Apart from the fact it is difficult to say how things would have been different, it's possible they have an intrinsic understanding of these differences. Putting that aside, I can entirely see person A, who knows these things, does better than person B, who does not. Person A is going to make fewer mistakes, is going to more quickly glom onto problems based on a misunderstanding of the topic, and that topic is quite prevalent in life. Prevalent enough that I think it is fair to say the aggregate of people who understand the principle are doing better than the aggregate who do not.
Equality is *an* equivalence relation, not *all* equivalence relations.
To wit:
There are an equal number of oranges in this basket as there are apples in that basket.
The basket of oranges is not equivalent to the basket of apples.
The color value of this small orange is equal to the color value of that large orange.
These oranges are not equivalent.
A brainless (anencephalic, technically) human baby is genetically human
'Genetically human'?
What I think people don't really understand about evolution is that speciation is an indiscrete process. Each organism is essentially it's own species; to define a species is to create an arbitrary boundary around a group of individuals that are more similar to each other than they are to other individuals. But within that group there will be divisions and subdivisions that will, in time, grow to be wholly separate groups.
So your basic assumption that something either is or isn't human won't hold up in the long term. We still cling to the idea, but it's basically outmoded. This is an extremely hairy issue; our society is based around the idea that the present members and their offspring are part of it, and we gear the society towards their needs. When we start inducting new members, those that have never been part of society, suddenly we have to consider when we throw members out, or what qualifies as a potential member. If chimps, why not monkeys? If monkeys, why not all mammals? Why not all animals? Why not all life? But despite being one writhing biomass in the first place, it's not tenable to give rights to, say, a corn stalk or a mosquito.
Hence the drive to name sentience as a reasonable delineating factor; but then you run into your speciation question again. What about those humans who are, effectively, nonsentient? Arguably many humans fall under this aegis - more if you consider it possible for things such as religion to be 'the opiate of the masses' and effectively take free will away. If a mentally challenged 'human' is less mentally aware or capable than a mental maverick... dog, do we give the dog rights and not the human?
In conclusion, I recommend that if you have an interest in the subject and have not done so already, read "The Selfish Gene". Until there is a good widespread understanding of the fuzzy nature of the 'species' category I don't think the philosophy will properly catch up.
I think that is the perfect example of the programming interface-like potential of our senses. Video games are another great example: where an 'user interface' is designed to transmit data that may not have much to do with the actual physicality of a thing. For that matter, all visual representations use the sense of sight to piggy-back additional data. Where this ought to go, though, is towards creating different paradigms that people can learn to operate their senses in; using their sense of touch, for instance, to get directional information, or to get proximity information (imagine a real-life device that gets hotter or colder the closer or further respectively you get from the target), or any number of other things. Learning different paradigms would be different at first, but we all learn to switch 'modes' in any number of different areas; balance while riding a bike versus while walking, using a Mac or a PC (wait... there are people who use both?), talking in one language or another. With the explosion of data that we are able to gather and process externally, this seems like a necessary step towards bridging the synthesis gap.
In X-Wing, the last level required you to assault the Death Star. The horde of badguys was nearly impossible to get by in time, but if you instead jumped to hyperspace, as though you were leaving the mission, and then cut out the hyperspace engines a split second after they engaged, you'd jump right past the huge wave of badguys and get to the Death Star to start your trench run before poor Yavin IV bought it.
How is this a bug? Any game can be hacked in this way, if you have an understanding of how it writes it's particular bits to storage. If anything, it shows entirely *expected* behavior on the part of the program.
As a programmer, and a former student in at least one other math-related discipline, it's clear to me that 4 and 4.0 are equal. But they are not equivalent.
Knowing 'Accuracy', 'Precision' and 'Proper Use Of Units' like the back of your hand will help you in any career.
Exactly!
Anyone should be able to mark any article they want as an article they put faith in, or otherwise believe to be accurate. What matters is whether or not those people stamping the article have credentials to be meaningful. A system of identifying credentials would be awesome (and one wonders if there isn't a startup opportunity in there...), and would require no fundamental change to the way things are done; only a layer on top that allows an additional level of evaluation by the end user.
It does not have to come down to money; that's a falsehood brought on, no doubt, by a culture obsessed with measuring all value in terms of money. So what if Wikipedia horns in on the territory where some people make their living? This is the nature of progress, and it's silly to decide a thing isn't valid simply because it's based on a new abstraction. Look at books; when the printing press first came out people thought books would cease to be meaningful, because the 'masses' had access to the ability to publish. Is this true? Or has the ability to print in fact exploded not only our ability to spread knowledge but to differentiate between the accurate and the inaccurate?
It is an oft-cited quotation; "The cure for bad information is more information."
Wikipedia is as accurate and as diverse as it is because it has stripped away the things that stop someone from posting. It should not change this policy - and for that reason I think Citizendium is like to fail. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to add something to the mix; to add more information to the mix, sourcing information - and to boot, I don't think that it would be hard to do.
Let people keep editing pages willy-nilly. That content generation is by far the hardest thing to accomplish for any project, period. Continue to allow peer reviewing - that is what keeps the majority of the content readable. But add in the ability for peer sign-off, and let it come in as many forms as can be reasonably included. Let us say you have no verifiable credentials other than the number of posts you have as determined by some order of magnitude. The ten post user is more reliable than the one post user, after all. The thousand post user even more so. Have posts that are rolled back count against them - perhaps greatly if it is a case of vandalism, but I suspect that will be hard to arbitrate.
That is one form of credential. Add others. People align themselves to institutions all the time, which give them credence to certain tasks. You have a BA in Physics? Set up a process by which their institution can confirm this, giving you an electronic stamp. Then, when you go to an article you can stamp it as "I think this is accurate, as a BA Physicist." It's not going to have as much weight as a PhD in Physics, and it's going to have no weight when talking about the political history of Sri Lanka, but it's a way of letting end users know how much weight they should give the article.
The real question is; what is a valid authentication of a user? Do universities want to set up a whole process by which they respond to these sorts of requests? How does Wikipedia expedite that? Some stopgap measures can be taken: a 'Claimed Credential' can be distinguished from a 'Confirmed Credential' or a 'Multiple-Times Confirmed Credential'. But overall, I don't think that the flow of information should be choked down on, or be forced to be reviewed. The only issue here worth looking at is how to add the information regarding the reliability of encyclopedic knowledge.
Also, I think that any of the above would work well with a 'bleeding edge' view and a 'last signed-off on' view. Remember too that regardless of how accurate an article is today, knowledge changes. There is nothing wrong with owning what we think now, and deciding later it is different.
Well, speaking as a chemist, I can tell you for sure that it would take a chemistry graduate student under a day to reverse engineer the trade secret formulation. That's the basic problem, no market barrier, no technological barrier after the original research and development. So the only remaining remedy is actual market protection (ie, patent). I will echo this; it is probably harder to reverse engineer software than it is to reverse engineer a drug.
But surely there is another design pattern that we could use for patents. On the one hand, we don't want people to have wasted time and energy creating something, only to not be properly rewarded for it (though this is a time-honored and physics-backed tradition of the universe; the first thing into the breach may be the bellweather, but it rarely survives). On the other hand, we don't want people to have an unnatural lock on a concept through the force of law; apart from the issues of enforcing that law, it does society little good to limit access to the most useful things.
Naturally, being in software development, my thoughts run to the idea of interfaces and implementations. For instance; while I think it's greedy for Disney to hold onto the patent for it's cartoon characters, it is easy for someone to create a new cartoon character that fulfills the same functions. And we can all agree that Disney should not have a lock on all cartoon characters - only their particular implementations. In the case cited in the article; go ahead and patent your implementation of a triply linked list, for all the good that it will do you.
That shift in evaluatory logic I think would be important and useful to correcting patents. Second to that - because some things, such as drugs, are always going to have the same implementation because it's dictated by physics - is the idea of having expiration times on patents that make sense. In particular, I think this evaluation should be made as part of the patent process, and should take into account how much time a 'reasonable company' would need to recoup their investment as a minimum measure and maximum measure of, given the present state of technology, how long it would take another 'reasonable company' to recreate the same effect, without prior knowledge of it's possibility or previous research done by the patenting company. While the 'reasonable company' would be as much a legal fiction as a 'rational man', I think it would set a good water mark for keeping patent lengths to a period of time that allows for the recouping of investment without allowing a company to profit off a created monopoly. It would also require some transparency on the parts of corporations regarding how much money they're spending on research, and how - because that would be needed for the evaluation of the patent. Overall, a win for society all around.
It is unlikely to happen, though, because it's a net loss for the individual companies already heavily invested in the current patent structure.
Just because someone is bright, or intelligent, or cunning, or well-read, or has a doctorate, or works on a supercollider, or knows the difference between an intron and an exon, or what-have-you does not mean they are not independent, able to cook, able to change a lightbulb, able to pick up girls, able to pick up guys, or work on an engine. As a point of fact - one that stands up to far more generalization than the ones you posit - each human has a different set of knowledge; rather as the result of being different humans.
Any sort of objective view of the whole of human 'knowledge' - necessarily an experience-based pool - is going to run across an innumerable number of conflicts. It is possible that there is objective truth, but no one individual, and indeed no non-astronomically large number of individuals will achieve it. So instead, there are things like encyclopedias, books and wikipedia.
No one made the claim wikipedia was Truth, whole and clear. But nothing like wikipedia has had such a large and wide array of people contributing to it (save maybe World War II), and it is very worthwhile in that it is - whether anyone likes it or not - a pool of human contributions, which is a great jumping off point for human knowledge. I have no objection to requiring claims of credentials being backed up - much like one has to cite claims made in articles. It allows for a layer of transparency that lets individuals judge whether there is a factual contradiction. But I hope that anonymous contribution remains there as well, because I do think the knowledge collection is more important than filtering out the noise, at present. Maybe in twenty years, when it's growth has slowed to a relative crawl we can rethink that.
But, you know, in the mean time lay off the smart people. Lots of smart people - really smart people - are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Look at Feynman.
I agree, and find this slashdot article rather irresponsible. It was posted by the author of the linked article, which was entirely unoriginal or insightful. Please bring to our attention when someone has done an article on the comparative accuracy between various encyclopedic methods - until then I think we're all aware that wikipedia is not perfect, just very likely more perfect than anything else yet.
It doesn't seem to me like the 'one in a thousand' users is the actual problem. That's probably just a matter of scaling the computation thrown at the problem. On the other hand, not having false positives seems like it would be particularly tricky given that while you might be able to easily "print" someone and identify their pattern for a given point in time, people are not static. The way I use the web during the week is particularly different than on the weekends, or even at night. The way I use the web when I'm away from home differs yet still. And the way I use the web now is vastly different than how I used it ten years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the fact it is difficult to say how things would have been different, it's possible they have an intrinsic understanding of these differences. Putting that aside, I can entirely see person A, who knows these things, does better than person B, who does not. Person A is going to make fewer mistakes, is going to more quickly glom onto problems based on a misunderstanding of the topic, and that topic is quite prevalent in life. Prevalent enough that I think it is fair to say the aggregate of people who understand the principle are doing better than the aggregate who do not.
Equality is *an* equivalence relation, not *all* equivalence relations. To wit: There are an equal number of oranges in this basket as there are apples in that basket. The basket of oranges is not equivalent to the basket of apples. The color value of this small orange is equal to the color value of that large orange. These oranges are not equivalent.
A brainless (anencephalic, technically) human baby is genetically human 'Genetically human'? What I think people don't really understand about evolution is that speciation is an indiscrete process. Each organism is essentially it's own species; to define a species is to create an arbitrary boundary around a group of individuals that are more similar to each other than they are to other individuals. But within that group there will be divisions and subdivisions that will, in time, grow to be wholly separate groups. So your basic assumption that something either is or isn't human won't hold up in the long term. We still cling to the idea, but it's basically outmoded. This is an extremely hairy issue; our society is based around the idea that the present members and their offspring are part of it, and we gear the society towards their needs. When we start inducting new members, those that have never been part of society, suddenly we have to consider when we throw members out, or what qualifies as a potential member. If chimps, why not monkeys? If monkeys, why not all mammals? Why not all animals? Why not all life? But despite being one writhing biomass in the first place, it's not tenable to give rights to, say, a corn stalk or a mosquito. Hence the drive to name sentience as a reasonable delineating factor; but then you run into your speciation question again. What about those humans who are, effectively, nonsentient? Arguably many humans fall under this aegis - more if you consider it possible for things such as religion to be 'the opiate of the masses' and effectively take free will away. If a mentally challenged 'human' is less mentally aware or capable than a mental maverick... dog, do we give the dog rights and not the human? In conclusion, I recommend that if you have an interest in the subject and have not done so already, read "The Selfish Gene". Until there is a good widespread understanding of the fuzzy nature of the 'species' category I don't think the philosophy will properly catch up.
I think that is the perfect example of the programming interface-like potential of our senses. Video games are another great example: where an 'user interface' is designed to transmit data that may not have much to do with the actual physicality of a thing. For that matter, all visual representations use the sense of sight to piggy-back additional data. Where this ought to go, though, is towards creating different paradigms that people can learn to operate their senses in; using their sense of touch, for instance, to get directional information, or to get proximity information (imagine a real-life device that gets hotter or colder the closer or further respectively you get from the target), or any number of other things. Learning different paradigms would be different at first, but we all learn to switch 'modes' in any number of different areas; balance while riding a bike versus while walking, using a Mac or a PC (wait... there are people who use both?), talking in one language or another. With the explosion of data that we are able to gather and process externally, this seems like a necessary step towards bridging the synthesis gap.
Isn't the Falcon a light Correlian Transport or somesuch? I swear I played X-Wing at some point in my life... [Ego]out "What's an aluminum falcon!?"
In X-Wing, the last level required you to assault the Death Star. The horde of badguys was nearly impossible to get by in time, but if you instead jumped to hyperspace, as though you were leaving the mission, and then cut out the hyperspace engines a split second after they engaged, you'd jump right past the huge wave of badguys and get to the Death Star to start your trench run before poor Yavin IV bought it.
How is this a bug? Any game can be hacked in this way, if you have an understanding of how it writes it's particular bits to storage. If anything, it shows entirely *expected* behavior on the part of the program.
As a programmer, and a former student in at least one other math-related discipline, it's clear to me that 4 and 4.0 are equal. But they are not equivalent. Knowing 'Accuracy', 'Precision' and 'Proper Use Of Units' like the back of your hand will help you in any career.
Exactly! Anyone should be able to mark any article they want as an article they put faith in, or otherwise believe to be accurate. What matters is whether or not those people stamping the article have credentials to be meaningful. A system of identifying credentials would be awesome (and one wonders if there isn't a startup opportunity in there...), and would require no fundamental change to the way things are done; only a layer on top that allows an additional level of evaluation by the end user.
It does not have to come down to money; that's a falsehood brought on, no doubt, by a culture obsessed with measuring all value in terms of money. So what if Wikipedia horns in on the territory where some people make their living? This is the nature of progress, and it's silly to decide a thing isn't valid simply because it's based on a new abstraction. Look at books; when the printing press first came out people thought books would cease to be meaningful, because the 'masses' had access to the ability to publish. Is this true? Or has the ability to print in fact exploded not only our ability to spread knowledge but to differentiate between the accurate and the inaccurate?
It is an oft-cited quotation; "The cure for bad information is more information." Wikipedia is as accurate and as diverse as it is because it has stripped away the things that stop someone from posting. It should not change this policy - and for that reason I think Citizendium is like to fail. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to add something to the mix; to add more information to the mix, sourcing information - and to boot, I don't think that it would be hard to do. Let people keep editing pages willy-nilly. That content generation is by far the hardest thing to accomplish for any project, period. Continue to allow peer reviewing - that is what keeps the majority of the content readable. But add in the ability for peer sign-off, and let it come in as many forms as can be reasonably included. Let us say you have no verifiable credentials other than the number of posts you have as determined by some order of magnitude. The ten post user is more reliable than the one post user, after all. The thousand post user even more so. Have posts that are rolled back count against them - perhaps greatly if it is a case of vandalism, but I suspect that will be hard to arbitrate. That is one form of credential. Add others. People align themselves to institutions all the time, which give them credence to certain tasks. You have a BA in Physics? Set up a process by which their institution can confirm this, giving you an electronic stamp. Then, when you go to an article you can stamp it as "I think this is accurate, as a BA Physicist." It's not going to have as much weight as a PhD in Physics, and it's going to have no weight when talking about the political history of Sri Lanka, but it's a way of letting end users know how much weight they should give the article. The real question is; what is a valid authentication of a user? Do universities want to set up a whole process by which they respond to these sorts of requests? How does Wikipedia expedite that? Some stopgap measures can be taken: a 'Claimed Credential' can be distinguished from a 'Confirmed Credential' or a 'Multiple-Times Confirmed Credential'. But overall, I don't think that the flow of information should be choked down on, or be forced to be reviewed. The only issue here worth looking at is how to add the information regarding the reliability of encyclopedic knowledge. Also, I think that any of the above would work well with a 'bleeding edge' view and a 'last signed-off on' view. Remember too that regardless of how accurate an article is today, knowledge changes. There is nothing wrong with owning what we think now, and deciding later it is different.
Even a nerd ought to be able to look up ways to improve themselves.
Just because someone is bright, or intelligent, or cunning, or well-read, or has a doctorate, or works on a supercollider, or knows the difference between an intron and an exon, or what-have-you does not mean they are not independent, able to cook, able to change a lightbulb, able to pick up girls, able to pick up guys, or work on an engine. As a point of fact - one that stands up to far more generalization than the ones you posit - each human has a different set of knowledge; rather as the result of being different humans.
Any sort of objective view of the whole of human 'knowledge' - necessarily an experience-based pool - is going to run across an innumerable number of conflicts. It is possible that there is objective truth, but no one individual, and indeed no non-astronomically large number of individuals will achieve it. So instead, there are things like encyclopedias, books and wikipedia.
No one made the claim wikipedia was Truth, whole and clear. But nothing like wikipedia has had such a large and wide array of people contributing to it (save maybe World War II), and it is very worthwhile in that it is - whether anyone likes it or not - a pool of human contributions, which is a great jumping off point for human knowledge. I have no objection to requiring claims of credentials being backed up - much like one has to cite claims made in articles. It allows for a layer of transparency that lets individuals judge whether there is a factual contradiction. But I hope that anonymous contribution remains there as well, because I do think the knowledge collection is more important than filtering out the noise, at present. Maybe in twenty years, when it's growth has slowed to a relative crawl we can rethink that.
But, you know, in the mean time lay off the smart people. Lots of smart people - really smart people - are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Look at Feynman.
I agree, and find this slashdot article rather irresponsible. It was posted by the author of the linked article, which was entirely unoriginal or insightful. Please bring to our attention when someone has done an article on the comparative accuracy between various encyclopedic methods - until then I think we're all aware that wikipedia is not perfect, just very likely more perfect than anything else yet.
It doesn't seem to me like the 'one in a thousand' users is the actual problem. That's probably just a matter of scaling the computation thrown at the problem. On the other hand, not having false positives seems like it would be particularly tricky given that while you might be able to easily "print" someone and identify their pattern for a given point in time, people are not static. The way I use the web during the week is particularly different than on the weekends, or even at night. The way I use the web when I'm away from home differs yet still. And the way I use the web now is vastly different than how I used it ten years ago.