response to DancesWithDeath
July 13th 2007 17:08
yes! you just won a subscriber for that post. I like your brain. The only thing is, lets not make the wikipedia first and then test it by putting people in the society it describes. That's not what wikipedia is. Its not a plan. Plans don't work. Just make a society where the people in it can change the rules as they please, that's what wikipedia is, you don't write it then test it on other people you test it on the people who design it.
That way the people in it cause the whole system to evolve, and to evolve to a state which pleases them. So wikipedia started as a plan, a way of collecting data before putting it into Nupedia. Nupedia was meant to be an online encyclopedia that represented the sum of human knowledge. But it wasn;t wikipedia, they were kind of expecting to have a static thing. Like a book. Sure there would be updates, written encyclopedias get updated too. But this essential was going to be a 'real' and 'respectable' encyclopedia. But they soon found out that wikipedia was the real encyclopedia not just the training ground. Soon they canned Nupedia altogether.
Wikipedia is becoming knowledge. Some academics still looks down on it, but many are starting to participate. Anyone who uses Wikipedia regularly recognises that it is not inferior in any way. There can be no printed edition because it is constantly evolving, constantly changing. To collect the sum of human knowledge you don't take a snapshot of what everyone thinks now and write that down in a book and say that's knowledge. That book goes out of date, bcomes incorrect the second it goes to print. Revisions and updates aren't to fix the encyclopedia, the revisions and updates are the actual knowledge, whatever changes and why, that's what really says something about what's going on in society at that time.
So wikipedia says: herein lies the truth. Whatever is written here is what defines truth. You put the test subjects in the system. They live under its truth. The plus side for them is that they can edit it however they please. And that's the only way to collect the sum of human knowledge, let them tell you. You don't guess and write it in a big book because you have pretty good research to support the guess that guessing is a good way of doing it. No! don't guess. Don't plan anything, because plans never ever ever work. In theory there shouldn't be a difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. So the only solution is to build society according to practice and not according to any theory. So in your economic wikipedia it will not be a plan that can be tested on a group of test subjects. Because the plan won't work. It will be wrong for them, the society will fail, no question. But if instead you kept the wikipedia running but everyone who had ever edited it was the subject. They are living in the economy which is described in the wikipedia that they wrote, but the upside is that they can still edit it at any time and the rules will change. That's how you build the perfect society. You don't plan it, you just put people in it and let them build it themselves.
But no. That would be anarchy. They wouldn't build a good village, it would just be hotch potch, all over the place, no good, they wouldn't know anything about town planning these fools. And that's pretty much the view of people who have never read wikipedia but insist on deriding it as substandard in its presentation of knowledge. The people who believe in it work pretty hard to make sure they don't believe in somethng stupid. And the people in the editible society too would work hard to ensure they didn't live in a bad society. Because they could change it with ease each time they discovered something bad about it.
Now some say that this fickle editibility renders the information useless because it will just go back and forth and people can edit it to nonsense at any time. But history has proven them wrong. I need not construct a thought experiment which proves why an editible system is actually more reliable than the old methods suffice to see the results of the actual experiment.
Anyways, I'm in a horribly rambly mood tonight, so I can't really offer you coherent thoughts, but sufficed to say i agree with you on the building an economy wikipedia where the people design an economy. But I don't think they then take that information and build an economy that works that way. They should already be in it, while they are editing it. That way they will edit it to be the best for them. If we do this with the entire of humanity, we will build a system which is best for all of us. Simple.
That's the main thing. If you want to read some extra ramblings that I had written before I had realised that I was rambling are written below and I don't feel like deleting them because they are so fun. So i just left them below.
wikipedia is not a back and forth, it is an accelerating path forwards. The knowledge on wikipedia is subject to exponential growth in terms of ammount of articles, length and depth of articles, accuracy, neutrality, just about any criteria of judgement you can think of, it is growing exponentially, and maybe I'll see if i can go about a mathematical proof of that and find the gradient of the derivitave of that curve but lets just assume its some kind of exponential growth. So I'd say quite recently it surpassed any other written encyclopedia and is now the best knowledge which is available. It is the perfect guide to your research. It is not your research, but it allows you to conduct any research you need. Get the background on the ideas for yourself, it will give you links to articles, other websites, videos and even wikipedia articles on all of the relevant research avenues on any topic. You won't know everything about Argentina from reading the page on Argentina. But you can follow the links and get more background information about anything that's related, and by continuing to learn more background you understand the... shit. When did that become a ramble? dammit.
That way the people in it cause the whole system to evolve, and to evolve to a state which pleases them. So wikipedia started as a plan, a way of collecting data before putting it into Nupedia. Nupedia was meant to be an online encyclopedia that represented the sum of human knowledge. But it wasn;t wikipedia, they were kind of expecting to have a static thing. Like a book. Sure there would be updates, written encyclopedias get updated too. But this essential was going to be a 'real' and 'respectable' encyclopedia. But they soon found out that wikipedia was the real encyclopedia not just the training ground. Soon they canned Nupedia altogether.
Wikipedia is becoming knowledge. Some academics still looks down on it, but many are starting to participate. Anyone who uses Wikipedia regularly recognises that it is not inferior in any way. There can be no printed edition because it is constantly evolving, constantly changing. To collect the sum of human knowledge you don't take a snapshot of what everyone thinks now and write that down in a book and say that's knowledge. That book goes out of date, bcomes incorrect the second it goes to print. Revisions and updates aren't to fix the encyclopedia, the revisions and updates are the actual knowledge, whatever changes and why, that's what really says something about what's going on in society at that time.
So wikipedia says: herein lies the truth. Whatever is written here is what defines truth. You put the test subjects in the system. They live under its truth. The plus side for them is that they can edit it however they please. And that's the only way to collect the sum of human knowledge, let them tell you. You don't guess and write it in a big book because you have pretty good research to support the guess that guessing is a good way of doing it. No! don't guess. Don't plan anything, because plans never ever ever work. In theory there shouldn't be a difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. So the only solution is to build society according to practice and not according to any theory. So in your economic wikipedia it will not be a plan that can be tested on a group of test subjects. Because the plan won't work. It will be wrong for them, the society will fail, no question. But if instead you kept the wikipedia running but everyone who had ever edited it was the subject. They are living in the economy which is described in the wikipedia that they wrote, but the upside is that they can still edit it at any time and the rules will change. That's how you build the perfect society. You don't plan it, you just put people in it and let them build it themselves.
But no. That would be anarchy. They wouldn't build a good village, it would just be hotch potch, all over the place, no good, they wouldn't know anything about town planning these fools. And that's pretty much the view of people who have never read wikipedia but insist on deriding it as substandard in its presentation of knowledge. The people who believe in it work pretty hard to make sure they don't believe in somethng stupid. And the people in the editible society too would work hard to ensure they didn't live in a bad society. Because they could change it with ease each time they discovered something bad about it.
Now some say that this fickle editibility renders the information useless because it will just go back and forth and people can edit it to nonsense at any time. But history has proven them wrong. I need not construct a thought experiment which proves why an editible system is actually more reliable than the old methods suffice to see the results of the actual experiment.
Anyways, I'm in a horribly rambly mood tonight, so I can't really offer you coherent thoughts, but sufficed to say i agree with you on the building an economy wikipedia where the people design an economy. But I don't think they then take that information and build an economy that works that way. They should already be in it, while they are editing it. That way they will edit it to be the best for them. If we do this with the entire of humanity, we will build a system which is best for all of us. Simple.
That's the main thing. If you want to read some extra ramblings that I had written before I had realised that I was rambling are written below and I don't feel like deleting them because they are so fun. So i just left them below.
wikipedia is not a back and forth, it is an accelerating path forwards. The knowledge on wikipedia is subject to exponential growth in terms of ammount of articles, length and depth of articles, accuracy, neutrality, just about any criteria of judgement you can think of, it is growing exponentially, and maybe I'll see if i can go about a mathematical proof of that and find the gradient of the derivitave of that curve but lets just assume its some kind of exponential growth. So I'd say quite recently it surpassed any other written encyclopedia and is now the best knowledge which is available. It is the perfect guide to your research. It is not your research, but it allows you to conduct any research you need. Get the background on the ideas for yourself, it will give you links to articles, other websites, videos and even wikipedia articles on all of the relevant research avenues on any topic. You won't know everything about Argentina from reading the page on Argentina. But you can follow the links and get more background information about anything that's related, and by continuing to learn more background you understand the... shit. When did that become a ramble? dammit.
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