Consequently, after I had carefully researched the subject of each page, filling it with facts and tagging every sentence and paragraph with one or more references, others would often come by and, totally unimpeded by any knowledge of the subject, just start making changes as they saw fit. I could argue with them, typically regarding the quality of their sources, but they were often stubborn and refused to understand. I could point out that they were not following Wikipedia's own guidelines, but they didn't see it that way. The administrators and arbitrators didn't have any knowledge of the subject either and figured we just had to remain civil and reach a consensus.
Amen. The way I would summarize it is that working on wikipedia articles just isn't any fun, and they expect an insane amount of dedication from their volunteers.
But I hardly see how running ads is going to help this, unless part of the deal is paying editors and writers...
So let's say wikipedia is up against it, and a few years hence it will be in an obvious state of decay. What are we going to replace it with? (I don't have a lot of hope for citizendium, somehow, I suspect it goes a little too far in the opposite direction, the control is a little too tight.)
But ads? Yeah, sure. Write "we sold out" all over the site while you're at it. As far as I'm concerned, if you run ads, you have given up all pretense of being objective. Because sooner or later, someone will offer you a really nice deal if only...
I share your skepticism about advertising-supported media, but it's important to realize that wikipedia already has no mechanism for resisting well-funded attempts at subversion. They're all proud of themselves for being able to fend off teenage vandals who want to insert "is gay!" after every proper name, but there's nothing they can do against the, uh, hypothetical case of hired propagandists pretending to be "neutral".
I bring up this scenario about once a month, no one seems to have an answer to it: suppose a Karl Rove type hires a dozen people, who each open a dozen accounts, which they then use in a half-way reasonable manner to build up reputations as good citizens. Then when there's a need for it, there's 144 Rover-boy identities that all have the apparent idea that "consensus" is defined by one politician's list of talking points.
(Note, in the slashdot version of this scenario, the Rover-boys all mod each other up).
"I find a lot of complaints around WP are about someone's inability to insert something they value but which isn't widely known or reported in the media."
And I find that a lot of the defenders of WP generally seem to miss the point of a lot of the criticism.
Since it's bad to be "original" on wikipedia, you're stuck with "consensus opinion" as the only guide toward the truth.
This "family feud" criteria seems pretty silly when you feel you can prove that the consensus is wrong.
A modest proposal: wikipedia should incorporate a mechanism for evaluating original material.
Jimmy Wales reason for rejecting this is pretty lame: "we don't have the resources".
So create the resources, already.
Thanks, interesting post. It's a subject I've been wondering about lately, because it's pretty obvious to me that writing stuff on wikipedia just isn't any fun. There's a huge number of rules and guidelines you're supposed to be familiar with, and large numbers of the editors there insist on taking them too seriously (it appears that no quantity of caveats about how a guideline is a rule of thumb and you're supposed to apply "common sense" will dissuade a true internet nerd that said guideline is the word of god that can be applied with mathematical precision). It's really easy to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to achieve some sort of reasonable, neutral consensus with people who are of dubious sanity. Wikipedia's conflict resolution process is no where near adequate, it's ineffective against any nut that doesn't actually exhibit Turette's syndrome. On articles that I care about, I've watched the content churn back and forth over the years without looking like it's going to converge out onto any stable state ever... you can't just work on something and move on to something else, you have to camp out and defend the older work or else it gradually deteriorates. The whole system is just way to labor intensive to expect it to be sustainable by volunteer labor.
A question I've been wondering about lately is "why would you donate money to wikipedia?".
I read things on wikipedia now and then, I spend time contributing to articles... but you often hear people
say things like "wikipedia is good for technical stuff, but you can't trust the political articles", in other words, it's acting
as a forum for fanatics and professional propagandists. Why would you volunteer to support a platform for these people?
Effectively anonymous, free accounts are clearly not conducive to anything like a robust information architecture...
someday we're going to look back on sites like wikipedia (and slashdot) and phrases like "rope of sand" will come to mind.
This is much clearer than the junk news article slashdot is pointing at.
In general, I think it takes some thought to evaluate what the researchers have done here, which means that pretty much every single person who is rushing to talk about it have skipped that annoying process. You can use comments on this topic to screen out people who aren't worth taking seriously.
(Slashdot commenters possess the R2D2 gene, and can't resist making annoying squeaky noises.)
Then there's amazon.com, which in addition to their ground-breaking aggressive use of an inane software patent, was also donating money to the Republican party during the rise of the Bush Jr. regime... in contrast to Barnes and Nobles, which has been solidly blue, all along.
technophobic crap along the lines of claims that cell phones cause bone/brain cancer
But this is (or at least was) a plausible theory, that had some preliminary research results in it's favor. Supposedly it's been shot down (I haven't looked closely enough to judge how well it was shot down), but that just makes it Wrong, it doesn't make it "technophobic crap".
What's actually interesting about that whole business is how little credence was given to the claims that it might actually be dangerous to hold a microwave transmitter right up against your head for long periods of time. The cell phone habit had already become entrenched, and no one wanted to hear about any problems with them. That in itself is kind of worrying: we're looking at an addictive technology here, with many actual problems (like, an estimate of thousands of traffic accidents a year from cellphone gabblers). But hey, The People Want It, our corporate masters are making money pushing them, you can't challenge it without being some weirdo luddite freak.
The possibility that, say, google searches are similarly addictive is an interesting thought... it's too bad this BBC article sucks as far as providing references to actual research. All you get is the fact that Nicolas Carr has a book out he wants you to buy.
This PBS interview makes it sound like he wrote a whole book about his private theory:
What we can I think theorize is that as we train our brains to take in information very, very quickly in a very interrupted, distracted way little bits of it come at us all the time, the way we experience it online that strengthens those parts of our brain that are good at multitasking and good at zipping up, shifting our focus very, very quickly. On the other hand we are not exercising those parts of our brain that are involved in deep concentration, deep attentiveness, things like contemplation and reflection.
What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind.
It often strikes me as an interesting thing that we have no social mechanism for turning down a technical capability, even when we largely believe it's a bad idea. If a gadget exists, we have to have it, like it or not...
This is me writing on the subject of cellphones at burning man, back in 2005:
MORE_OR_LESS
Do they know how to fix a tire on their bicycle? (Do they even ride a bicycle?)
Are you seriously suggesting that children should be out riding bicycles, unsupervised? This is horribly irresponsible and dangerous behavior. Everyone knows you should never let our child out of the house unless encased in a plastic shell strapped down inside a steel cage, with at least two armed adults to protect it. Otherwise it might be kidnapped by mexican pedophile flying saucers from mars.
No, fat is what butter is about. Mayonnaise is for poor deluded fools who want everything to seem creamy but aren't willing to just eat cream.
(1) exercise (2) diet complicated (3) gm etc ok
on
The Rise of Nanofoods
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, here's three quick points:
The main health problem among Americans is lack of exercise. Everyone essentially knows this, but we keep slinking away from the point and looking for magic diet foods. The odds are good you don't have a beer gut or a McDonald's gut, what you have is a gasoline gut.
While diet is important, it's far more complicated than most of us are willing to admit. Is a low-fat diet important? But then, how do you explain the French? Is a low-calorie diet important? But then how do you explain the Japanese? The suckers will no doubt snap up novelty low-calorie diet products, but there are reasons the official recommendations haven't budged much over the years: eat a varied diet, and try to cover all the bases.
High tech modified foods: it's worth watching out for problems, it may even be worth beefing up government watchdog agencies (though I suspect what we really need is just to get the existing ones to do their jobs, which means not appointing people who won't do their jobs, which means not electing Republicans, or the equivalent). But overall, I think the paranoia about food experimentation is going to turn out be misplaced (e.g. there's a not so implausible scenario where GM foods enable a wide-spread return to organic gardening, and save the planet).
(Posted with "It's All Text". Just say no to TEXTAREAs)
If you're in the SF Bay Area, I would say you should go down to NoiseBridge
on a Monday night at 7pm:
Circuit Hacking Mondays,
where Mitch Altman (of TV Begone fame) instructs in the basics of hands-on electronics hacking.
Science Fiction is a discourse about possibilities, therefore it is a dangerous idea because it makes people believe change is a possibility. Change imposes a disruptive force which is associated with risk, something that modern economists demonstrated recently they have great difficulty handling competently.
I think it's the other way around. Science Fiction flourished when the idea of change was off the table, and the people who were interested in it needed an outlet to talk through the ideas. Now that it's pretty much understood that 25 years from now things are going to be way different, talking about how they're going to be different isn't restricted to a weird pulp fiction ghetto.
The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF
require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There
hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal
improvements in the old ones. This matters.
That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will
never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The
better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man
Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy
problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains
an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.
Nope, you're pretty much completely wrong here. My understanding
is that the energy required to get into low-earth orbit is
roughly the same required by a transcontinental plane flight.
And further, once you are in LEO, energetically you're around
half-way to anywhere else in the solar system.
A "free energy scenario" wouldn't hurt, but really
if you're wondering why we don't rule the solar system at this
point, you're going to have to look elsewhere.
During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We
don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which
one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median
real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median
income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth
concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high
school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a
house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's
over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was
heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard
of living in the world".)
One suspects that the powers that be didn't much like the
political unrest generated in the affluent 60s. Best to keep
people feeling a bit desperate and hungry, eh?
But you know, just for argument's sake... why would anyone in
their right minds care about that crap? A two-car house in the
burbs? Please, give me a bicycle in a real city any day.
Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw
materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain
current output for another century, let alone bring China and
India up to US levels of consumption.
Methinks you've been listening too much to the "peakies". The
people who really believe in the peak oil scenario are people who
want to believe that it's true (why exactly do they keep ignoring
the Caspian sea area? What do they think we're doing in
Afghanistan, anyway?). The oil companies aren't arguing with
them too much, I suspect because this general belief is a great
excuse for price gouging... Exxon has been doing great with "the
energy crisis" part II.
It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's
been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide
with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little
guy.
A couple of things here:
As I just mentioned to someone else: you're whining about how
nothing cool ever happens anymore on a medium that didn't exist
15 years ago. Hell, 15 years ago, people were still having
trouble with the idea of email.
The idea that Science Fiction is a literature of optimism is
fundamentally crazy. Just to pick an example: one of Heinlein's
first works was about a United States under the thumb of a
religious dictatorship. In general, utopian fiction has always
been a regarded as a boring exception to the rule: cautionary
tales about things going wrong in the brave new world of the future.
Tell me what, exactly, does Foundation realistically predict? It
was a retelling of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in space
with funny maths, glowey nuclear bits and, most importantly, damn
good writing.
The whole notion of science fiction as prediction is a red
herring, the issue at hand is science fiction as a source of
inspiration.
Notably, Paul Krugman admits that Asimov's "psychohistory"
was one of the things that inspired him as a kid to go on to do work in
macroeconomics:
TWISTED_PATHS
I think you'll find that the typical young physicist these days got involved in the game because they wanted to discover hyperdrive.
* The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
An obvious either/or fallacy, don't you think?
* The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast.
Don't forget the attack of the killer NONES, predicted in the
near future:
American
Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population,
NONES
- google's quickview
(By the way: "luddites"? I can't say I see what christian fundamentalism has
in common with a labor vs. automation conflict. Saying that both
"coporations" and "luddites" are winning in the same breath
is... odd.)
* The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars.
And you're whining about this using a communications medium that
was unthinkable a few decades ago. (Damn, no flying cars! But
I'd rather have the conveyor belts, myself).
* The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years.
There are two long-term nuclear waste repositories operating in the United
States. Clearly a solved problem, as far as technical issues go.
* The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.
The Club of Rome's predictions were laughably bad (Paul Erhlich
lost his bet, remember)?
We do indeed seem to be moving back toward the Great Gatsby era,
but resouce limitations have very little to do with it.
Try asking the question the other way around: why did anyone ever start writing hard science fiction? Doesn't pressing into service the framework of an adventure story to explore the future potential of the human race seem like a strange thing to do?
Science Fiction was an important forum for a certain style of thinking only as long as that mode of thought was considered disreputable... once it became more acceptable to speculate about the future, other forums opened up for it: you can write up your ideas as a "non-fiction" book, or for that matter go shopping for venture capital. It didn't used to be that way...
I believe we see less innovative SciFi books not because they're not being written, but because they're not being published.
Try actually talking to some editors. They tend to tell you they're not publishing hard SF because they're not getting submissions of it,
and the reason is pretty simple: it's hard to write well, and if you know enough to do it, you probably know enough to do something else that's going to pay better and will usually seem like more important work.
Exactly! I was very surprised by the summary's quote: 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,'. What kind of impact did Snow Crash have? There are almost no novel concepts in that book. Metaverse -> Second Life maybe, but that's it.
The trouble is that the Virtual Reality stuff had been introduced by Vinge ("True Names"), and done with style by Gibson ("Neuromancer")
long before "Snow Crash" got on to the scene. "Snow Crash" is certainly an okay book, but the way young geeks obsess over it is almost certainly a reflection of what's not there rather than what is. Some people found "cyberpunk" too emotionally cold, and they like the jokey satiric version that Stephenson came up with better... but it's very much a third generation, toned-down, work.
A better example is indeed Citzendium, which most of us have heard of, but few have any use for. It too has an obsession with credentials, which I don't share, and have not been talking about at all.
What I have been saying is that you need to know who you're talking to -- you can indeed use that to verify what credentials people have, but what I'm specifically talking about is verifying what credentials people don't have. If you read a product review, you need to know if it came from an independent source, of if it's some weasel's idea of "guerrilla marketing".
And yes, Jimbo is (ultimately) in charge of the rules by which wikipedia is run, and my contention is that if he's not willing to change those rules, as wikipedia becomes more important, it's going to increasingly turn into an unusable repository of misinformation.
But what I think you're talking about is a tendency toward "faddishness" rather than a need to be normal. There's a lot of posing about being professional and rational and all of that, but with the present state-of-the-art we're all essentially blundering around in the dark shouting anecdotes at each other. We tend to rely on tribal identity for decision-making because we don't have much of anything else to work with. We're not alone in this, of course, it's pretty much how must people deal with stuff like politics or religion (there are reasons we call them "religious issues", you know?).
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. The way I would summarize it is that working on wikipedia articles just isn't any fun, and they expect an insane amount of dedication from their volunteers.
But I hardly see how running ads is going to help this, unless part of the deal is paying editors and writers...
So let's say wikipedia is up against it, and a few years hence it will be in an obvious state of decay. What are we going to replace it with? (I don't have a lot of hope for citizendium, somehow, I suspect it goes a little too far in the opposite direction, the control is a little too tight.)
I share your skepticism about advertising-supported media, but it's important to realize that wikipedia already has no mechanism for resisting well-funded attempts at subversion. They're all proud of themselves for being able to fend off teenage vandals who want to insert "is gay!" after every proper name, but there's nothing they can do against the, uh, hypothetical case of hired propagandists pretending to be "neutral".
I bring up this scenario about once a month, no one seems to have an answer to it: suppose a Karl Rove type hires a dozen people, who each open a dozen accounts, which they then use in a half-way reasonable manner to build up reputations as good citizens. Then when there's a need for it, there's 144 Rover-boy identities that all have the apparent idea that "consensus" is defined by one politician's list of talking points.
(Note, in the slashdot version of this scenario, the Rover-boys all mod each other up).
"I find a lot of complaints around WP are about someone's inability to insert something they value but which isn't widely known or reported in the media." And I find that a lot of the defenders of WP generally seem to miss the point of a lot of the criticism.
Since it's bad to be "original" on wikipedia, you're stuck with "consensus opinion" as the only guide toward the truth. This "family feud" criteria seems pretty silly when you feel you can prove that the consensus is wrong.
A modest proposal: wikipedia should incorporate a mechanism for evaluating original material. Jimmy Wales reason for rejecting this is pretty lame: "we don't have the resources". So create the resources, already.
Thanks, interesting post. It's a subject I've been wondering about lately, because it's pretty obvious to me that writing stuff on wikipedia just isn't any fun. There's a huge number of rules and guidelines you're supposed to be familiar with, and large numbers of the editors there insist on taking them too seriously (it appears that no quantity of caveats about how a guideline is a rule of thumb and you're supposed to apply "common sense" will dissuade a true internet nerd that said guideline is the word of god that can be applied with mathematical precision). It's really easy to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to achieve some sort of reasonable, neutral consensus with people who are of dubious sanity. Wikipedia's conflict resolution process is no where near adequate, it's ineffective against any nut that doesn't actually exhibit Turette's syndrome. On articles that I care about, I've watched the content churn back and forth over the years without looking like it's going to converge out onto any stable state ever... you can't just work on something and move on to something else, you have to camp out and defend the older work or else it gradually deteriorates. The whole system is just way to labor intensive to expect it to be sustainable by volunteer labor.
A question I've been wondering about lately is "why would you donate money to wikipedia?". I read things on wikipedia now and then, I spend time contributing to articles... but you often hear people say things like "wikipedia is good for technical stuff, but you can't trust the political articles", in other words, it's acting as a forum for fanatics and professional propagandists. Why would you volunteer to support a platform for these people?
Effectively anonymous, free accounts are clearly not conducive to anything like a robust information architecture... someday we're going to look back on sites like wikipedia (and slashdot) and phrases like "rope of sand" will come to mind.
Since no one would actually say this, it doesn't even work as a joke: "The daughter angrily fired back, 'That wouldn't be fair! It's MY money!'"
(Plus 5 informative? Why do I even bother with this site any more?)
If you're actually interested in this subject, I suggest reading the original publication: Friendships Moderate an Association Between the DRD4 Gene and Political Ideology
This is much clearer than the junk news article slashdot is pointing at.
In general, I think it takes some thought to evaluate what the researchers have done here, which means that pretty much every single person who is rushing to talk about it have skipped that annoying process. You can use comments on this topic to screen out people who aren't worth taking seriously.
(Slashdot commenters possess the R2D2 gene, and can't resist making annoying squeaky noises.)
Then there's amazon.com, which in addition to their ground-breaking aggressive use of an inane software patent, was also donating money to the Republican party during the rise of the Bush Jr. regime... in contrast to Barnes and Nobles, which has been solidly blue, all along.
Okay, so let's say Nicolas Carr is right, and we need something to help us concentrate deeply in the face of the ecosystem of interruption technologies.
Is there a technical fix for this? I'm thinking something like an X windows hack that will force you to stay inside your text editor for an hour.
But this is (or at least was) a plausible theory, that had some preliminary research results in it's favor. Supposedly it's been shot down (I haven't looked closely enough to judge how well it was shot down), but that just makes it Wrong, it doesn't make it "technophobic crap".
What's actually interesting about that whole business is how little credence was given to the claims that it might actually be dangerous to hold a microwave transmitter right up against your head for long periods of time. The cell phone habit had already become entrenched, and no one wanted to hear about any problems with them. That in itself is kind of worrying: we're looking at an addictive technology here, with many actual problems (like, an estimate of thousands of traffic accidents a year from cellphone gabblers). But hey, The People Want It, our corporate masters are making money pushing them, you can't challenge it without being some weirdo luddite freak.
The possibility that, say, google searches are similarly addictive is an interesting thought... it's too bad this BBC article sucks as far as providing references to actual research. All you get is the fact that Nicolas Carr has a book out he wants you to buy.
This PBS interview makes it sound like he wrote a whole book about his private theory:
Jonah Lehrer objects in a NY Times book review:
Carr's 2008 article in the Atlantic has at least a few research links in it: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
It often strikes me as an interesting thing that we have no social mechanism for turning down a technical capability, even when we largely believe it's a bad idea. If a gadget exists, we have to have it, like it or not...
This is me writing on the subject of cellphones at burning man, back in 2005: MORE_OR_LESS
Are you seriously suggesting that children should be out riding bicycles, unsupervised? This is horribly irresponsible and dangerous behavior. Everyone knows you should never let our child out of the house unless encased in a plastic shell strapped down inside a steel cage, with at least two armed adults to protect it. Otherwise it might be kidnapped by mexican pedophile flying saucers from mars.
No, fat is what butter is about. Mayonnaise is for poor deluded fools who want everything to seem creamy but aren't willing to just eat cream.
Okay, here's three quick points:
(Posted with "It's All Text". Just say no to TEXTAREAs)
If you're in the SF Bay Area, I would say you should go down to NoiseBridge on a Monday night at 7pm: Circuit Hacking Mondays, where Mitch Altman (of TV Begone fame) instructs in the basics of hands-on electronics hacking.
I think it's the other way around. Science Fiction flourished when the idea of change was off the table, and the people who were interested in it needed an outlet to talk through the ideas. Now that it's pretty much understood that 25 years from now things are going to be way different, talking about how they're going to be different isn't restricted to a weird pulp fiction ghetto.
Animats (122034) wrote:
Nope, you're pretty much completely wrong here. My understanding is that the energy required to get into low-earth orbit is roughly the same required by a transcontinental plane flight. And further, once you are in LEO, energetically you're around half-way to anywhere else in the solar system.
A "free energy scenario" wouldn't hurt, but really if you're wondering why we don't rule the solar system at this point, you're going to have to look elsewhere.
One suspects that the powers that be didn't much like the political unrest generated in the affluent 60s. Best to keep people feeling a bit desperate and hungry, eh?
But you know, just for argument's sake... why would anyone in their right minds care about that crap? A two-car house in the burbs? Please, give me a bicycle in a real city any day.
Methinks you've been listening too much to the "peakies". The people who really believe in the peak oil scenario are people who want to believe that it's true (why exactly do they keep ignoring the Caspian sea area? What do they think we're doing in Afghanistan, anyway?). The oil companies aren't arguing with them too much, I suspect because this general belief is a great excuse for price gouging... Exxon has been doing great with "the energy crisis" part II.
A couple of things here:
sabernet (751826) wrote:
The whole notion of science fiction as prediction is a red herring, the issue at hand is science fiction as a source of inspiration.
Notably, Paul Krugman admits that Asimov's "psychohistory" was one of the things that inspired him as a kid to go on to do work in macroeconomics: TWISTED_PATHS
I think you'll find that the typical young physicist these days got involved in the game because they wanted to discover hyperdrive.
An obvious either/or fallacy, don't you think?
Don't forget the attack of the killer NONES, predicted in the near future: American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population, NONES - google's quickview (By the way: "luddites"? I can't say I see what christian fundamentalism has in common with a labor vs. automation conflict. Saying that both "coporations" and "luddites" are winning in the same breath is... odd.)
And you're whining about this using a communications medium that was unthinkable a few decades ago. (Damn, no flying cars! But I'd rather have the conveyor belts, myself).
There are two long-term nuclear waste repositories operating in the United States. Clearly a solved problem, as far as technical issues go.
The Club of Rome's predictions were laughably bad (Paul Erhlich lost his bet, remember)? We do indeed seem to be moving back toward the Great Gatsby era, but resouce limitations have very little to do with it.
Try asking the question the other way around: why did anyone ever start writing hard science fiction? Doesn't pressing into service the framework of an adventure story to explore the future potential of the human race seem like a strange thing to do?
Science Fiction was an important forum for a certain style of thinking only as long as that mode of thought was considered disreputable... once it became more acceptable to speculate about the future, other forums opened up for it: you can write up your ideas as a "non-fiction" book, or for that matter go shopping for venture capital. It didn't used to be that way...
Try actually talking to some editors. They tend to tell you they're not publishing hard SF because they're not getting submissions of it, and the reason is pretty simple: it's hard to write well, and if you know enough to do it, you probably know enough to do something else that's going to pay better and will usually seem like more important work.
The trouble is that the Virtual Reality stuff had been introduced by Vinge ("True Names"), and done with style by Gibson ("Neuromancer") long before "Snow Crash" got on to the scene. "Snow Crash" is certainly an okay book, but the way young geeks obsess over it is almost certainly a reflection of what's not there rather than what is. Some people found "cyberpunk" too emotionally cold, and they like the jokey satiric version that Stephenson came up with better... but it's very much a third generation, toned-down, work.
A better example is indeed Citzendium, which most of us have heard of, but few have any use for. It too has an obsession with credentials, which I don't share, and have not been talking about at all.
What I have been saying is that you need to know who you're talking to -- you can indeed use that to verify what credentials people have, but what I'm specifically talking about is verifying what credentials people don't have. If you read a product review, you need to know if it came from an independent source, of if it's some weasel's idea of "guerrilla marketing".
And yes, Jimbo is (ultimately) in charge of the rules by which wikipedia is run, and my contention is that if he's not willing to change those rules, as wikipedia becomes more important, it's going to increasingly turn into an unusable repository of misinformation.
Yeah, me too, though I specifically started wondering about "science fiction fans".
I would say we've got roughly three theories to choose from in some combination:
But what I think you're talking about is a tendency toward "faddishness" rather than a need to be normal. There's a lot of posing about being professional and rational and all of that, but with the present state-of-the-art we're all essentially blundering around in the dark shouting anecdotes at each other. We tend to rely on tribal identity for decision-making because we don't have much of anything else to work with. We're not alone in this, of course, it's pretty much how must people deal with stuff like politics or religion (there are reasons we call them "religious issues", you know?).