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Jimmy Wales's Open Source Collaboration Tips
destinyland writes "In a new interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledges his debt to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and discusses his new open source search project. He applauds the way Open Source developers work around their ideological differences, acknowledges that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds, and blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years."
If you're actually looking for open source collaboration tips, take a look at Karl Fogel's (freely-available) book:
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/index.html
My other car is first.
you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Maybe the problem is that wikipedia, as it is currently designed, doesn't tap into that wisdom as effectively as a market does.
Yet again, someone else who doesn't know that Open Source is not what the FSF write....
If you are skeptical of crowds, you should try to use one of them talk pages once...
[He] blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, the number of years in which Wikipedia will bury Encyclopedia Brittanica has tripled in the last six months.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Jimmy Wales needs to learn that reality has become a commodity.
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy. I recently read Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court, 1998) which, besides being a chronicle of how many lives her and her immediate followers wrecked, talks much about how the philosophy community--even scholars with ethical views similar to her own--reject her work as lacking in rigour, containing much inconsistency and back-peddling, and showing a lack of understanding of the earlier philosophers she cites (putting words into Kant's mouth, for example).
It doesn't reflect well on Jimbo at all to claim such a crackpot and madwoman as a role model. Besides, isn't part of Objectivism supposedly rejecting gurus? Why doesn't Jimbo just say he's an individualist, why bring up Rand at all?
I assume you're talking about cinelerra or something. Negligence is when your build instructions don't work. Thank you, and have a nice day.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I take it you have not graduated from Slashdot Trolling 101 yet?
Football Odds
Only a Slashdotter can spell Encyclopædia Britannica so wrong.
You use software that you didn't pay for, in terms of support you deserve exactly what you paid for. If the authors happen to be kind enough to return your e-mails instead of snickering 'RTFM', that great, but a FOSS author is under no obligation to support anything. If he wants his project to succeed, he will have to support what he's written for at least some time, but nobody's gonna put his feet to the coals for dropping support for a project he no longer has time for.
My blog
Not sure if you are joking, but he's referring to Ayn Rand of the Atlas Shrugged variety. Whenever I hear anyone mentioning Rand it seems to be in the vein of laissez-faire capitalism and an "every man for himself" philosophy. Usually I end up not liking that person very much, but that's just me.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
There's a little bit more detail and context in the audio of the interview.
If you're one of those Reality-Denoying Looters who doesn't want to pay for a book, the gist is also in Michael Shermer's essay, The Unlikeliest Cult in History. Shermer's name and reputation might be familiar to folks who travel in Objectivist circles too.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Even then, if Jimbo is a follower of Rand, he's done about the exact opposite of her views.
... sickening. Jimbo should be out exploiting people, not helping them.
Rand would look at Wikipedia and shudder. Wikipedia is the embodiment of altruism. People helping people for reasons other than to further their own status
"If you don't have the time and the resources to fully support what you put on the internet, don't do it, or plan on a huge legal bill."
Based on what legal theory?
"You will be sued for negligence."
What did I "neglect" to do?
"You're obligated to support what you put on the internet, whether or not the GPL says "no warranty"."
Bullshit. I'm not 'obliged' (that's the word you are searching for) to provide anything for free) to do anything unless you pay me. That is called a 'contract'. You provide me something in 'consideration' for something else. If I give you something for nothing, that is all you expect to get in return.
He doesn't blame Slashdot, he blames himself for writing something on Slashdot to rile up the Slashdotters.
Come on, summarizer! This is the guy from Wikipedia, who discusses the importance of distinguishing a channel from its content just a bit higher up in TFA, for crying out loud. Read the damn thing!
Really? They don't work?
Have you been successful in getting it to work? Because I was about to try that app as soon as I had the chance...
My blog
You sound like you were beaten up by an Objectivist in college.
"Really, whenever someone professes such hostility toward an old dead woman who wrote turgid novels, I can only assume that it is out of indolence, a mere reading of Walker's book, and a lack of any real training in Objectivism, etc..."
Lighten up. Or you'll get Piekoff on your case.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Yes, it's a joke. For the necessary background I refer you to; Wikipedia:
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Rand
Usually I end up not liking that person very much. .
We might get along.
KFG
Why doesn't Jimbo just say he's an individualist, why bring up Rand at all?
Because a lot more people know about Rand and what she wrote than actually understand the implication of the term Objectivist. It's the easiest way of explaining it to most people.
We are all free to engage in behavior which we find pleasing. Please don't call yours altruism when in fact, you derive pleasure from it. Few things could be more thoroughly greedy. It's like bragging about how humble you are.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Atlas Shrugged is a melodramatic joke of a book with such a childish storyline that I'm surprised that anyone takes her "philosophy" seriously. As other posters have indicated, her "serious" philosophical work is regarded with derision by most in the field. Her so-called ethical system had been demolished by others more rigorous and of greater intellect (Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Kierkegaard) before she was even born.
Like you, I have to admit to a experiential distaste for her adherents. I have found that those espousing her philosophy are usually just selfish creatures trying to justify their own selfishness. Bleh...
- Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's own past press releases contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
- Claim that the majority of work is done by a group of people who actually don't really contribute that much.
I'm sure there's more.Free Hans!
This must be some alien, non-clique ridden, Wikipedia that I've never seen.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Well, I am hostile to Rand because I read Atlas Shrugged.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
When in doubt, blame Slashdot. It's fun for the whole family.
You might be an Ayn Rand objectivist if:
You're a brilliant innovator. Really. You'd show us... but we're not worthy of benefiting from your genius.
You replaced your subscription of Penthouse with the Wall Street Journal and read it for the same purpose.
Whenever you visit a national park you lament all the sky scrapers that should have been built there instead.
You day dream about escaping to Galt's Gulch, even though the male\female ratio is something like 10:1. Hey, it worked for the Smurfs.
It takes you 20 minutes to explain to people the concept of "A thing is itself" and wonder why people think you are condescending.
Wikipedia is the embodiment of altruism. People helping people for reasons other than to further their own status ... sickening.
Have you actually been to Wikipedia lately?
At any rate, I agree that Rand would hate Wikipedia, but only because of its "everyone has a say" open-source traits. Though of course Wikipedia is now making some people "more equal than others."
Rob
Really, a philosophy is what you make of it. Just because a well known "philosopher" takes issue with Ayn Rand, it doesn't mean she didn't have something to say. I don't really agree with her views, but, like most "philosophy", she has a few good points, and many that are totally off-base. However, if someone is devoted enough to read her material (particularly Atlas Shrugged, that takes serious devotion!) and agrees with her, that is their decision. They found something they feel works for them, so, more power to 'em.
Let's be honest, most philosophers are excellent at writing a lot, but saying nothing. And when they so say something, like Sartre does, you have to wade through the muck and circular reasoning to find out what is actually being said. Ayn Rand is no Kant, Heidegger, or Sartre, but at least she puts down her ideas in a way that is interpretable by the many. It's no surprise that so many people are drawn to it.
I'm annoyed! The Annoyed Droid!
. . .a mere reading of her two fat novels. . .
Is enough to fry your brain into a mass of undifferentiated goo.
KFG
Well, they didn't work for me anyway, on Ubuntu. I did go around installing things. Finally I found a repo that would let me install it; if I were booted into Linux right now I'd look it up and tell you what it was. Suffice to say that you can find binary packages and this is definitely the method I'd suggest for trying out cinelerra. I noodled around with the build for quite a while and finally gave up and installed the binaries.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is a "troll."
Advocate banning "trolls" whenever possible, especially when they threaten to expose malfeasance on the part of your worst employees.
Call one of your detractors a "disease" in your IRC channels, then deny you said it (even though it was logged) and create an entire "biography" on the person devoted solely to libeling them, in violation of publication laws and your own "standards" for biographical entries.
Suggest in your logged, publicly available email lists for the project that "lone wolves" should start filing dishonest "complaints" with the hosting ISP against a site critical of your behavior.
Take the money donated for "the project" and build a new house with it.
I don't think there are people making sacrifices in their own lives to write Wikipedia entries, nor are there people holding guns to the other group making them write Wikipedia entries.
Rand would have loved Wikipedia, IMHO. It's the embodiment of *selfishness*, as she saw the meaning of the word:
But ultimately, though Rand should be lauded for such things as assigning individual worth to individuals and not merely to society, or a dogged insistence on personal freedom of action, she fails to take her notions anywhere particularly grand or glorious. The novels start getting dull and repetitive, and one might arrive at the end of a work, and wonder, "what was the point of all that?" The philosophy seems to cover a few basic ideas like this and then... well... spins in some sort of busy-loop repeating the same sort of concepts. Perhaps some future philosopher will take this bright little engine, brush off the dust and the dirt and the icky stuff, polish it up, and actually really go somewhere with it. It will be a good day for the world if that happens.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
> Like you, I have to admit to a experiential distaste for her adherents. I have found that those espousing her philosophy are usually just selfish creatures trying to justify their own selfishness. Bleh...
I can't agree with you enough. Well, I guess I've known a couple who were okay people, but they always seemed to attribute their silliest ideas to Rand. Hell, I wouldn't have ever known who the hell Ayn Rand was if I hadn't wondered why all these kooks I saw on the internet were citing her as the source of their ideas...
but then again, I'm no Atlas
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
Suicidal graduate English assignment:
/not that I'm saying that Atlas Shrugged is anywhere near on the level of monstrosity as The Turner Diaries - I'm just picking out two books that tend to make people wince at the very thought of their existence.
Compare and Contrast the Turner Diaries and Atlas Shrugged.
If you can complete this project without your brain melting, you get a free straight-jacket.
> They're building a storehouse of knowledge to make factual information available to everyone
Why would Rand care about something done for this nebulous "everyone", especially when no one pays for it?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The difference between the "prediction market" you're talking about, and the actual stock market, is that in the prediction market, the bettors (for that's what they really are) don't determine the outcome.
If you bet on whether Obama is going to be the next Democratic presidential candidate, your bet doesn't directly influence the outcome (except perhaps in some very indirect, butterfly-effect-like fashion, but we'll ignore that). The two are independent. It's just like betting on a horse race, or a football game, or anything else. You're trying to determine what the outcome will be, but unless someone in the game is crooked, what the crowd thinks the outcome will be, doesn't affect the results.
In the stock market, things are more complicated: the value of the shares are the direct result of what people are willing to pay for them. So if I think that a stock is going to increase in value, and want to buy some of it, I'm going to offer slightly more than the price it's currently trading at, in order to acquire some. If I buy a lot of it, or if a lot of people do that, it'll cause the price to increase all by itself. It's as though, by betting on a horse, or on Obama, you actually make them more likely to win whatever event they're competing in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
Just try touching an Ayn Rand article, go on, I dare you... you'll see how "open" it is.
What Ayn Rand was against was forced altruism. Voluntary altruism is allowable in Randian ideology if the altruist is being voluntarily altruistic from their own resources, not with someone else's. I don't think she would shudder at WikiPedia.
She would shudder if it was a government funded organization, supporting the lame writing of academics who could not hold their own in the real world. This is not the case with WikePedia.
Hold on, Wikipedia has killed Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Most people I know use wikipedia, and not one of them uses EB.
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy
There are a small number of people (a few dozen worldwide, maybe) who don't fall into that category, and Jimmy is one of them. Although his background is primarily in economics and I wouldn't accuse him of being a deep philosophical thinker, in the mid-90's he organized and ran the only worth-while electronic forum on objectivism, the e-mail list MDOP (Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy). A significant number of participants had reasonable scholarly credentials, at least some of them in philosophy. Admitedly, I believe that participation in MDOP was sufficient to get one banned from the more conventional objectivist organizations, which are all about orthodoxy and not at all about philosophy.
Jimmy is at his best as an organizer and bringer-together of others, and the fact that he was able to create and maintain for some years a rational, productive forum for the discussion of a topic as famously flamegenic as objectivism is a measure of his ability in this regard.
As for Rand, some aspects of her anti-realist metaphysics and epistemology actually can be fruitfully studied, although the usual crtiques regarding her lack of scholarship certainly apply.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Altruism is doing something that benefits other people when you only indirectly benefit from it. That describes 90% of Wikipedia contributions. Personal pleasure doesn't even enter into it, and can't, because unless you're under coercion you are always doing things for some sort of personal pleasure. Actually even if you're under coercion it's usually the pleasure of a lack of pain.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in the last 6 years. Thank you.
Let's try phrasing it this way:
People with knowledge are creating a resource by which any individual who seeks knowledge may find it, and people are donating the fruits of their labors (money) to the WikiMedia Foundation because they value the dissemination of knowledge to those who value and crave it.
Wow...sounds wordy enough to be from the pages of Atlas Shrugged.
Rather, the "exact oppposite" would be if he tried to compel others to build Wikipedia against their own wishes and interests. Or seek legal sanction against those who would not build it for him. Or to manipulative the weight of others to bear against some other encyclopedia group.
And she doesn't condemn altruism, she posits that there's no such thing as 'altruism' -- people do things because those things are in their interest to do, whether pragmatic or abstract. What she condemns is the elevation of a slavery/behavior compulsion ethic deceptively mislabeled as 'altruism' to a position of unchallengeable supremacy in an individual's decision-making process.
I know of no successful open source software projects run that way. On all the successful open source projects only few are granted write access to cvs/svn and most open source projects are run by one or two very opinionated people who do not accomodate others on a whim. In most cases, people finding a problem submit a patch and onte of the trusted few will apply it. In many cases, the patch will not be applied directly, but will be rewritten to achieve the desired effect better.
Sure people can take all the code and fork the project, but that is very different to having control over the document. You very seldom get wikipeia-style edit wars in OSS code bases because "the boss" does not tolerate it. Abuse the privaledge of write access and you lose it.
To draw a parallels between Wikipedia (which is uncontrolled) and Open Source (which is controlled) just does Open Source a disservice. There's enough anti-Open Source FUD out there and we don't need people thinking that any dummy with a chip on their shoulder can modifyt open source.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Jimbo Wales, I'm sure, means well, but Wikipedia is a mess.
Here's a couple of truisms that he should have kept in mind.
1.) The average person is of average intelligence. In crowds, the overall intelligence is, at best, average. Comparison to Linux is inappropriate here because in order to contribute to Linux, you need to be able to write code. Anyone who can write a spoken language can contribute to Wikipedia. Comparison to the stock market is inappropriate here because there is no cost in contributing to Wikipedia, but there is a cost to contributing in the stock market. In other words, people self-select. When the self-selection is towards higher levels of quality (as it is in Linux and the stock market (due, respectively, to expertise required and cost of participation), crowds can be smarter than individuals. When the self-selection is towards the local average (as it is in Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects which appeal to the masses - on which everyone thinks they're an "expert" on a moral crusade), crowds encourage mediocrity.
2.) Small groups find it easier to organize and are more prone to do so than are large groups. What this means is that point of view in Wikipedia articles tends to reflect the small groups which have organized rather than the large groups which have not.
Actually, no, Rand explicitly rejected the doctrine of psychological egoism--and rightly so.
Rand simply held that one should have his own rational self-interest as his primary motive, not necessarily that everyone does
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
It seems like Wales is on a project creation frenzy, it seems like every month theres yet another project launched from Wales and Beesley. Actually I exaggerate but the previous big announcement http://campaigns.wikia.com/ seems to be pretty inactive now. I fear the same will happen for the new search engine. Does jimbo have the time to dedicate to making this happen, or is it vapor-ware?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
The goal of the Wikimedia foundation is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.
That sounds pretty "selfless". Now some of the individuals who make up Wikipedia might be assholes, but I don't really do much work there, so I don't know. I contribute because I want to make things better for others. I want everyone to have access to correct information, not because I get a hard-on for having more edits than someone.
I'll concede that Jimbo might have started Wikimedia for his own, selfish reasons. If that is the case, he's no better from a moral perspective than the suits at the RIAA. I'm glad he started it, but he's an amoral person in that respect.
Collectivism allows the individual to persue his goals. Without the support of others, people are very limited in what they can do. Without collectivism, we would each be at the mercy of the strong and amoral, as well as nature. There's an old African proverb that peaks to the reciprocal nature of individual freedom and social responsibility: Only free individuals can make a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can make free individuals.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yep, with enough turgid prose, you can justify pretty much anything, including outright charity and altruism.
Of course Rand also believed that anyone who liked Strauss as opposed to Rachmaninov was also "denying reality" and directed exactly the same vitriol that way. Same went for painters, actors, and so on. Really goofy boid, that Rand dame.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Personal pleasure doesn't even enter into it, and can't, because...you are always doing things for some sort of personal pleasure.
So by "not entering into it," you mean "is the single biggest reason people do anything." Got it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I mean that it doesn't enter into what altruism means because if it does then there is no altruism and the term itself becomes meaningless ergo my definition.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
> Is that what I was doing on Wikipedia? I thought that I was engaging in a hobby I enjoy, which is of benefit to me.
:-)
Weird. Normal people rationalize away their greed and selfishness. I never realized that Rand's followers rationalized altrusim, instead...
I'm not complaining, mind you--I'd much rather you were altrusitic than some greedy asshole--but I confess that the notion of rationalizing it seems odd to me. You usually only rationalize bad things
No, altruism is doing things for others that you do NOT benefit from.
Doing things for others that you benefit from indirectly is called 'enlightened egoisms.'
As opposed to the brute egoism of those who can't see the indirect benefits.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
One thing I've noticed over the years as a Wikipedia contributor is that there's nothing done to stop Rand's wacko cult followers from turning her article into a shrine to her. I once tried to fix this problem, but it turns out that her cult will not allow anything, no matter how well cited, to make her look bad. To this day, I can still point to biases left in the article that they will not allow anyone to correct. And even when there are admins around, her followers are allowed to harass contributors who don't worship her as well. I've often atributted this to Wikipedia's inability to stop large biased mobs from taking over any article they want to (as admins refuse to stop people from adding biased information). Still, I've had a long-standing suspicion that this has something to do with Jimbo's worship of her, and I am still not convinced that I'm wrong.
Well I say indirectly because IMHO doing altruistic things for other people encourages them to do altruistic things which will eventually benefit everybody including you, in a Prisoner's Dilemma kind of way. That's the evolutionary reason we even have individual altruism at all.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
> besides being a chronicle of how many lives her and her immediate followers wrecked
I hear that Jesus Christ and his followers have wrecked a couple of lives too.
The point of my post was that Rand's thought is not taken seriously within the philosophical community. If you beg to differ, please tell me which peer-reviewed journals Rand sought to publish in and what tenured scholars base their research and teaching on her work. K thx bye.
Another quote: Pure democracy is kind of like three wolves and two chickens voting on what to have for dinner.
Most of us can agree that it is proper and even critical role of government to secure basic freedom. However, to move from securing basic freedom to redistributing assets, excessively controlling consumer choice, etc is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You totally ignore that there are many collectivist organizations in 20th century that have done great harm to the individual (e.g., Naziism, Communist Russia, Communist China, etc). There is no guarantee that a simple majority vote, even an overwhelming ones, delivers justice or freedom.
You'd be surprised, but neuroscience is disproving Rand's pseudophilosophy:_ of_altr.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/neuroscience
If you love science, reasoning, don't hate yourself, like trading the things that you create for things of value created by others, and generally find that your own happiness is important to you, it's likely that you'll love Ayn Rand's writings.
...
I love all those things up til you get to Ayn Rand. She's a poor writer, a hateful polemicist, and a shoddy philosopher. I don't find it the least bit inconsistent that her vile bilge is inconsistent with my own philosophies, even if they overlap halfway.
If you can't stand logical thought, think that every blade of grass on earth is more important than your own life, want a handout from the government, and think that all that counts is serving others, well, there's always Jesus or Karl Marx for you
Well hey, congratulations on your, uh, rational analysis.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Are you talking about cinelerra or cinelerra-cvs? I compiled the cinelerra-cvs version on ubuntu a while ago but it was pretty tough. I had to install tons of dev packages, finding out which ones were required each time just by reading the error output on each compile attempt and then I had to check irc for why the rendering would'nt work, turned out some of the symlinks were in the wrong place. It might have got better now but I would definatly go for the binary if you just want to try it out.
If it weren't for people who help other people, I probably would be in a much worse place than I am in right now. Several of my teachers have said that I am the smartest person they have ever known, and I'm not even making this up. But I have Asperger's Syndrome and it has lead to me being almost entirely emotionally inept. Things like this are the standard for smart people--one switch on, one switch off. Supporters of individual fanaticism like the majority of the Objectivist movement is predicated on the belief in a superman who is perfect everywhere and the false dichotomy between "the projection of an ideal man" and a man whose main goal is leeching off of society. Thinking in ones and zeroes may work when programming circuits but that's not how it works with people. There is no "ideal man" and most of those whom the Randian society sees as leeches aren't. Belief in the "ideal man" is just as illogical as belief in the Second Coming, but I can forgive the latter as it was invented in the Roman society when the nature of reality was not as well-defined as it was in the twentieth century when Rand lived.
Objectivism may be based off of logical reasoning from assumed premises, but all the reasoning in the world is for naught when it's based on false principles. The majority of Objectivists tend to ignore their weaknesses, considering that if they acknowledged both their weaknesses and Objectivism then they'd have to admit that they are a leech on society. Which leads to them considering those who are strong in their weaknesses as the leeches on society. This leads to the false belief in "I should only care about myself" and the delusions Objectivists get of being the intellectual equivalent of Superman. In other words, belief in Objectivist reality is like believing in Superman reality. Superman may make for a decent story but all-powerful people like Superman only exist in the comic books. No, wait, Superman used his powers to help people who obviously don't deserve to be helped because otherwise they'd be able to fly away from certain death themselves. And then there's Kryptonite which requires other people to oh my god help him. No wait, the Objectivist hero barely even makes a good story(only insomuch as Chuck Norris facts make a good story) considering that most Superman stories are chock full of kryptonite because of how boring and unrealistic somebody with absolutely no weaknesses is.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Thus, drawing parallels between Wikipedia content and OS projects is misguided. Perhaps if Wikipedia pages were controlled by "patch managers" you would not get some of the errors and shit-wars that you do get, but then content would get generated more slowly too.
I am not at all saying "Wikipedia is broken". Wikipedia deals with human knowledge/opinions etc which is often very subjective and is more toleratant of errors etc. What I am saying is that Wikipedia content and OSS projects have different needs aand use very different mechanisms to interact with the community and that it is wrong to say that they are similar.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
As someone who tries to do something about it, I often don't bother, because some articles are that badly written.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
(After the mutants explain that everything they have has been flushed down a toilet.)
Mutant: And here's our library.
Bender: It's all crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
There's a circularity to arguing that deriving pleasure from an altruistic act makes it non-altruistic. If one derives pleasure - even if it is the pleasure of a more comfortable self-image, from the knowledge that one simply has helped another, then it is an altruistic pleasure. Even simply knowing that one's own altruism creates the possibility of another's altruism which may someday benefit you may generate a kind of pleasure. What is important is that the pleasure not derive from another direct source - an expected quid pro quo, for example.
The demand that an action is altruistic only if it benefits another while the actor receive absolutely no benefit whatsoever is an absurd demand. What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat; I expend time and energy to save the life of someone to whom I have no obligation), nor an expected reciprocity. These conditions are adequate for a fully functional conception of altruism. "Enlightened selfishness" introduces the expectation of reciprocity.
Negligence is when your build instructions don't work.
so you expect people to test thier build on every version of every linux distro or even every unix-like system out there?
that is one of the downsides of a system like linux, all the distros are different so you can't gaurantee that what works on one will work on all of them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
JW: Oh yeah. We really owe Richard a debt of gratitude for all that. So do I.
factor 966971: 966971
My understanding of Ayn Rand is as an existentialist story teller [AKA: writer/philosopher].
...) wisdom/philosophy a/o decision [AKA: The Experience and Knowledge (TEK)] is the best.
Yes, I agree Ayn Rand was an objectivist; However, as an objectivist the story/philosophy must be equally skeptical of the wisdom of self and crowds. As an existentialist, you decide for only yourself (no others). As an objective existentialist, you may decide for only yourself (no others) which (self, crowd,
Ayn Rand the existential objectivist cannot reserve skepticism for just the crowd and remain "Objective".
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat[)]
It's difficult to say there's no expectation of reciprocity in most situations, since we know there's a socially implied expectation. If Steve buys you a lunch today, you're socially expected to return the favor when you can, and if you don't, Steve may well be offended, or at least disappointed, neither of which would be possible if there were no expectations to disappoint.
At any rate, I conceed that situations in which there's no reasonable expectation of the possibility of reciprocity would form a working definition of altruism; charities such as the Gates Foundation where there's really no way it could be argued that Bill would expect to see any real return on his time and money, nor does he need a return, nor would it better his quality of life even if he saw a return.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Well, much of the philosophy through ages was a rationalization (meaning-ization) or, furthermore, a glorification of given (philosophers own) human behavior or imprinted set of values and preferences.
A fugitive before red terror professes collectivism - how unexpected! Someone with less ambition of "painting a big picture" would just say: "They did me wrong, I hate them for that" and THAT is the most justified reason for an objective individualist. Trying to project your own life story onto "cosmic way of things" is ultimate collectivism (omnism?), in disguise.
He may be trolling, but you need to get your facts correct.
I think the entry you were looking for was this.