Fwd: EDGE 208: "Who Says We Know" by Larry Sanger

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 26 Apr 2007 00:21
Subject: EDGE 208: "Who Says We Know" by Larry Sanger
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

"How did I come to know what I know about the world and myself? What ought I to know? What would I like to know that I don't know? If I want to know about this or that, where can I get the clearest, best and latest information? And where did these other people about me get their ideas about things, which are sometimes so different from mine?" - H.G. Wells

Edge 208
April 25, 2007

(11,000 words)

This EDGE edition, at 11,000 words with video, graphics, and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media - in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.

But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web - the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people.  It is particularly the AGGREGATION of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.

WHO SAYS WE KNOW
On the New Politics of Knowledge
By Larry Sanger

An EDGE Original Essay

LARRY SANGER, a co-founder of Wikipedia recently started a new competitor, the Citizendium, or the Citizens' Compendium.

The Reality Club:  Jaron Lanier, George Dyson

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#sanger
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THE REALITY CLUB
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Jaron Lanier, George Dyson on "Who Says We Know" by Larry Sanger

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GEORGE DYSON [ 4.24.07]

"The day when an energetic journalist could gather together a few star contributors and a miscellany of compilers of very uneven quality to scribble him special articles, often tainted with propaganda and advertisement, and call it an Encyclopaedia, is past."

So proclaimed H. G. Wells, to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on November 20th, 1936. With darkness descending across Europe, Wells called for "a World Encyclopaedia... carefully assembled with the approval of outstanding authorities in each subject... alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world."

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#sanger
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JARON LANIER [ 4.22.07]

He's charitable in characterizing his opponents as "egalitarian." By way of analogy, a clunky communist economy that makes everyone equally poor is not egalitarian in any admirable way, and neither is a sloppy information architecture that gives everyone equal access to creating and receiving mediocre information. ...

My problem with the Wikipedia was not primarily with the questions of expertise or accuracy when I wrote "Digital Maoism." Instead I was worried about the reduced expectations people seemed to have of themselves in the context of "Web 2.0." Why tweak a wiki or add data to some other conglomerate site when you now have the ability to really write and be read? Why choose to become part of an anonymous mush when you can finally be known? ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#sanger

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EDGE BOOKS
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WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? Today's Leading Thinkers on the
Unthinkable With an Introduction by STEVEN PINKER and an Afterword by
RICHARD DAWKINS Edited By JOHN BROCKMAN

"A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age."- SUNDAY HERALD

"Provocative" - THE INDEPENDENT

"Challenging notions put forward by some of the world's sharpest minds"-  SUNDAY TIMES

"A titillating compilation" - THE GUARDIAN

"Danger - brilliant minds at work...A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling." _ THE EVENING STANDARD (London)

Hardcover - UK
£12.99, 352 pp
Free Press, UK

Paperback - US
$13.95, 336 pp
Harper Perennial


WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in
the Age of Certainty With an Introduction by IAN MCEWAN Edited By JOHN
BROCKMAN

"...This collection, mostly written by working scientists, does not represent the antithesis of science. These are not simply the unbuttoned musings of professionals on their day off. The contributions, ranging across many disparate fields, express the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best - informed guesswork" - Ian McEwan, from the Introduction,in THE TELEGRAPH

"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle - a book ro be dog-eared and debated." - SEED

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best." - THE GUARDIAN

"Makes for some astounding reading." - BOSTON GLOBE

"Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once
you start, you can't stop thinking about that question." - BBC RADIO 4

"Intellectual and creative magnificance...an impressive array of insights and challenges that will surely delight curious readers, generalists and specialists alike." THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

Paperback - US
$13.95, 272 pp
Harper Perennial

Paperback - UK
£7.99 288 pp
Pocket Books

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THIRD CULTURE NEWS
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EL NORTE
April 17

La tercera cultura
Alfonso Elizondo

...the third culture is alive and in the heat of development. Books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Brian Greene, Stephen Pinker, Martin Rees, etcetera, are indispensable not only for their information, but they are also great successes in the bookstore. Their subjects deal wth the main controversies of the western world in the last decades: abortion and euthanasia, demographic policies, the increase of differences between rich and poor countries, pacifism, migrations, racism and xenophobia, the causes of the ecological crisis and the implications of the technology that lead to a postulation of an ethics of the responsibility and the social control of the scientific policies.

The world-wide phenomenon of the third culture is not only the interruption by the natural scientists of the postmodern intellectual scene, but a movement towards a global intellectual vision caused by the intensive use of the images and  hypermedia in the communication between the human beings, which has allowed the scientific knowledge of second half of 20th century  to permeate all society, providing for the utlization of information for confronting the great universal challenges of 21st century.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#eln
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NPR
April 25, 2007-Morning Edition

INTERVIEWS: Scott Atran
Moroccan Village Funnels Suicide Bombers to Iraq
[Listen]

Moroccan authorities believe the village of Tetuan has sent as many as 30 suicide bombers from the North African village to Iraq. Scott Atran, senior fellow at City University of New York's Center on Terrorism, briefed the National Security Council on the issue in March.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#npr
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ABC NEWS
April 23, 2007

Weightless Thrill Ride
Float like an astronaut in spAce on the new Zero Gravity Ride

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Zero Gravity Corporation

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#abc
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LOS ANGELES
April 23, 2007

Predicting random chaos from hindsight
Why do we insist on drawing causal chains to exceedingly rare calamities after the fact?

By Niall Ferguson

...YET IT IS Taleb's assault on traditional historiography that is most relevant here. Since Thucydides, it is true, historians have encouraged us to explain low-probability calamities (like wars) after the fact. Such storytelling helps us to make sense of a random disaster. It also enables us to apportion blame. Generations of historians have toiled in this way to explain the origins of such great calamities as, say, World War I, constructing elegant narrative chains of causes and effects, heaping opprobrium on this or that statesman.

There is something deeply suspect about this procedure, however. It results in what Taleb calls the "retrospective distortion." These causal chains were quite invisible to contemporaries, to whom the outbreak of war came as a bolt from the blue. The point is that there were umpteen Balkan crises before 1914 that didn't lead to Armageddon. Like Cho, the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip was a black swan - only vastly bigger. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#lat
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THE TIMES
April 23, 2007

The brutal truth is out at last

Anjana Ahuja: Science Notebook

...So, Professor Zimbardo stopped the experiment because he risked losing the woman he loved. He calls Dr Maslach a hero for challenging the wisdom that the experiment was a justifiable study of human nature. And it is has led him, he tells the Edge website ( www.edge.org), to consider the flip side of evil: the
psychology of heroism. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#times
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 19, 2007

How Safe Is the Race To Send Tourists into Space?

...Earlier this month, a Russian rocket carried another billionaire, former Microsoft Corp. programmer Charles Simonyi, to the International Space Station -- the fifth civilian to make the trip. The ride was brokered by Space Adventures Ltd., a company that has announced plans to build spaceports in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

But how safe is the space tourism business? The Wall Street Journal Online invited Patricia Smith, who heads the Federal Aviation Administration office responsible for overseeing the nascent industry, to discuss the topic with space   entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, a co-founder of Space Adventures and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, which awarded a $10 million prize to Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne in 2004. Their conversation, carried out via email, is below. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#wsj-space
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FORBES
May 7, 2007

Special Report

The Spreading Epidemic
We're destroying the web of nature. Can we knit it back together?

Larry Brilliant, M.D., M.P.H

...What are we to do? We need to reduce population growth through education, choices and widely available contraception. We must invent better desalinization methods and prepare for a new Green Revolution with seeds that will thrive in a brackish world. The attack on climate change must dramatically increase financial flows to clean energy--particularly in the developing world, most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Carbon trading systems can spur this clean energy transition, as well as restore forest and agricultural lands. And we must develop an early-disease-detection-and-response system, a sort of AWACs for epidemics. That requires networked technology plus a human network of cooperative efforts by scientists, governments, nonprofit groups, businesses and ordinary people. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#forbes
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FORBES
May 7, 2007

Special Report

Open-Door Policy
How do you create a new search engine based on trust--and still keep out the creeps?

By Jimmy Wales

...Openness and trust are at the core of Wikia Search. But how do you maintain a friendly system and still keep out troublemakers? Pretty much the same way Wikipedia is policed. Curse words, blanking pages, false inserts and other forms of delinquency are pretty easy to deal with. Admins, the thousand or so cops on the site, can block difficult users, delete entries, take away editing privileges from certain users, revert (or restore) entries. The core community of contributors is vigilant, too, and fixes improprieties quickly--often within seconds. That's because this community rallies around a couple of core concepts: neutrality and quality. The system isn't perfect, of course, as anyone who has followed various Wikipedia news headlines knows. There are errors, and sometimes quite embarrassing ones. But the system has a way of ferreting out errors and correcting them. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#forbes2
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FORBES
May 7, 2007

Special Report

The Inside-Out Web
What will replace the Internet? Something safer, more personal, more manageable

By David Gelernter

...The next Web--the Worldbeam, we call it--will resemble today's Web imploded or, if you prefer, turned inside out. It will be a single global "information beam." Every Web page ever posted is in this beam. Whenever someone updates a page or designs a new one, it is added to the end. The Worldbeam is a stream of many separate documents--or a beam with many documents dissolved in it, held in suspension. Both metaphors are useful. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#forbes3
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ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION
April 22, 2007
OPINION

NOTED: Strange looks and funny lines from the past week

Slide into evil. In the Stanford Prison Study in 1971, university students were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards and then placed in a mock prison setting in the basement of the campus psych building. The guards became so oppressive and sadistic, and the prisoners so passive and depressed, that the two-week study was ended after six days. Lead researcher Philip Zimbardo is featured on edge.org in a lengthy discussion of evil and heroism. He calls the study a "cautionary tale of the many ways in which good people can be readily and easily seduced into evil. . . . Those who sustain an illusion of invulnerability are the easiest touch for the con man, the cult recruiter or the social psychologist ready to demonstrate how easy it is to twist such arrogance into submission."

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#ajc
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PORTFOLIO
May 2007 Issue

Chaos Is Underrated

In The Black Swan, Taleb excoriates the delusions of economists and their ilk.
by Roger Lowenstein

...N.N.T., who lives in New York and has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, previously traded derivatives on Wall Street. The academics who drive him to tears are the ones who have explained - or Misexplained - his old profession. They think that markets are from Mediocristan when in fact they inhabit Extremistan.

Say what? Mediocristan is the terrain of the ordinary, the part of the world that conforms to the bell curve. It answers to statistics and knowable probabilities. Height resides in Mediocristan. You may find one 7-footer on your block, almost certainly not two. Experience (and biology) enable us to frame the odds. Weight is also from Mediocristan. Pick any 1,000 people and their average weight will be close to that of the general population (even if you include the world's fattest person). Personal wealth, however, is from Extremistan. For instance, the average wealth of 1,000 people will be very different if one of those people is Bill Gates.

This distinction is potent. In Extremistan, past events are a faulty guide to projecting the future. Gates may be the world's richest person, but it isn't unthinkable that someday, someone (at Google, perhaps?) will be twice as rich. Wars also reside in Extremistan. Prior to World War II, the planet had never experienced a conflict as terrible. Then we did. Suppose you frequent a pond. Day after day you see swans-always white. Naturally (but incorrectly) you presume that all swans are white. World War II was a black swan-horrific and unpredictable.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#port
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BLOGGINGHEADS.TV
April 20, 2007

Science Saturday: On Violence

John Horgan and George Johnson discuss Virginia Tech and gun control: John is horrified by Mickey's idiocy; Are we natural-born killers?; A history of violence (theories); The nature and nurture of evil; A primitive Amazonian tribe asks: Does Noam Chomsky know what he's talking about?; A spiritually uplifting conclusion. (1:03:35)

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#bh
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FRESH AIR WITH TERRY GROSS
April 19, 2007

Jimmy Wales on the User-Generated Generation

Jimmy Wales helped create Wikipedia, the interactive online encyclopedia founded in 2001. Users write and edit Wikipedia entries themselves; the site also has a dedicated corps of editors. There are often "edit wars" over entries - some, including the one headlined "2006 Lebanon War," have been edited and then re-edited thousands of times - and Wikipedia's accuracy has been questioned by some professors and colleges, who forbid students to cite it as a source. But Wikipedia, with versions in 250 languages, is one of the top 10 sites on the Internet.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#fresh
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BLOOMBERG
April 20, 2007

Embrace Black Swans to Avoid Financial Disaster, Urges Taleb
By Mark Gilbert

A slump in Chinese stocks on Feb. 27 triggered the worst week for U.S. equities in more than four years and the biggest one-day jump in volatility ever -- the financial equivalent of a butterfly's flapping wing in New Delhi causing a hurricane in North Carolina.

In "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,"  Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we are dangerously blind to the possibility of unlikely events, and reluctant to accept their unpredictability when they do occur. It is a seductive thesis.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#bberg
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BOING BOING
Thursday, April 19, 2007

Larry Sanger on the "New Politics of Knowledge"

In an original EDGE essay, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger claims that the Web's ability to aggregate public opinion and knowledge into some form of "collective intelligence" is leading to a new politics of knowledge. According to Sanger, the power to establish what "we all know'" is shifting out of the hands of a small elite group and becoming more of a conversation open to anyone with a Net connection. However, Sanger is also the founder of Citizendium, a competitor to Wikipedia that, according to its Web site, "aims to improve on (the Wikipedia) model by adding 'gentle expert oversight' and requiring contributors to use their real names."  In this essay, titled "Who Says We Know: On The New Politics Of Knowledge," Sanger argues that a lack of "expert" oversight leads to unreliable information, something he sees as a major flaw in knowledge egalitarianism. I'm sure this essay will spark as much fiery debate as the previous essay in this EDGE series, Jaron Lanier'S "Digital Maoism". ...


Previously on BB:
- Clay Shirkey: An "expert Wikipedia" won't work Link
- Responses to Jaron Lanier's crit of online collectivism Link

posted by David Pescovitz

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#boing
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 19, 2007

OPINION
Op-Ed Columnist

The Morality Line
By David Brooks

In short, the killings at Virginia Tech happen at a moment when we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice - and individual responsibility - begins. The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.And it's true. We're never going back. We're not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists? insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.

After all, according to research by David Buss, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had a vivid homicidal fantasy. But they didn't act upon it. They don't turn other people into objects for their own fulfillment.There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It's just that these selves can't be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#nyt
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THE COLBERT REPORT
Tuesday, April 17

Elaine Pagels tells Stephen about the gospel according to Judas.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html#colbert
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This EDGE edition, at 11,000 words with video, graphics, and links, is available online:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge208.html

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EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private  operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of  the Internal Revenue Code.
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