And yet here we are, posting here and in all those articles MarkusQ referenced... free speech is alive and well, believe it or not, and people bitching about it not being free while they freely post their rants here are too oblivious to see the irony.
Perhaps. But bitching about it when they are no longer able to freely post their rants would be too late, wouldn't it?
People are complaining not so much about the current state of "free speech" as the potential future state.
I must have counted at least 10 instances in that article (about 3-5 pages long?) where a quote was followed by "said a senior administration official / confidant / military official, who did not want to reveal his/her name out of fear of reprisal from the administration."
Free speech does not protect -- and has never protected -- individuals from "reprisal." "Free speech" does not mean -- and has never meant -- "Say whatever you want and there will never be any consequences."
It is a sad world we live in where people feel there should never be consequences for anything that comes out of their mouths. (And I recognized you may not believe this. You probably just didn't really think about what you were saying. But I know many, many people who really do think that "free speech does -- or should -- mean "no consequences.")
You just proved his point... You pointed out all the various time-consuming ways that he could, as he puts it, "fight that battle." Thus making it even clearer that, "It's biggest flaw is a "Tyranny of Those With The Most Time.'"
It's electrical, and therefore can be modified. I can't imagine a reasonable scenario in which both cannot be controlled at the same time, given the right (fairly simple, seeing as it is electrical) modifications.
On the other hand, I'm not too worried about people modifying it to play while driving. You can modify your car not to beep when your selt belt is off (assuming you have this feature), but not a lot of people do this. Why? Because (a) it takes time, and (b) it is dumb. Most people are going to get caught by these two hindrances when it comes to any sort of modification to play and drive at the same time.
What I am worried about, however, is people playing this game for a couple hours while their kid has soccer practice or whatever, and then driving around on real streets. While we all like to pretend video games don't affect reality, the truth is that our brains take time to switch from one scenario to another. I've experienced it, and I'm sure others have as well. Who left the theater after seeing Gone in 60 Seconds or The Fast and the Furious and didn't drive at least a bit more dangeriously than they normally would have?
This doesn't mean people are suddenly going to be racing down streets as if in a video game, but that urge to drive just a little faster, take that turn just a little sharper, etc. etc. etc. -- that urge is going to be a lot fresher and more tempting if you go driving directly after playing the game, and more importantly, in the the exact same environment in which you just played the game.
It isn't even "hey, that's me!" it's just "that's performing the same pattern as I am doing" (although the use of I would indicate self-awareness, I personally believe it's much more complex).
There is something more complex to being human, or conscious, perhaps, but is there really something more complex to being self-aware? What further is necessary other than "knowing" (i.e. getting input about) what it itself is doing?
It's programming would possibly allow a robot of a completely different configuration, that mirrors the pattern, to trick the robot into thinking it is a mirror image of itself.
How is this different than a human? Presumably a human of a different "configuration" could be mistaken for a mirror image as well, assuming the signs we look for in a mirror are all there. For example, imagine a human that is emitting ultraviolet light, but otherwise looks the same.
All you have pointed out is that the robot's "sensory organs" are more limited than ours.
Not only that, but why start from scratch when there is such an enourmous body of good source material? A better project would be to gather acknowledged experts, and get them to contribute to Wikipedia instead.
It seems likely to me that "acknowledged experts," at least the ones contributing to this new site, think that Wikipedia is NOT an enormous body of good source material, and do NOT want to contribute to it.
It especially seems likely in light of the fact that Langer Sanger, who left Wikipedia because he didn't feel it was working. He has made comments to the effect that trolls and vandals have the same amount of clout in Wikipedia as experts. A problem (or not, depending on how you look at it) that keeps many experts away.
I don't believe the previous poster was using that statement as an argument for why testing should not be done on the poor. It seems more likely to me that he was simply stating his opinion about where the boundaries of medical testing should fall.
Medical research cannot be effectively conducted on terminal patients because they are terminal patients.
Medical research can certainly be effectively conducted on terminal patients. You are likely correct if what you are trying to say is that it is not as effective as testing on healthier subjects. Though you seem to confuse "terminally ill" with "compromised immune system." A terminally ill patient does not necessarily have a compromised immune system.
There would be no point to doing medical research on a terminal patient unless the testing had something specifically to do with the patient's original problem -- and most testing won't.
This is more to the point, and I don't disagree (and I suspect the previous poster would not either). This says little about whether testing should be done on the Indian poor. There would be no point in transplanting a dead man's face to a live man (because face transplants require a live donor), but this does not mean we should, say, begin using prisoners as "donors." There are much more relevant issues than whether such research does not work on others.
As previous commentors have pointed out, the people in India who are being tested on are poor, not stupid. As with every decision that every person makes in life, they will weigh the pros and cons as they understand them, and decide for themselves whether it has a greater potential to make their life better or worse. These treatments are not being forced on the poor of India.
This misses the point entirely. Of course they will make decisions after weighing the pros and cons of their various options. The point, however, is that we are providing them with the option of being tested upon, but not with the option of receiving current treatment. We could help these people, but instead we use them as subjects of medical research.
How important is medical innovation? Is saving the life of an American child worth the death or injury of a couple impoverished Indian children? Is this death or injury balanced out by giving these people money, and making it voluntary? There are a lot of questions to consider...
Anyone have any answers as to what breaks on the page in safari?
Safari has some seriously weird CSS implementation. For example, they don't always size their buttons and other UI elements correctly (e.g. the height property is just ignored), because they are part of Aqua.
There are other oddities and annoyances.
Then again, IE and Firefox both have their sets of oddities as well. I suspect there are more hacks to get things to display the same in IE and Firefox than there are for all three browsers, though.
So they say it's a "waste of time" and only losers have time for something like that?
This was not a comment about anyone who contributes to Wikipedia. It was a response to a particular argument that people make in defense of Wikipedia, that if a person is upset by an entry, they can change it themselves.
His point is that the "if you don't like it, change it" argument doesn't take into account the fact that Wikipedia exists now. There is no "end goal" for Wikipedia, because it is a resource at this very moment. So if an entry is changed for the worse, that entry exists as part of the whole of Wikipedia until it is fixed. (And you can't expect people to constantly monitor all the entries they care about, nor should you expect people to have to spend their time erasing vandalism or stupidity or whatever, so it may potentially exist for a while.)
What people who argue this don't realize is that fixing an entry does not change the fact that it was wrong for some period of time. If your car gets a flat tire, fixing it does not change the fact that it was flat. You may have depended upon the tire being good in order to get to an important meeting, which you did not make. Fixing the tire does not magically get you to the meeting on time.
Similarly, fixing a Wikipedia entry does not magically make the people who viewed the entry while it was bad suddenly view the fixed version. Someone may have used faulty information, or become biased against someone or some product, or whatever. (And yes, there are arguments that respond to these problems, like the "don't trust anything" argument; but this argument, that if an entry is wrong you can just fix it, does not.)
The point is, Wikipedia is not simply its current incarnation, but also all of its past incarnations.
Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team
Modded as "Funny," but this is actually very insightful. The problem (and advantage) of Wikipedia is its volatility. Anyone can go change something to be incorrect (whether maliciously or not), at any time.
This study, unfortunately, tells us almost nothing. The average number of errors per entry is really not a valuable statistic. How bad were the errors? How long are the errors there? Wikipedia, because of its volatility, really cannot be instanced in the way this study has done. It would be more revealing to do a study of the past X months/years/whatever, to determine how many errors there were, what kind of errors there were, and how long these errors were around.
Of course, then the Encyclopedia Britannica wouldn't be studied as *it* should. Because it is *not* such a volatile resource. In reality, the two resources are not as similar as people think.
And regarding the average number of errors per length of text: this statistic is downright worthless. If someone states something incorrect in one sentence, how is it any better to state the same incorrect thing in 10 sentences?
How many garages knew how to service fuel injection systems when they were frst being developed? How many developers knew how to program in Java when it was created? How many people knew how to pilot a plane when the Wright brothers were trying to get their machine off the ground?
Technology advances, people have to learn new things... This isn't a downside of a steam hybrid engine, this is a downside of technology in general.
I'm not sure how your replies are relevant. Were you trying to say that there are not degrees of skepticism? That you can, in fact, be completely skeptical of everything? Obviously you trust your grandfather to some degree, or you wouldn't be quoting him. Presumably you trust him more than me?
There is no infallible source of information. That is pretty much what the Wikipedia people were saying in their defense and it is a valid defense. Do you believe there is an infallible source of information?
Whether I believe there is an infallible source of information, and whether I believe that the fact that there isn't is a good argument in defense of Wikipedia are two entirely different things. I don't believe there is an infallible source of information. That doesn't mean we should take everything with the same grain of salt.
That argument is, essentially, that because all sources of information are unreliable to some degree or another, Wikipedia's unreliability is irrelevant to its value. This is only true if all sources of information are equally unreliable. Which, I hope you agree, is not the case.
And for what it's worth, the author was not advocating living life like a paranoid. They were, in fact, pointing out how silly it would be if one were completely skeptical of everything (to the same degree).
I hate to say it, but warnings are sometimes necessary. Take, for instance, air bags. Many people believe(d) that air bags are a seat belt replacement. They are not, and there are appropriate warnings in cars with air bags to tell people this.
Many people visit Wikipedia and don't understand the entire concept. They may understand that "anyone" can contribute, but not to what extent, or they may only understand that it is an "internet encyclopedia." I think these are reasonable misconceptions. I would be very wary of placing the blame entirely on these people.
And besides, I deliberately refrained from saying that Wikipedia should have some sort of warning, because I really don't think that would solve anything.
You missed the point. The point was that (for most people) there are degrees of skepticism. You can't simply be a skeptic of everything. Even your grandfather, I think, would agree.
People instinctively trust some sources more than others. A well-known, well-regarded encyclopedia where the publishers/editors/etc. are held accountable can be trusted to a fairly high degree. People you respect (say, your grandfather?) are trusted more than the random guy on the street.
The author's point is that "don't trust anything" is not a reasonable way of living. If you went around being as skeptical of everything as you should be of Wikipedia, you would be a paranoid mess.
It's all over one word: Encyclopedia. If wikipedia called itself the "Unreliable Encyclopedia", would this article have been written? I suppose the author would have had a hernia over what he considered the contradiction in terms.
From TFA:
If what we today know as "Wikipedia" had started life as something called, let's say - "Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia" - we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a "Big Bag O'Trivia" is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.
For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an "encyclopedia" is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti - and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.
The author of the register article obviously wants the administrators of wikipedia to be held responsible, as if it was a top-down heirarchy. But it's not: it's more of a sort of p2p encyclopedia. It's not useful to blame wikipedia for being irresponsible any more than it is to blame gnutella for having illegal media on its network.
The author wants the administrators to be held responsible, true, but not for the content of the site, as you seem to think; but rather, for the impression that Wikipedia gives that it is a reliable source of information. Personally, I think this is a valid argument. I know too many people who think Wikipedia is a reliable source of information. It really is not.
Further, the author is making a claim about the philosophy or theory or whatever you want to call it behind Wikipedia. There are a lot of people who view Wikipedia as a counter to capitalism, commercialism. I have seen it used to argue that anarchy "works." The author attempts to show that, in fact, it really does not "work"; that it may be an interesting phenomenon, but it is not an end, it is not a "solution."
The Gnutella analogy really does not apply.
But I think that the answer lies in finding a way to hold individual wikipedia authors more accountable for their actions.
I think you'll find that if you attempt this, Wikipedia will fall apart quite rapidly. No one wants to write an article if in the back of their mind they are thinking, "What if I get in trouble for this somehow?"
I really don't think there is an answer, except to somehow make it understood that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in any sense of the word. Wikipedia really is a new phenomenon. Of course, I have no idea how this should be done...
Slashdot Mirror
And yet here we are, posting here and in all those articles MarkusQ referenced... free speech is alive and well, believe it or not, and people bitching about it not being free while they freely post their rants here are too oblivious to see the irony.
Perhaps. But bitching about it when they are no longer able to freely post their rants would be too late, wouldn't it?
People are complaining not so much about the current state of "free speech" as the potential future state.
I must have counted at least 10 instances in that article (about 3-5 pages long?) where a quote was followed by "said a senior administration official / confidant / military official, who did not want to reveal his/her name out of fear of reprisal from the administration."
Free speech does not protect -- and has never protected -- individuals from "reprisal." "Free speech" does not mean -- and has never meant -- "Say whatever you want and there will never be any consequences."
It is a sad world we live in where people feel there should never be consequences for anything that comes out of their mouths. (And I recognized you may not believe this. You probably just didn't really think about what you were saying. But I know many, many people who really do think that "free speech does -- or should -- mean "no consequences.")
You just proved his point... You pointed out all the various time-consuming ways that he could, as he puts it, "fight that battle." Thus making it even clearer that, "It's biggest flaw is a "Tyranny of Those With The Most Time.'"
It's electrical, and therefore can be modified. I can't imagine a reasonable scenario in which both cannot be controlled at the same time, given the right (fairly simple, seeing as it is electrical) modifications.
On the other hand, I'm not too worried about people modifying it to play while driving. You can modify your car not to beep when your selt belt is off (assuming you have this feature), but not a lot of people do this. Why? Because (a) it takes time, and (b) it is dumb. Most people are going to get caught by these two hindrances when it comes to any sort of modification to play and drive at the same time.
What I am worried about, however, is people playing this game for a couple hours while their kid has soccer practice or whatever, and then driving around on real streets. While we all like to pretend video games don't affect reality, the truth is that our brains take time to switch from one scenario to another. I've experienced it, and I'm sure others have as well. Who left the theater after seeing Gone in 60 Seconds or The Fast and the Furious and didn't drive at least a bit more dangeriously than they normally would have?
This doesn't mean people are suddenly going to be racing down streets as if in a video game, but that urge to drive just a little faster, take that turn just a little sharper, etc. etc. etc. -- that urge is going to be a lot fresher and more tempting if you go driving directly after playing the game, and more importantly, in the the exact same environment in which you just played the game.
So, as New Year's Eve is coming, remember to use only tall glasses for your party!!!
Obviously that should be short not tall. Who edits this stuff anyway?
It isn't even "hey, that's me!" it's just "that's performing the same pattern as I am doing" (although the use of I would indicate self-awareness, I personally believe it's much more complex).
There is something more complex to being human, or conscious, perhaps, but is there really something more complex to being self-aware? What further is necessary other than "knowing" (i.e. getting input about) what it itself is doing?
It's programming would possibly allow a robot of a completely different configuration, that mirrors the pattern, to trick the robot into thinking it is a mirror image of itself.
How is this different than a human? Presumably a human of a different "configuration" could be mistaken for a mirror image as well, assuming the signs we look for in a mirror are all there. For example, imagine a human that is emitting ultraviolet light, but otherwise looks the same.
All you have pointed out is that the robot's "sensory organs" are more limited than ours.
Not only that, but why start from scratch when there is such an enourmous body of good source material? A better project would be to gather acknowledged experts, and get them to contribute to Wikipedia instead.
It seems likely to me that "acknowledged experts," at least the ones contributing to this new site, think that Wikipedia is NOT an enormous body of good source material, and do NOT want to contribute to it.
It especially seems likely in light of the fact that Langer Sanger, who left Wikipedia because he didn't feel it was working. He has made comments to the effect that trolls and vandals have the same amount of clout in Wikipedia as experts. A problem (or not, depending on how you look at it) that keeps many experts away.
When you try to get out of the screen saver, does it give you a black screen with "LI" up in the left corner?
I don't believe the previous poster was using that statement as an argument for why testing should not be done on the poor. It seems more likely to me that he was simply stating his opinion about where the boundaries of medical testing should fall.
Medical research cannot be effectively conducted on terminal patients because they are terminal patients.
Medical research can certainly be effectively conducted on terminal patients. You are likely correct if what you are trying to say is that it is not as effective as testing on healthier subjects. Though you seem to confuse "terminally ill" with "compromised immune system." A terminally ill patient does not necessarily have a compromised immune system.
There would be no point to doing medical research on a terminal patient unless the testing had something specifically to do with the patient's original problem -- and most testing won't.
This is more to the point, and I don't disagree (and I suspect the previous poster would not either). This says little about whether testing should be done on the Indian poor. There would be no point in transplanting a dead man's face to a live man (because face transplants require a live donor), but this does not mean we should, say, begin using prisoners as "donors." There are much more relevant issues than whether such research does not work on others.
As previous commentors have pointed out, the people in India who are being tested on are poor, not stupid. As with every decision that every person makes in life, they will weigh the pros and cons as they understand them, and decide for themselves whether it has a greater potential to make their life better or worse. These treatments are not being forced on the poor of India.
This misses the point entirely. Of course they will make decisions after weighing the pros and cons of their various options. The point, however, is that we are providing them with the option of being tested upon, but not with the option of receiving current treatment. We could help these people, but instead we use them as subjects of medical research.
How important is medical innovation? Is saving the life of an American child worth the death or injury of a couple impoverished Indian children? Is this death or injury balanced out by giving these people money, and making it voluntary? There are a lot of questions to consider...
Anyone have any answers as to what breaks on the page in safari?
Safari has some seriously weird CSS implementation. For example, they don't always size their buttons and other UI elements correctly (e.g. the height property is just ignored), because they are part of Aqua.
There are other oddities and annoyances.
Then again, IE and Firefox both have their sets of oddities as well. I suspect there are more hacks to get things to display the same in IE and Firefox than there are for all three browsers, though.
So they say it's a "waste of time" and only losers have time for something like that?
This was not a comment about anyone who contributes to Wikipedia. It was a response to a particular argument that people make in defense of Wikipedia, that if a person is upset by an entry, they can change it themselves.
His point is that the "if you don't like it, change it" argument doesn't take into account the fact that Wikipedia exists now. There is no "end goal" for Wikipedia, because it is a resource at this very moment. So if an entry is changed for the worse, that entry exists as part of the whole of Wikipedia until it is fixed. (And you can't expect people to constantly monitor all the entries they care about, nor should you expect people to have to spend their time erasing vandalism or stupidity or whatever, so it may potentially exist for a while.)
What people who argue this don't realize is that fixing an entry does not change the fact that it was wrong for some period of time. If your car gets a flat tire, fixing it does not change the fact that it was flat. You may have depended upon the tire being good in order to get to an important meeting, which you did not make. Fixing the tire does not magically get you to the meeting on time.
Similarly, fixing a Wikipedia entry does not magically make the people who viewed the entry while it was bad suddenly view the fixed version. Someone may have used faulty information, or become biased against someone or some product, or whatever. (And yes, there are arguments that respond to these problems, like the "don't trust anything" argument; but this argument, that if an entry is wrong you can just fix it, does not.)
The point is, Wikipedia is not simply its current incarnation, but also all of its past incarnations.
Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team
Modded as "Funny," but this is actually very insightful. The problem (and advantage) of Wikipedia is its volatility. Anyone can go change something to be incorrect (whether maliciously or not), at any time.
This study, unfortunately, tells us almost nothing. The average number of errors per entry is really not a valuable statistic. How bad were the errors? How long are the errors there? Wikipedia, because of its volatility, really cannot be instanced in the way this study has done. It would be more revealing to do a study of the past X months/years/whatever, to determine how many errors there were, what kind of errors there were, and how long these errors were around.
Of course, then the Encyclopedia Britannica wouldn't be studied as *it* should. Because it is *not* such a volatile resource. In reality, the two resources are not as similar as people think.
And regarding the average number of errors per length of text: this statistic is downright worthless. If someone states something incorrect in one sentence, how is it any better to state the same incorrect thing in 10 sentences?
How many garages knew how to service fuel injection systems when they were frst being developed? How many developers knew how to program in Java when it was created? How many people knew how to pilot a plane when the Wright brothers were trying to get their machine off the ground?
Technology advances, people have to learn new things... This isn't a downside of a steam hybrid engine, this is a downside of technology in general.
I'm not sure how your replies are relevant. Were you trying to say that there are not degrees of skepticism? That you can, in fact, be completely skeptical of everything? Obviously you trust your grandfather to some degree, or you wouldn't be quoting him. Presumably you trust him more than me?
There is no infallible source of information. That is pretty much what the Wikipedia people were saying in their defense and it is a valid defense. Do you believe there is an infallible source of information?
Whether I believe there is an infallible source of information, and whether I believe that the fact that there isn't is a good argument in defense of Wikipedia are two entirely different things. I don't believe there is an infallible source of information. That doesn't mean we should take everything with the same grain of salt.
That argument is, essentially, that because all sources of information are unreliable to some degree or another, Wikipedia's unreliability is irrelevant to its value. This is only true if all sources of information are equally unreliable. Which, I hope you agree, is not the case.
And for what it's worth, the author was not advocating living life like a paranoid. They were, in fact, pointing out how silly it would be if one were completely skeptical of everything (to the same degree).
Allow me just a bit of hyperbole! ;)
What I meant was that it is significantly different than anything else that has been called an "encylopedia" in the past.
I hate to say it, but warnings are sometimes necessary. Take, for instance, air bags. Many people believe(d) that air bags are a seat belt replacement. They are not, and there are appropriate warnings in cars with air bags to tell people this.
Many people visit Wikipedia and don't understand the entire concept. They may understand that "anyone" can contribute, but not to what extent, or they may only understand that it is an "internet encyclopedia." I think these are reasonable misconceptions. I would be very wary of placing the blame entirely on these people.
And besides, I deliberately refrained from saying that Wikipedia should have some sort of warning, because I really don't think that would solve anything.
This is just plain bullshit.
You missed the point. The point was that (for most people) there are degrees of skepticism. You can't simply be a skeptic of everything. Even your grandfather, I think, would agree.
People instinctively trust some sources more than others. A well-known, well-regarded encyclopedia where the publishers/editors/etc. are held accountable can be trusted to a fairly high degree. People you respect (say, your grandfather?) are trusted more than the random guy on the street.
The author's point is that "don't trust anything" is not a reasonable way of living. If you went around being as skeptical of everything as you should be of Wikipedia, you would be a paranoid mess.
From TFA:
The author of the register article obviously wants the administrators of wikipedia to be held responsible, as if it was a top-down heirarchy. But it's not: it's more of a sort of p2p encyclopedia. It's not useful to blame wikipedia for being irresponsible any more than it is to blame gnutella for having illegal media on its network.
The author wants the administrators to be held responsible, true, but not for the content of the site, as you seem to think; but rather, for the impression that Wikipedia gives that it is a reliable source of information. Personally, I think this is a valid argument. I know too many people who think Wikipedia is a reliable source of information. It really is not.
Further, the author is making a claim about the philosophy or theory or whatever you want to call it behind Wikipedia. There are a lot of people who view Wikipedia as a counter to capitalism, commercialism. I have seen it used to argue that anarchy "works." The author attempts to show that, in fact, it really does not "work"; that it may be an interesting phenomenon, but it is not an end, it is not a "solution."
The Gnutella analogy really does not apply.
But I think that the answer lies in finding a way to hold individual wikipedia authors more accountable for their actions.
I think you'll find that if you attempt this, Wikipedia will fall apart quite rapidly. No one wants to write an article if in the back of their mind they are thinking, "What if I get in trouble for this somehow?"
I really don't think there is an answer, except to somehow make it understood that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in any sense of the word. Wikipedia really is a new phenomenon. Of course, I have no idea how this should be done...