luxe relatiegeschenken

They can steal them and defend their claims. The tyranny of the many or the loud few is well known in philosophy and history.

I spent part of this weekend discussing Rand’s “Anthem” with my daughter. Objectivism has lost favor in your generation only to regain favor in hers. And so it goes.

People who have blogs, of course, don’t need this — they already have a place setup to publish online. Picture, though, all of the experts in various fields who don’t necessarily have or want a website, but still have the ability to write valuable content. Where do they post that content now? I don’t think there’s ever really been a place for that kind of content. There are a few sites mentioned in the comments, but do any of them carry the weight of a Google tool? Are any of those sites easy to find for someone who doesn’t use the web frequently?

Even if Google was doing a better job of reaching/advertising to those potential authors, Knol would still be an experiment because it’s a big “if” as to whether those non-authors can write quality, readable, usable articles.

Most oncologists continue to deny the role of the immune system in fighting cancer thirty years after the discovery of NK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_killer) cells in the 1970s.

There are a large number of diseases uncured, some of which are frighteningly increasing in rate such as allergies and cancers. Current medical practices are failing to not only cure these but also to prevent their progression.

After all, health is still a work in progress with many open questions. People need to have access to all available knowledge and opinions, because health is also a matter of opinion when you are facing a deadly disease for which conventional medicine offers you no hope (Metastatic cancers, Alzheimer, …).

Wikipedia NPOV (No Point Of View) policy requires that all opinions be expressed as opinions and no bias towards a subset of opinions. This is going in the right direction and enables more knowledge about any subject to be represented in a single location. I don’t see how Knol will ever be able to address this issue.

That said Wikipedia is far from perfect and still falls under the indirect pressure of another guideline which is the notability guideline. This guideline requires that any knowledge provided comes from so-called reliable sources, which means mainstream media, which is in turn controlled by financial interests which means advertising and in the end the pharmaceutical industry as far as health is concerned. This prevents the inclusion of knowledge and opinions coming from other cultures and experiences that are not red-stamped by the FDA or other well-founded research. I don’t understand why Wikipedia, which is a pure product of the Internet has such disregard for internet-borne content.

I believe that all opinions need to be represented especially in the cases where definitive cures to deadly diseases do not exist. These opinions need to be clearly represented as such to enable readers to understand quickly the origin of such research, yet enabling the centralization of such knowledge and research.

In the end new generation, internet-age, readers know that knowledge cannot be 100% trusted and that skepticism is the rule rather than the exception. They know this because of the widespread dissemination internet scams, spam, and other lunatic opinions now available. They also have been able to learn that so-called mainstream media is nothing more than opinions.

What is changing with the Internet is not just what is available as units of knowledge but the trust that people now put in all past, present and future knowledge. The result is higher scrutiny and better ability to make personal choices. Both Knol and Wikipedia need to understand this.

Although some of the content is roughly encyclopedic in nature, E2 is best at opinion and fiction. Where content is factual, there is room for humour and caprice. I suspect that most E2 contributors writing factual content there have moved to Wikipedia since it turned up, which is probably a good thing as it lets E2 play to its strengths.

Perhaps Knol and Yahoo Answers don’t need to have a high standard on average, though. I’ve only stumbled on Yahoo Answers when it’s turned up in search results and it’s frequently been useful.

Robert Marchenoir brings up a point that at first seemed to follow through on the idea I was going for, but on reflection it is based on a false analogy: there is a significant difference between hiring a plumber and getting someone involved in online collaboration or conversation. In the first case, the only affected parties are you and the plumber, in the latter the societal repercussions are wider. If there are no (or few) women involved in a given discussion or online environment, this might make the environment discouraging for other women to get into. If, for example, Knol were to become widely used as a tool for academics to publish on the web, as Laura Gibbs suggests, the fact that it might have become an environment hostile or unwelcoming to women would clearly be problematic.

But there is still something in that sentence – “Y’see – a system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters. (And men…)”, that makes me a little anxious. The problem is that there’s a leap of logic in there: “men are individualistic” leads to “a tool designed for individualistic behaviour is sexist”It seems like generalizing behaviour patterns along gender lines to inform our design of social software is fundamentally problematic: how can you differentiate a social tool that appeals to certain behaviours and personality traits from one which discriminates based on gender when you make such a bold association of personality traits with gender?

P.S. I read the article of yours you linked to, and found it interesting though somewhat vague statistically speaking, and I also very much liked Joe Clark’s rebuttal, which seemed to articulate some of the gripes I have with certain aspects of your view on this topic.

I think you have a rosey-eyed view of Wikipedia. Sure – the intentions are admirable but the delivery has much to be desired – (and you hint at the need of improvement). From where I sit, I find that the mafia that are the key contributors to the site create a Wikipedia which has a BayArea view of the world.

I’m sure Know was created for several reasons, but maybe one of them is that many of us are frustrated with the direction the groupthink has taken it.

As an outsider or newbie, there’s no way to contribute. The mafia will delete and edit. As someone who would like my company (www.psfk.com) to be listed on the pages, we’re not notable enough and the mafia will delete anyone’s addition of our details to it.

Simply, for many of us – we don’t need a secret society to give us manipulated pages like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol – Knol might not be the right alternative – but thank goodness someone is trying.

I think there is more to individualism than the profit/success system. (Indeed, later developments of that system in our own historical period have become profoundly corporate and snti-individualist). The ideologues of individualism within libertarian circles would make the connection to the profit system and value it positively (e.g. Ayn Rand). But I think there’s more going on.

Consider an act of creative insight, the moment the light bulb goes on in one’s head and you say “aha!” – either about comprehending a pre-exosting idea or discovering a genuinely new one. Surely most would agree that this is a necessary element of social/tecnical progress by most definitions. Yes, this often occurs in the course of animated social discussion – with or without chemical lubricants. But just as often, if not more, it occurs as a solitary moment in the privacy of one’s own thoughts (e.g. Kekule’s famous discovery of the ring structure of benzine. ANd even when a discover occurs in a social moment, it is usually also the fruit of long hours spent wrestling with paradoxes and questions in one’s own skull.

So far, I have put forward an argument that the individual is necessary for the process of discovery. Let’s see if we can make an analogous argument on behalf of the collective.

Consider the most rsbid individualist ideologue. Do they speak a language? Certainly. Did they invent it themself? Unless they are psychotic, they did not. In fact, even if they are psychotic, they normally express their views in a language derived from a pre-existing human culture. Consider the technological artifacts on which their personal survival is based. Did they create those artifacts? In general, no. And even those who attempt a lifestyle of radical physical self-sufficiency will have to make the tools with which they make their tools with the assistance of tools made my others. (A blacksmith can make many things, but typically not his or her own anvil).

In the realm of intellectual pursuits this is even more clear. Who would a Hawking, a Penrose or a Feynman be without the likes of Einstein, Minkowski, Riemann, Gauss or Planck?

So this is the paradox. The act of intellectual creation occurs within individual human minds acting as individuals, but at the same time the process is profoundly social (which is why “intellectual property” is inherently an oxymoron).

Counterposing Yin and Yang as adversarial is false to fact and serves nobody. It would be like trying to say that the piston downstroke in an internal combustion engine is “better” than the upstroke – or vice versa. Neither view would help one design a better engine.

In the words of Daniel Webster (from Webster’s “Reply to Hayne”) “Liberty and Union! One and inseparable! Now and forever!

Just a thought,
-Steve