmate.
Yes, that was what I understood you to mean. It isn't so much paywalls that separate the masses from the latest scientific research, but years of training and immersion in the field. I take your point about people with some scientific education, some even degreed and with a bit of professional experience, who at some point left universities, research institutes and R&D departments where they had access to scientific publications in their field (indeed, I am one of those people). But I think you overestimate their numbers and their willingness and ability to actively engage in reviewing the latest research. Very few retirees, decades out of practice, would be able to polish their rusty education, however much of it they had in the first place, get up to speed with everything that's been done and published in the intervening years, and get back into the thick of it. (And, by the way, those who live close to a good university can often get a library access for their personal research, free of charge, not to mention municipal and national libraries. I have taken advantage of that at some point.)
And this is leaving aside the absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that you have going about scientists hiding their research behind paywalls so that outsiders, untainted by special interests, would not be able to check their work. For one thing, scientists don't have much to do with the publishing industry. They don't get to decide the business model of the journals in their field, and few of them even care. Generally, they'll try to submit their work to the highest-profile journal that will accept it, other considerations being secondary (and among those secondary considerations are publication fees, which can be much higher in open access journals, for obvious reasons). The only examples of authors exhibiting a preference among traditional vs. open access publishing that I know are actually in favor of the latter, driven by grievances against traditional publishing or ideological considerations along the lines of alcontali's.
And then of course there are all the reasons why such an insanely massive conspiracy, involving millions of researchers and even more students all around the world, working together and in absolute secrecy for many decades, could not possibly hold together. Honestly, I feel silly even arguing about this.
Moreover, it's not a scientific argument! We can't emperically compare a global knowledge system with the least amount of barriers possible to one with the current barriers. As I said, these arguments supporting the current system are all just reducible "nothing to see here".
I'll focus for now on your strawman:
Quoting SophistiCat
I do not say there's one giant conspiracy, I say there's an incentive structure which does not exclude local conspiracies on occasion.
This is why the opioid crisis is blowing up: there was no basis in science for it! it was not an honest mistake yet there is massive harm to the public. The "experts" with "years of training and immersion in the field", from the researchers on opioids to the government oversight to the doctors themselves.
Consider one aspect of it, the policy to outsource the licensing of fentynol prescriptions (who gets to prescribe fentynol) to the pharmaceutical companies themselves who outsourced it to a pharmaceutical distributor.
How do you explain this decision as "the best expertise can come up with".
If you don't, then:
If it was obviously corruption of the government why didn't experts in academia sound the alarm and make some protest to stop it? Or, why didn't doctors themselves "self-organize" to mitigate the affects of this corruption (police themselves)?
If we don't expect our experts to have any expertise (i.e. people prescribing opioids don't know anything about opioids) or then we don't expect them to overcome incentive structures that promote self-censorship, then how do you avoid the conclusion:
Making knowledge systems more open so that ordinary people can check the basis of policy decisions is an additional safety backstop to avoid poor policy decisions and accelerates awareness when the affects of poor policy decisions start to be felt.
In my next post I'll get into the positive reasons why we should expect transparency to have large affects (that expert networks are vulnerable to corruption, self-censorship, insufficient time to police themselves for mistakes, incentivization of various other kinds, and group-think), and it's a question of both availability and barriers to access, and any fixes to these problems must come, by definition, from outside the expert-networks themselves. Now we can't know what lowering the barriers to checking will do, but we don't know the cost of errors going unnoticed: if one such error is an existential threat then open research is justified as opening publicly funded research is neither difficult nor an existential threat (it's just basic risk-analysis).
I have some expertise in two areas: mathematics and a certain outdoor sport. Articles I have read in Wikipedia of advanced topics in math have generally been very good, excellent at times. Usually these are written by experts in the areas, and when they make mistakes other experts chime in. Articles on more elementary topics, however, sometimes demonstrate the limitations of amateurish contributions. And articles on advanced topics of very limited interest may also be less dependable than one would hope.
I have published papers in a number of international refereed math journals, and I have found that peer review has its limitations as well. Topics that are popular in a particular clique, particularly breakthroughs, are usually well-vetted, but those not as popular might receive cursory reviews. Also, if the researcher is respected in a community their paper might not be as rigorously inspected as an unknown, reviewers assuming the known colleague has a history of making few if any mistakes.
Every day between 100 and 135 new math research papers arrive at ArXiv.org. Lots of them have errors. Eventually some will be corrected. Most are destined for publication.
As for the outdoor sport, Wikipedia is much softer and too often relies on books and articles on both the sport and its participants for verification, when these references may have numerous flaws. Rumor may become fact over time.
Plus, who knows, its detractors, the anti-Wikipedia brigade, may be on the payroll of for-profit encyclopedias. Cui bono? Follow the money (trail).
Free knowledge is what Wikipedia and its ilk (free encylcopedias) stands for and in this regard it is a philosopher and not a sophist which other paid-for knowledge sources are.
Wikipedia represents (as a single instance) the general global population's (humanity's) attempt to educate and fortify itself through open and accessible information. An effort that has not only been successful, but has been integrated (as a foundational VIP) into other everyday technologies; such as Google Search.
It's fine if other (more exclusive) bodies of information don't want to participate with Wikipedia, it always has been okay. That isn't what Wikipedia is for. Wikipedia is (free) for the average person. There are as few barriers to entry and is feasible and sustainable for the platform.
Of course it would be a dramatic improvement if other (more exclusive) bodies of knowledge wished to merge with Wikipedia, or offer their data and expertise. But that is a topic for another thread. What matters is that Wikipedia is an open, useful, reliable and outwardly referencing body of knowledge; some might even say wisdom.
However, ignoring the cost of an internet connection, the cost of Wikipedia = $0.00.
The Paradox of Value.
Something doesn't add up.
All of us who use Wikipedia should contribute some $ now and then. It will continue to exist but may have to start accepting ads.
That'll spell doom for Wikipedia, if the fate of the old philosophy forum is anything to go by.