Well, I'm moving to an air gapped computer, hoping this way of doing it won't be too complex, and might keep things kosher:
https://medium.com/@russellirv...
Correlation isn't causation, and what we now know about our biological clock makes the interpretation stated in the article ridiculous. Similar genetic discoveries often involve dopamine - anything that is more likely to key you to stay up, abuse artificial light and blow your diurnal hormone cycle. But in a generation or two we'll be smart enough to turn out the lights roughly when the sun goes down, experience much better health, and it will turn out that nobody was really a night owl (under even semi-natural conditions) after all. This determinative view of genetics belongs back in nineteen fifties. Genetics are the substrate upon which the environment acts.
Go is a game played on a board with 20 x 20 = 400 intersections. That's where the pieces are placed, not in the center of the 361squares. I suppose I now know why most of my software is so crappy - nobody checks their assumptions. (There were 90 comments already when I wrote this!) Even when the evidence is staring them in the face, visible in every photo of a Go game, ever. What's gonna happen next, Republicans exhibiting climate denial or something crazy like that?
I was in the room long ago hearing Buckminster Fuller advocate this idea. My father, an electrical engineer who designed telecommunication networks for a power company, laughed it off - he said it couldn't work because transmission was too inefficient. He may not have considered the direct current wrinkle. In any case, superconductors would change that, and there are short superconducting transmission cables in use, I believe.
Lots of rock, yes, for shielding and more - but shot up from the lunar surface to the L1 gravitational saddle point with electromagnetic cannons. like rolling a marble up a smooth mountain so it just nicely comes to rest at the top. (How best to balance the station, etc, there is a whole other discussion.) Not using current rail gun designs, though, because those wear out way too quickly. Essentially we need to be able to greatly accelerate a bucket, and then slow it while letting the payload sail away. The lunar poles might be a good location for such guns for a few reasons, including more reliable sunlight for power and the fact that the gun could be horizontal and still aim at at the L1 point.
True, a tether (moonthread) elevator could be used coming up from the lunar surface with a counterweight nearer earth. We doubtless have materials strong enough. But very complex Coriolis effects from various climbing payloads and descending containers likely make this impractical for the time being.
Thanks for filling the previous poster in, but that rather highlights a real problem:
Because this is where Windows really shines - messages that don't give you a hint about how to proceed, where to find more information, which program even posted the message or wants permission, or posting notices underneath windows, unseen.
And trying for the third time to see what happens in the editor now:
Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Having watched inventions wander away from me and become private (first to the patent office with a whole bunch of cash now wins thanks to changes to U.S. law) I know how vital defensive publication is. Now I see that the OIN and linuxdefenders.org related defensive publication service defensivepublications.org has been discontinued. The website still exists, but won't take further submissions if you try to submit them. Without being able to keep open inventions open, we're in a heap of trouble. I'd like to see easy, reliable, court-provable defensive publication come first. I am suppressing several inventions right now that I believe would greatly benefit open source (etc) because such a service doesn't exist; as I wait until it does exist again. That's all I can do on my budget right now.
Everybody's talking about communication, but that's drinking the Kool-Aid, and being a good codependent.
This is the opposite of a communications problem. What the graph shows is disinvestment - it shows a clear policy that's been extremely well communicated right down to the coders. The message is: "it's working well enough, let's stop spending so much money (programmer time) and get something else done, that's now more vital." Without more context, we can't in fact rule out the possibility that this is the best business decision - although my experience is that disinvestment is frequently very premature. Investment can't be infinite, it can't keep expanding just because bug reports continue to come in at nearly the same rates (but, on average, about ever more specific and less economically damaging issues.)
I suspect (more than suspect, I've painfully experienced) that managers are often beyond ignorant about risk, but the truth is that most of their "ignorance" is pretended. Your communication skills are fine, and so are theirs. Many managers will disinvest when code is still quite dangerous because the economic rewards to them personally are large and immediate for doing so. They will build in or lock in technical and risk debt (and legal jeopardy for that matter) that can bring their whole company down to bankruptcy in full knowledge of those risks; as long as they can be reasonably sure that they will have moved on to a still better job by that time, with some bonuses tucked away that were fattened by their cheating the long-term interest of the corporation. Which they don't own. (See the Great Subprime Robbery of 2007/8.) That's corruption, of a kind very common in a "manager's economy." Maybe more common than not. It's not poor communication, and the tech field isn't immune, it attracts these managers because it's where the money is.
The reason that VCs have learned painfully to keep founders around is that founders aren't susceptible to this particular form of corruption. Founders have their payoff, now the only thing that really matters to them is how the long-term results reflect on their image. Mercenary managers are presented with very different, more perverse incentives and respond to them just as you would expect.
And surely that's the point - the supposed policy that you should use the talk pages to communicate, protest, etc is something never mentioned to those just trying to add something to Wikipedia. Why not? Precisely because it would leave traces. Nor do the editors themselves use the talk pages and then refer their interlocuters to those notes. If the real culture of Wikipedia ACTUALLY wanted the talk pages used, it would be easy to use them, use would be transparent; there would be a form to ease that, say; but in fact it's perhaps the most arcane part of Wikipedia - giving the clear signal that if you don't really, really know what you're doing you should stay away from talk pages. That way of presenting things is no accident, not after decades! The foxes are very securely in control of the henhouse.
De jure doesn't matter when de facto actions are highly effective (in this case at keeping most interactions off the record) and never reversed or punished.
No doubt Mr. Wales meant well when he called for quality just before the great decline; but he didn't distinguish between narcissism: which is to say, not being caught out, and accuracy - which would have to include taking some chances in order to reflect the best and newest information. So incompleteness (in order to ensure verifiability according to some cobbled-together criteria) actually became a desirable means for many editors, and a goal for some, judging by results.
So his speech initiated a self-reinforcing, ever-tightening conservative regime in which - as under Stalin - the only important thing was never to allow a change that might be shown wrong someday; just stick with the previous coffee-table consensus and never mind the facts. Never try for completeness, or unpopular fact.
This process has continued to feed on itself, like an infinite loop or the French Revolution, as the least conservative and anal-retentive editors amongst the remaining bunch get chucked each year. Left to itself, it can only get worse.
Pernicious cultures in any group or business are notoriously difficult to change. So difficult that it's very foolish to try. As a practical matter, you have to clean house entirely and start again. In this case, bar anyone who's been active in Wikipedia during the last five years from anything except bare contributions for the next ten years; then let them back in very gradually, if at all. So much has been lost that there's little downside at this point.
PS - I'm reminded of Dyson's analysis of bomber formation tightness in WWII.
You can look them up if you care to, just a couple of examples, out of many, many I know about personally:
Under Celiac disease, rejection of an accurate prevalence figure because they source "wasn't sufficiently reliable" even though no other figure was being given by the article at the time. The unreliable source? The New York Times.
Under the incident that led to the Movie Black Hawk Down, back when the book that was the source for the movie was the only detailed public account available: any fact in the book, but not in the movie, was deleted. Why? All the editors had seen the movie, none of them had apparently read the book. This re Bin Laden's involvement in shipping arms (RPGs) in, war crimes by insurgents (in the movie but not unmistakeable), and more.
Then look at all the locks - convenient for editors, but the very acme of ossification of error.
I couldn't possibly count my contributions to Wikipedia; not least because they happened a long time ago now. It's been many years since I've attempted to contribute, except the odd time when it's been deleted anyway for absurd reasons; but I'm very frequently tempted since there's a ton left to do, and plenty of new research that will take a generation to find its way into the now uber-reactionary encyclopedia, sadly. It's just insane now, corporate narcissism run amok - so long as they're never embarrassed, ever, they're happy to reflect unmoored consensus ignorance and ignore any amount of empirical research. If that means not reflecting any changes in human knowledge, or very few, well, they're quite happy with that - that is their definition of "quality" - never being caught on except when they're accurately reflecting common prejudice.
2016: Celebrating a decade of utter mismanagement of Wikipedia! May it, the institution not the information it's abusing, die a thousand deaths. Or at least one, soon.
I knew a man like this - a boss of mine at a summer job - who was oblivious to safety concerns whether that meant ancient gas stoves he cavalierly over-rode the safety valves on, canoes, or anything else (he was an avid tinkerer and jerry-rigger, but in his case not truly inventive.) He was more than a bit of a bully in everything, and felt certain he could bully nature, too. I left that summer job glad to still have my skin (after one very close call in one of his boats.) Just a couple years later I read that he had managed to kill both himself and his grown daughter on a ski slope, going where he was clearly warned he shouldn't go (but he knew better.) Believe me, when I read that news story, I didn't say "Gosh, that was a freak accident."
Nature bullied back, in the end.
As for myself, my inventions and clever thoughts have only killed one person, that I know of. (It was years before - looking back - I realized what had caused his death: the incident above happened in between.) One can't always avoid unintended consequences, but one can have more forethought than Midgley, I or my late boss did! Please do. Software kills, too, in many ways - the recent change to Facebook's notification algorithm broke many medical support groups on FB, making it much harder for people to get help quickly or reliably, and hasn't been fixed.
Risk homeostasis - you make much better brakes, and people begin to drive faster, take more chances in traffic and have nearly as many accidents as before. Put in better QA, and developers slack off their own efforts until the number of bugs that slips through is about the same as before. If QA doesn't respond to that, then they've become codependents, only helping programmers to be more slovenly and still keep their apparent productivity up, and keep their jobs.
But there are a bizillion better ways to deal with that problem than "Let's take out the brakes, or go back to really bad brakes." One of those ways is to, make risk severe but intermittent. In which case there's still QA - but it's NOT a safety net because at least 1/3 of the time (or 2/3 of the time) it isn't there to catch your particular errors, they are reviewing someone else's code quite intensely; and you aren't told when that is. (Even some of the time when they are reviewing your code, you aren't told, their reports to you are delayed, so that you can't figure out when they're watching for the moment and slack off.) Even the period they watch any particular coding team is randomly selected. QA still catches a lot of problems, saves a lot of money and embarrassment - but programmers can't relax or rely on QA to wipe their noses like a good codependent, so they remain vigilant.
Another way is to make the penalty for disappointing QA as visible and embarrassing as crashing the whole ball of wax. But highly visible rewards for safe coding are another.
It's very common in business environments for cooperation to happen at lower levels that frustrates the most important goals of top management. That apparently happened at Yahoo, and the response was to remove half of the cooperating parties permanently. The problem was real; but there are far smarter ways to deal with it.
I'm pretty sure Neal knows that individual engineers actually spend a little time blue-skying, mostly on their own. After all, he cites the fact that engineers have brought forward possible alternatives. But other engineers cheerfully recommend against investing the large sums necessary to prove the tech and make it an economic competitor. He is saying more about investment, and funding. But re Engineering culture, I had a father who was an engineer, and while he was much more open minded than most of his ilk, he was nonetheless astonishingly closed minded and very quick to tell me that, say, flat display screens were an impossible tech that would never exist, no matter how long the universe lasted, 'cause you couldn't flatten a cathode ray tube. People self-select themselves for engineering school because they have a very deep psychological need for certainty, not because they love career-changing surprises.
And bees can't fly. Until you look at the problem another way. For example, ablative materials, or a two stage shot to reduce initial atmospheric resistance, etc, etc, etc. Who needs to be told that the need for a search for new tech that isn't obvious, can't be contradicted by saying that there is no blindingly obvious path to that tech right now? Boring a hole in a magnetron blew apart the equation that "proved" that producing microwave radar was forever impossible (see cavity magnetron) - but first you have to imagine that there is something your present equations haven't imagined or encompassed. What we have here is a failure of the imagination...
I like this comment because extreme wealth disparities are in fact a huge cause of lock in. Maybe, as some argue, wealth disparities don't affect happiness since that is created by relative differences in wealth, not absolute. But the already very rich can only lose by game changing innovation, so the sharply increasing disparity in the U.S. does heavily reinforce lock-in.
Eventually, such wealth concentration becomes self-referential:
"nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982. Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash."
"One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden."
His argument does not assume this. It may assume that the wholesale replacement of fundamental technology in one field doesn't frequently happen from a whole different field, or that that process happens but is slowing. And he's no doubt right on both those counts. Microprocessors have made rockets a bit cheaper and lighter, but they haven't replaced rocket technology in some bizarre way.
However your argument assumes that there's no lock-in in other tech like microprocessors! I just have to giggle at that assumption. Silicon just by itself is a massive and frequently discussed instance of lock in.
So you repeat his argument, with your own extremely similar example; and then say that big science and big projects cure all. And, yes, sometimes they help a bit by creating novel circumstances that allow the development of say, the safety helmet (Golden Gate Bridge.) Not to mention Tang. But usually big projects follow new technological breakthroughs and novel engineering designs, they don't create them. The rocket tech developed in and after WWII caused the Apollo project, not the other way 'round.
Right now, a huge breakthrough in interplanetary propulsion, plasma propulsion, is being funded, a bit, by NASA. To it's credit: but way too little funding given the extraordinary advance that this new tech represents, and the huge projects it would allow us to perform - say by returning a very rich asteroid to earth orbit. Only if we dump far more money into the lock-in breaking research now can we have the big projects later.
A great article by Neal Stephenson, that I was lucky enough to stumble upon yesterday, after months of thinking over related difficulties in science, and particularly physics (in part, as Lee Smolin has written about.) I'm going to say that Jane Jacobs' argument in "Dark Age Ahead" subsumes Neal's, although Mr. Stephenson adds a great deal. She argued that what was exploratory science has now been replaced by a lot of people who look the same, since they still wear lab coats a lot[ but who are just spouting cant, merely copying previous “scientific” opinion, or just making it up on the spot; and are dreadfully reluctant to challenge whatever has previously been held to be “obviously true” - whether there was ever any evidence offered in support of that opinion or not. In other words, an academic priesthood that has a stunning degree of priestly inertia – the opposite of what science is supposed to be.
Lee Smolin argues much the same of physics in “The Trouble with Physics”, and I'd like to argue that the field of medicine is still worse for priestly nonsense. (I ask you, in what other field would the advocacy of something like “evidence-based medicine” be novel, and revolutionary?)
Jacob's argument easily extends to saying that only very large technological changes force the “science” priesthood to adapt and change occasionally, by revealing large new realms of incontrovertible evidence. But, ouch, now Neal Stephenson, using rockets as an example, argues that technology may be ossifying more than we suspect, too, making the logjam complete.
The historical extension of this argument is that progress slowly moves around the globe because every civilization can advance only so far until it lapses into immovable complacency headed by economic or academic special interests who are doing just fine as things are, thanks. Then the torch passes to another civilization; for example, China to India to Arabia to Europe, over the last few millenia. Yet today, globalization ties us together so closely that there is now nowhere left for that torch to go. Globalization means globalized lock-in, too.
In other words, to return to Neal's example: “Why did the Chinese invest in developing a rocket capability rather than try to skip ahead to a better technology, since they had no infrastructure or educational investment in the old tech? Why were they locked in?” Arguably, however, developing economies are often even more locked in to obsolete technologies, for which no alternative has yet emerged. The gains in capacity by copying are so great, for so little investment (starting buying rocket tech at a discount from Russia) and with such great political benefits, that the outcome is all too predictable, both in technology, education and science.
I wish there were some way to convince the Chinese that no society is rich until it can afford to fund research efforts that fail frequently, publicly, and thoroughly. Then again, I wish I could convince us! Here in the U.S., centrally planned science funding that is ultimately supervised by an easily embarrassed Congress has everything to do with lock in, since innovation at the margins is the only reliable way of obtaining research funds, period, end of sentence, end of marked innovation.
Great, now transfer the tech to small birds, add a tiny bit of gelegnite, and send your new weapon at the throat of whatever head of state you wish. No more slow news days! I can't wait 'till the home kit comes out...
Isn't it great the govt publicizes new tech like this so widely?
There's already one Wikipedia based search engine up or proposed http://wikiseek.com/ - obviously they aren't going to honor the no-follow rule or they're out of business. The all-no-follow move will only make this new engine more popular. It might even put it over the top, fast.
Wikipedia is so big and so popular (pagerank 8, relevant to almost every query) that even the fact that some people will learn of links there, making its links indirectly valuable, is more than enough to keep the spammers happy. All-No-Follow will not significantly reduce spam there, or not for long. Sorry. Better, would be for Wikipedia to use No-Follow only for all new links that haven't been checked by a more trusted user/editor. I ain't saying perfect, just better. Even better, let trusted sites like Wikipedia tag links as spam (after commenting them to make them invisible), so that Google can then ruthlessly ignore similar links wherever they appear. That might actually scare spammers away, since they would know Wikipedia and other trusted sites could hit back - hard.
Think about it - if the simple All-No-Follow worked and Wikipedia became much freer of spam links than the rest of the web, then Wikipedia would by the same token become simply irresistible as a source of reliable information to competitive or up-and-coming Search Engines - which as they gain customers due to their higher quality of search results, again makes Wikipedia a premier place to spam, with or without "no-follow" links. Unless we dump capitalism entirely, uniformly using No-Follow can't work for Wikipedia the way it might for smaller sites. A modest reduction is the very most Wikipedia can hope for, and the downside to All-No-Follow is that their present massive positive contribution to my searches and yours is lost forever. Not good!
In this way - "If it works, it doesn't" - the all-no-follow policy reminds me of one of the most popular, and hilarious invention submissions to the USPO before computers existed - the automatic car headlight dimmer. Everyone and his dog had the brilliant idea that a photocell detecting an oncoming car's headlights could automatically dim your headlights. But now... imagine two cars with this feature approaching each other! Strobe city! The re-invention of the electric doorbell! Funny, and a little ironic perhaps, since with computers we can do this much now, given that spam isn't a problem with headlights... yet. (I'm just waiting for the first headlight virus.) It seems that some things seem like a great idea until you've thought about it a little more...
Re other replies (and they're good ones):
As for Hardin, and the commons, this sort of applies, even though most medieval grazers were not grievously abusive in those days. The problem was everybody, not a few freeloaders. Still it's well worth mentioning, mostly cause it's cool and important, even if it doesn't fit quite exactly. Perhaps generations from now our descendants won't bother talking about the "Tragedy of the Commons" anymore, they'll just refer to "The Tragedy of the Web!"
The take-away lesson is that this is a struggle - or as an essay on Occam's Razor at http://logictutorial.com/ says, a "contested system." So things will never be simple, and no one rule or method will remain sovereign. That having been said, however:
Metatags are still used by the big search engines - only now more for priority of terms than mere mention, and in effect, as negative information. For example, if you don't think, say, "heatstoke" is among the most relevant terms on your page, believe me, Google is going to take your word for that.
As for Google's recursive insight (or re-application of old algorithms) it won't die, but it is certainly showing it's age. The new, more active and chatty kid on the block is taking over; but since it won't benefit the world (or my future searches) to discuss what Yahoo and Google are doing now, I won't elaborate. "First do no harm."
Indeed, one must suppose that the frequency of "accidental" discoveries varies inversely with just how conceptually locked-in funding agencies are. To which, the contemporary answer is "extremely."
Parallel to this are suppresed discoveries - I've been given papers never published by researchers famous to their fields that were true, exciting and which they felt "couldn't publish."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm moving to an air gapped computer, hoping this way of doing it won't be too complex, and might keep things kosher: https://medium.com/@russellirv...
Oy veh. The owner can modify the terms - see the specific case law cited by the article.
Correlation isn't causation, and what we now know about our biological clock makes the interpretation stated in the article ridiculous. Similar genetic discoveries often involve dopamine - anything that is more likely to key you to stay up, abuse artificial light and blow your diurnal hormone cycle. But in a generation or two we'll be smart enough to turn out the lights roughly when the sun goes down, experience much better health, and it will turn out that nobody was really a night owl (under even semi-natural conditions) after all. This determinative view of genetics belongs back in nineteen fifties. Genetics are the substrate upon which the environment acts.
Go is a game played on a board with 20 x 20 = 400 intersections. That's where the pieces are placed, not in the center of the 361squares. I suppose I now know why most of my software is so crappy - nobody checks their assumptions. (There were 90 comments already when I wrote this!) Even when the evidence is staring them in the face, visible in every photo of a Go game, ever. What's gonna happen next, Republicans exhibiting climate denial or something crazy like that?
I was in the room long ago hearing Buckminster Fuller advocate this idea. My father, an electrical engineer who designed telecommunication networks for a power company, laughed it off - he said it couldn't work because transmission was too inefficient. He may not have considered the direct current wrinkle. In any case, superconductors would change that, and there are short superconducting transmission cables in use, I believe.
Lots of rock, yes, for shielding and more - but shot up from the lunar surface to the L1 gravitational saddle point with electromagnetic cannons. like rolling a marble up a smooth mountain so it just nicely comes to rest at the top. (How best to balance the station, etc, there is a whole other discussion.) Not using current rail gun designs, though, because those wear out way too quickly. Essentially we need to be able to greatly accelerate a bucket, and then slow it while letting the payload sail away. The lunar poles might be a good location for such guns for a few reasons, including more reliable sunlight for power and the fact that the gun could be horizontal and still aim at at the L1 point. True, a tether (moonthread) elevator could be used coming up from the lunar surface with a counterweight nearer earth. We doubtless have materials strong enough. But very complex Coriolis effects from various climbing payloads and descending containers likely make this impractical for the time being.
Thanks for filling the previous poster in, but that rather highlights a real problem: Because this is where Windows really shines - messages that don't give you a hint about how to proceed, where to find more information, which program even posted the message or wants permission, or posting notices underneath windows, unseen.
And trying for the third time to see what happens in the editor now: Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (my longer reply was swallowed.)
Having watched inventions wander away from me and become private (first to the patent office with a whole bunch of cash now wins thanks to changes to U.S. law) I know how vital defensive publication is. Now I see that the OIN and linuxdefenders.org related defensive publication service defensivepublications.org has been discontinued. The website still exists, but won't take further submissions if you try to submit them. Without being able to keep open inventions open, we're in a heap of trouble. I'd like to see easy, reliable, court-provable defensive publication come first. I am suppressing several inventions right now that I believe would greatly benefit open source (etc) because such a service doesn't exist; as I wait until it does exist again. That's all I can do on my budget right now.
Everybody's talking about communication, but that's drinking the Kool-Aid, and being a good codependent.
This is the opposite of a communications problem. What the graph shows is disinvestment - it shows a clear policy that's been extremely well communicated right down to the coders. The message is: "it's working well enough, let's stop spending so much money (programmer time) and get something else done, that's now more vital." Without more context, we can't in fact rule out the possibility that this is the best business decision - although my experience is that disinvestment is frequently very premature. Investment can't be infinite, it can't keep expanding just because bug reports continue to come in at nearly the same rates (but, on average, about ever more specific and less economically damaging issues.)
I suspect (more than suspect, I've painfully experienced) that managers are often beyond ignorant about risk, but the truth is that most of their "ignorance" is pretended. Your communication skills are fine, and so are theirs. Many managers will disinvest when code is still quite dangerous because the economic rewards to them personally are large and immediate for doing so. They will build in or lock in technical and risk debt (and legal jeopardy for that matter) that can bring their whole company down to bankruptcy in full knowledge of those risks; as long as they can be reasonably sure that they will have moved on to a still better job by that time, with some bonuses tucked away that were fattened by their cheating the long-term interest of the corporation. Which they don't own. (See the Great Subprime Robbery of 2007/8.) That's corruption, of a kind very common in a "manager's economy." Maybe more common than not. It's not poor communication, and the tech field isn't immune, it attracts these managers because it's where the money is.
The reason that VCs have learned painfully to keep founders around is that founders aren't susceptible to this particular form of corruption. Founders have their payoff, now the only thing that really matters to them is how the long-term results reflect on their image. Mercenary managers are presented with very different, more perverse incentives and respond to them just as you would expect.
And surely that's the point - the supposed policy that you should use the talk pages to communicate, protest, etc is something never mentioned to those just trying to add something to Wikipedia. Why not? Precisely because it would leave traces. Nor do the editors themselves use the talk pages and then refer their interlocuters to those notes. If the real culture of Wikipedia ACTUALLY wanted the talk pages used, it would be easy to use them, use would be transparent; there would be a form to ease that, say; but in fact it's perhaps the most arcane part of Wikipedia - giving the clear signal that if you don't really, really know what you're doing you should stay away from talk pages. That way of presenting things is no accident, not after decades! The foxes are very securely in control of the henhouse.
De jure doesn't matter when de facto actions are highly effective (in this case at keeping most interactions off the record) and never reversed or punished.
No doubt Mr. Wales meant well when he called for quality just before the great decline; but he didn't distinguish between narcissism: which is to say, not being caught out, and accuracy - which would have to include taking some chances in order to reflect the best and newest information. So incompleteness (in order to ensure verifiability according to some cobbled-together criteria) actually became a desirable means for many editors, and a goal for some, judging by results.
So his speech initiated a self-reinforcing, ever-tightening conservative regime in which - as under Stalin - the only important thing was never to allow a change that might be shown wrong someday; just stick with the previous coffee-table consensus and never mind the facts. Never try for completeness, or unpopular fact.
This process has continued to feed on itself, like an infinite loop or the French Revolution, as the least conservative and anal-retentive editors amongst the remaining bunch get chucked each year. Left to itself, it can only get worse.
Pernicious cultures in any group or business are notoriously difficult to change. So difficult that it's very foolish to try. As a practical matter, you have to clean house entirely and start again. In this case, bar anyone who's been active in Wikipedia during the last five years from anything except bare contributions for the next ten years; then let them back in very gradually, if at all. So much has been lost that there's little downside at this point.
PS - I'm reminded of Dyson's analysis of bomber formation tightness in WWII.
You can look them up if you care to, just a couple of examples, out of many, many I know about personally:
Under Celiac disease, rejection of an accurate prevalence figure because they source "wasn't sufficiently reliable" even though no other figure was being given by the article at the time. The unreliable source? The New York Times.
Under the incident that led to the Movie Black Hawk Down, back when the book that was the source for the movie was the only detailed public account available: any fact in the book, but not in the movie, was deleted. Why? All the editors had seen the movie, none of them had apparently read the book. This re Bin Laden's involvement in shipping arms (RPGs) in, war crimes by insurgents (in the movie but not unmistakeable), and more.
Then look at all the locks - convenient for editors, but the very acme of ossification of error.
I couldn't possibly count my contributions to Wikipedia; not least because they happened a long time ago now. It's been many years since I've attempted to contribute, except the odd time when it's been deleted anyway for absurd reasons; but I'm very frequently tempted since there's a ton left to do, and plenty of new research that will take a generation to find its way into the now uber-reactionary encyclopedia, sadly. It's just insane now, corporate narcissism run amok - so long as they're never embarrassed, ever, they're happy to reflect unmoored consensus ignorance and ignore any amount of empirical research. If that means not reflecting any changes in human knowledge, or very few, well, they're quite happy with that - that is their definition of "quality" - never being caught on except when they're accurately reflecting common prejudice.
2016: Celebrating a decade of utter mismanagement of Wikipedia! May it, the institution not the information it's abusing, die a thousand deaths. Or at least one, soon.
I knew a man like this - a boss of mine at a summer job - who was oblivious to safety concerns whether that meant ancient gas stoves he cavalierly over-rode the safety valves on, canoes, or anything else (he was an avid tinkerer and jerry-rigger, but in his case not truly inventive.) He was more than a bit of a bully in everything, and felt certain he could bully nature, too. I left that summer job glad to still have my skin (after one very close call in one of his boats.) Just a couple years later I read that he had managed to kill both himself and his grown daughter on a ski slope, going where he was clearly warned he shouldn't go (but he knew better.) Believe me, when I read that news story, I didn't say "Gosh, that was a freak accident."
Nature bullied back, in the end.
As for myself, my inventions and clever thoughts have only killed one person, that I know of. (It was years before - looking back - I realized what had caused his death: the incident above happened in between.) One can't always avoid unintended consequences, but one can have more forethought than Midgley, I or my late boss did! Please do. Software kills, too, in many ways - the recent change to Facebook's notification algorithm broke many medical support groups on FB, making it much harder for people to get help quickly or reliably, and hasn't been fixed.
Risk homeostasis - you make much better brakes, and people begin to drive faster, take more chances in traffic and have nearly as many accidents as before. Put in better QA, and developers slack off their own efforts until the number of bugs that slips through is about the same as before. If QA doesn't respond to that, then they've become codependents, only helping programmers to be more slovenly and still keep their apparent productivity up, and keep their jobs.
But there are a bizillion better ways to deal with that problem than "Let's take out the brakes, or go back to really bad brakes." One of those ways is to, make risk severe but intermittent. In which case there's still QA - but it's NOT a safety net because at least 1/3 of the time (or 2/3 of the time) it isn't there to catch your particular errors, they are reviewing someone else's code quite intensely; and you aren't told when that is. (Even some of the time when they are reviewing your code, you aren't told, their reports to you are delayed, so that you can't figure out when they're watching for the moment and slack off.) Even the period they watch any particular coding team is randomly selected. QA still catches a lot of problems, saves a lot of money and embarrassment - but programmers can't relax or rely on QA to wipe their noses like a good codependent, so they remain vigilant.
Another way is to make the penalty for disappointing QA as visible and embarrassing as crashing the whole ball of wax. But highly visible rewards for safe coding are another.
It's very common in business environments for cooperation to happen at lower levels that frustrates the most important goals of top management. That apparently happened at Yahoo, and the response was to remove half of the cooperating parties permanently. The problem was real; but there are far smarter ways to deal with it.
I'm pretty sure Neal knows that individual engineers actually spend a little time blue-skying, mostly on their own. After all, he cites the fact that engineers have brought forward possible alternatives. But other engineers cheerfully recommend against investing the large sums necessary to prove the tech and make it an economic competitor. He is saying more about investment, and funding. But re Engineering culture, I had a father who was an engineer, and while he was much more open minded than most of his ilk, he was nonetheless astonishingly closed minded and very quick to tell me that, say, flat display screens were an impossible tech that would never exist, no matter how long the universe lasted, 'cause you couldn't flatten a cathode ray tube. People self-select themselves for engineering school because they have a very deep psychological need for certainty, not because they love career-changing surprises.
And bees can't fly. Until you look at the problem another way. For example, ablative materials, or a two stage shot to reduce initial atmospheric resistance, etc, etc, etc. Who needs to be told that the need for a search for new tech that isn't obvious, can't be contradicted by saying that there is no blindingly obvious path to that tech right now? Boring a hole in a magnetron blew apart the equation that "proved" that producing microwave radar was forever impossible (see cavity magnetron) - but first you have to imagine that there is something your present equations haven't imagined or encompassed. What we have here is a failure of the imagination...
I like this comment because extreme wealth disparities are in fact a huge cause of lock in. Maybe, as some argue, wealth disparities don't affect happiness since that is created by relative differences in wealth, not absolute. But the already very rich can only lose by game changing innovation, so the sharply increasing disparity in the U.S. does heavily reinforce lock-in.
Eventually, such wealth concentration becomes self-referential:
"nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982. Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26rich.html?pagewanted=2
And yes, Houston, we have a problem:
"One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?pagewanted=2
His argument does not assume this. It may assume that the wholesale replacement of fundamental technology in one field doesn't frequently happen from a whole different field, or that that process happens but is slowing. And he's no doubt right on both those counts. Microprocessors have made rockets a bit cheaper and lighter, but they haven't replaced rocket technology in some bizarre way.
However your argument assumes that there's no lock-in in other tech like microprocessors! I just have to giggle at that assumption. Silicon just by itself is a massive and frequently discussed instance of lock in.
So you repeat his argument, with your own extremely similar example; and then say that big science and big projects cure all. And, yes, sometimes they help a bit by creating novel circumstances that allow the development of say, the safety helmet (Golden Gate Bridge.) Not to mention Tang. But usually big projects follow new technological breakthroughs and novel engineering designs, they don't create them. The rocket tech developed in and after WWII caused the Apollo project, not the other way 'round.
Right now, a huge breakthrough in interplanetary propulsion, plasma propulsion, is being funded, a bit, by NASA. To it's credit: but way too little funding given the extraordinary advance that this new tech represents, and the huge projects it would allow us to perform - say by returning a very rich asteroid to earth orbit. Only if we dump far more money into the lock-in breaking research now can we have the big projects later.
A great article by Neal Stephenson, that I was lucky enough to stumble upon yesterday, after months of thinking over related difficulties in science, and particularly physics (in part, as Lee Smolin has written about.) I'm going to say that Jane Jacobs' argument in "Dark Age Ahead" subsumes Neal's, although Mr. Stephenson adds a great deal. She argued that what was exploratory science has now been replaced by a lot of people who look the same, since they still wear lab coats a lot[ but who are just spouting cant, merely copying previous “scientific” opinion, or just making it up on the spot; and are dreadfully reluctant to challenge whatever has previously been held to be “obviously true” - whether there was ever any evidence offered in support of that opinion or not. In other words, an academic priesthood that has a stunning degree of priestly inertia – the opposite of what science is supposed to be.
Lee Smolin argues much the same of physics in “The Trouble with Physics”, and I'd like to argue that the field of medicine is still worse for priestly nonsense. (I ask you, in what other field would the advocacy of something like “evidence-based medicine” be novel, and revolutionary?)
Jacob's argument easily extends to saying that only very large technological changes force the “science” priesthood to adapt and change occasionally, by revealing large new realms of incontrovertible evidence. But, ouch, now Neal Stephenson, using rockets as an example, argues that technology may be ossifying more than we suspect, too, making the logjam complete.
The historical extension of this argument is that progress slowly moves around the globe because every civilization can advance only so far until it lapses into immovable complacency headed by economic or academic special interests who are doing just fine as things are, thanks. Then the torch passes to another civilization; for example, China to India to Arabia to Europe, over the last few millenia. Yet today, globalization ties us together so closely that there is now nowhere left for that torch to go. Globalization means globalized lock-in, too.
In other words, to return to Neal's example: “Why did the Chinese invest in developing a rocket capability rather than try to skip ahead to a better technology, since they had no infrastructure or educational investment in the old tech? Why were they locked in?” Arguably, however, developing economies are often even more locked in to obsolete technologies, for which no alternative has yet emerged. The gains in capacity by copying are so great, for so little investment (starting buying rocket tech at a discount from Russia) and with such great political benefits, that the outcome is all too predictable, both in technology, education and science.
I wish there were some way to convince the Chinese that no society is rich until it can afford to fund research efforts that fail frequently, publicly, and thoroughly. Then again, I wish I could convince us! Here in the U.S., centrally planned science funding that is ultimately supervised by an easily embarrassed Congress has everything to do with lock in, since innovation at the margins is the only reliable way of obtaining research funds, period, end of sentence, end of marked innovation.
Great, now transfer the tech to small birds, add a tiny bit of gelegnite, and send your new weapon at the throat of whatever head of state you wish. No more slow news days! I can't wait 'till the home kit comes out...
Isn't it great the govt publicizes new tech like this so widely?
There's already one Wikipedia based search engine up or proposed http://wikiseek.com/ - obviously they aren't going to honor the no-follow rule or they're out of business. The all-no-follow move will only make this new engine more popular. It might even put it over the top, fast.
Wikipedia is so big and so popular (pagerank 8, relevant to almost every query) that even the fact that some people will learn of links there, making its links indirectly valuable, is more than enough to keep the spammers happy. All-No-Follow will not significantly reduce spam there, or not for long. Sorry. Better, would be for Wikipedia to use No-Follow only for all new links that haven't been checked by a more trusted user/editor. I ain't saying perfect, just better. Even better, let trusted sites like Wikipedia tag links as spam (after commenting them to make them invisible), so that Google can then ruthlessly ignore similar links wherever they appear. That might actually scare spammers away, since they would know Wikipedia and other trusted sites could hit back - hard.
Think about it - if the simple All-No-Follow worked and Wikipedia became much freer of spam links than the rest of the web, then Wikipedia would by the same token become simply irresistible as a source of reliable information to competitive or up-and-coming Search Engines - which as they gain customers due to their higher quality of search results, again makes Wikipedia a premier place to spam, with or without "no-follow" links. Unless we dump capitalism entirely, uniformly using No-Follow can't work for Wikipedia the way it might for smaller sites. A modest reduction is the very most Wikipedia can hope for, and the downside to All-No-Follow is that their present massive positive contribution to my searches and yours is lost forever. Not good!
In this way - "If it works, it doesn't" - the all-no-follow policy reminds me of one of the most popular, and hilarious invention submissions to the USPO before computers existed - the automatic car headlight dimmer. Everyone and his dog had the brilliant idea that a photocell detecting an oncoming car's headlights could automatically dim your headlights. But now... imagine two cars with this feature approaching each other! Strobe city! The re-invention of the electric doorbell! Funny, and a little ironic perhaps, since with computers we can do this much now, given that spam isn't a problem with headlights... yet. (I'm just waiting for the first headlight virus.) It seems that some things seem like a great idea until you've thought about it a little more...
Re other replies (and they're good ones):
As for Hardin, and the commons, this sort of applies, even though most medieval grazers were not grievously abusive in those days. The problem was everybody, not a few freeloaders. Still it's well worth mentioning, mostly cause it's cool and important, even if it doesn't fit quite exactly. Perhaps generations from now our descendants won't bother talking about the "Tragedy of the Commons" anymore, they'll just refer to "The Tragedy of the Web!"
The take-away lesson is that this is a struggle - or as an essay on Occam's Razor at http://logictutorial.com/ says, a "contested system." So things will never be simple, and no one rule or method will remain sovereign. That having been said, however:
Metatags are still used by the big search engines - only now more for priority of terms than mere mention, and in effect, as negative information. For example, if you don't think, say, "heatstoke" is among the most relevant terms on your page, believe me, Google is going to take your word for that.
As for Google's recursive insight (or re-application of old algorithms) it won't die, but it is certainly showing it's age. The new, more active and chatty kid on the block is taking over; but since it won't benefit the world (or my future searches) to discuss what Yahoo and Google are doing now, I won't elaborate. "First do no harm."
Indeed, one must suppose that the frequency of "accidental" discoveries varies inversely with just how conceptually locked-in funding agencies are. To which, the contemporary answer is "extremely." Parallel to this are suppresed discoveries - I've been given papers never published by researchers famous to their fields that were true, exciting and which they felt "couldn't publish."