Sociology Wiki Discussion
Sociology Wiki DiscussionThe lengthy discussion on this page (not all of it retained) eventually spawned the SociologyWiki. Further debate goes there.
Considering the opinion expressed in ThePoliticsDiscussionGraveyard? that all "unenlightened" (whatever that means) contributions on any "off-topic" subject (eg, politics, philosophy and psychology in the general case) should be deleted aggressively .... I think that these pages should quickly be relocated to their own SociologyWiki, or simply to somewhere more congenial where people won't try to "cleanse" the wiki. Is there already a wiki that would suit?
I'm firmly of the belief that whatever Wiki were to become the repository for politics stuff moved would have to be much more rigorously moderated than WardsWiki is now. Consider the amount of flamage already here, and then consider how many more flame-warriors would show up to a Wiki that was 100% politics, 0% boring design patterns and programming methodology ...
I still have a little hope for the role of politics here, but then I've been known to be overly optimistic before.
-- FrancisHwang
Just a quick thought, not baked or seasoned yet - might it help to have predicated pages? For instance, suppose one disagreed with a page on economic policy not because of anything specific to the presented arguments, but because it relied heavily on the assumption that free markets work. Then one might flag the page with PredicatedOnFreeMarket? and place one's disagreement there. This would avoid repeating the basic disagreement on principles, but also clearly indicate that if the free market is indeed shown to fail hard, the current discussion can safely be ignored, and point out circular reasoning whenever it comes up. Maybe that gets too far from the relentless pursuit of truth, but so does flaming as it tends to stall the discussion, and without careful analysis it looks like a fair compromise.
I like it a lot except for the name pattern. PredicatedOnX isn't likely to come up in normal discussion. AssumesWeAcceptFreeMarkets? or AssumesFreeMarkets? would be more likely to come up in normal discussion, leading to more AccidentalLinking.
You could set up these kinds of assumptions, and it would make for a lot less flameage, but the result would be a lot less Wiki, wouldn't it? I mean, isn't the strength of Wiki that it encourages the middle ground, the act of synthesis and consensus? Sure, we can set up little areas saying "People who like capitalism go here, people who don't go there", but then why don't we just use UltimateBulletinBoard?? (See also: SplitByTopicNotByOpinion) -- francis
Well, the intent of the suggestion wasn't a topic split, it was to localize common material. If there's one section for discussing capitalism then synthesis is more likely than if separate arguments break out on each issue even remotely connected to it. And, of course, on some things synthesis realistically just isn't going to happen. But I'm not a WikiVeteran? and I won't pretend that I know whether or not such an idea would work in practice.
I understood it in that sense. For example, one of the issues any political or economic system has to deal with is justice. When confronting a right-winger, someone could respond by linking to a page called PresupposesDesert? (that it is possible to deserve something as recompense for having done something) or PresupposesNoHumanRights?, or both. In another instance, someone might link to PresupposesHomoEconomicus?. In all these cases, it would be a quick and easy way to dismiss an argument from consideration (assuming the argument does presuppose what the opponent claims it presupposes), and that's what would reduce flamage.
Also, a SociologyWiki is being planned precisely because synthesis is impossible and consensus-building is stifling. For example, it's impossible to arrive at a consensus about how evil the USA is and what's to be done about it with people who don't know anything about politics, economics or foreign affairs. What is possible is to dismantle bogus arguments, disprove lies and construct an unassailable structure of arguments and reason. This is an extremely ambitious goal which can't be done in a few pages (ie, synthesis is impossible for some simple conception of it). For example, it's impossible to prove that capitalism is evil without a dozen different examples on a half-dozen different topics. And that's not even going into what alternatives to capitalism exist, what principles should be used to evaluate them, and which one turns out to be the best.
There is a related concern (it may be the one Francis tried to get at), that people would blithely ignore links to PresumesX pages and just keep on reading whatever disproved theory was on that page. One solution to that is to break another wiki convention and allow people to declare victory. For example, if the argument on PresumesHomoEconomicus? were settled, thoroughly dismantling the notion of HomoEconomicus?, then somewhere else, people might write "This argument PresumesHomoEconomicus?, thus is completely nullified." Of course, the only purpose to this is to force intellectually dishonest people to face reality, which is of dubious value.
a SociologyWiki is being planned precisely because synthesis is impossible and consensus-building is stifling.
Well, I can't say I believe this to be proven at all. I mean, who out there is even trying to do any refactoring on the politics pages we have now? Synthesis is much more difficult, yes. But I feel like many have of us have given up prematurely on synthesis prematurely on these pages.
Besides synthesis is the direction, but it is not a presupposition. If you look on plenty of the non-politics pages here, you can find plenty of healthy disagreement. Look at LawOfDemeter, or MethodsShouldBePublic, for example. It is harder to perform synthesis when there is disagreement, of course, but it is not impossible.
But let's say, for example, that synthesis were impossible regarding political issues. Then why would you want them on Wiki pages at all? Look at a page like WtcPoliticsOfTerror? - it's a bloody mess, sprawling and rambling without any organizational sense. Any useful discussion that might have been extracted from the threads inside that page are trapped in the ossified thread form it's grown now. And now nobody's willing to touch it. (Well, I am, I suppose, though my list of pages to refactor is about 30 long these days.)
You need to give people license to refactor on a Wiki, and I see synthesis as a vital part of refactoring. -- francis
I can see that, but why would predication change any of it? As far as I can tell the main problem with WtcPoliticsOfTerror? is that, as a collection of opinions, nothing ever got removed or reorganized, or touched in any way. The goal here would be to encourage compartmentalization by topic to help prevent that, and grouping arguments by how specific they are (these deal with the issue at hand, these deal with far more general points) should be a good way to do that.
Yeah, perhaps my instinctive dislike of predication isn't quite justified. I suppose I'd have to see how it would work in practice.
I wasn't so much making a point here about predication, though, as much as refactoring in general. Already we have politics pages here that nobody will refactor, making them crufty and unreadable and useless. And a separate SociologyWiki would be even more controversial, scaring people off from refactoring. So the question is: How do we encourage more people to refactor? I tried asking this question on EncouragingWikiRefactoring, but other people didn't seem interested in the question at the time. Maybe it's more relevant now? ~ francis
The discussion would have been very different if I had been able to write an AmericaHadItComing? page, building on top of AmericaIsEvil? and WhatIsAmerica?. The last because Americans rarely understand the difference between people, a society and a state.
As it is, I wasn't even willing to link to WarIsPsychopathological to bolster the argument that the terrorists wished to achieve nothing beyond sharing their pain with their hated enemy (which they did). You can't ask for synthesis and refactoring in a forum where contributions are suppressed. And you can't 'synthesize' drivel with non-drivel. -- rk
What's your solution, then? If the new SociologyWiki is full of people who call other people's opinions "drivel", then I guess I won't be participating. - francis
I still think that a separate SociologyWiki is a good idea. It would divide the RecentChanges page so that people interested in a topic (politics in this case) have to take the active step of switching to the other wiki to see any pages. Then they couldn't whine about the political content or threaten to delete it just because it was political and controversial. It goes the other way too, people only interested in politics wouldn't have to weed through a long list of irrelevant changes.
And of course, any SociologyWiki should be a SisterSites with linking active in both directions. If it weren't then politics would crop up again on WikiWikiWeb because people interested in it wouldn't know where to go.
If AndyMorris is right about the present attitude to politics (see WardCunningham) then I think it's just a matter of time before some NekulturnyAmerican tries to MindWipe all politics off WikiWikiWeb.
The most important reason for having a separate SociologyWiki is that the subject deserves to exist in its own right. To have moderators and a community who care for it instead of tolerating it. To develop its own culture and its own norms.
Please help me write the charter for an "opinion" wiki that would be one of the SisterSites to this one. -- WardCunningham
The opinion wiki exists to ... {help me complete this thought.}
The opinion wiki shares these values with the original wiki from which it was spawned ...
Yes, I meant opinion as short for political opinion, as one might find in the newspaper under the title "Opinion". Perhaps "op-ed" would be a better title since it implies more diversity than that of the editors who contribute to the opinion page.
Is one wiki room enough? Another alternative would be to make a variety of wiki sites aligned with various poles of thought. Perhaps making them SisterSites would be as much a contribution to consensus as we could expect to work. I am imagining an AynRand site with AccidentalLinking to a NoamChomsky site and a CheGuevara? site. -- WardCunningham
Two problems. First, none of these sites would have the critical mass to go it alone. Second, this would polarize the subject matter along political lines, exactly as Francis and I are worried about above.
The kind of consensus achieved would be hollow and brittle. Instead of one viewpoint emerging dominant and everyone else being forced to deal with it, you'd have little enclaves of dogma where everyone can seek shelter, and a constant never-ending war between those enclaves.
This is what exists on UseNet. Every dogma has its own little newsgroup where the dogmatists can seek shelter, and periodically someone starts off a massive flamewar by crossposting between opposing newsgroups. But the wars are always superficial and nothing ever gets resolved one way or the other.
Finally, if the idea is to be studiously non-partisan and even-handed, then that's already what WikiPedia does. And there's really no point copying an already existing forum. -- rk
First, of all, I think the notion of things getting "resolved" is fundamentally anti-Wiki. If you want permanence, read books. Or even write one.
And while I agree with Richard that polarization wouldn't be the best result, it's certainly not the worst result. The worst result is a SociologyWiki that crams together all the opposing opinions in one place, without having any strong moderation to prevent flame-wars from breaking out. And perhaps this worst-case SociologyWiki would have a few opinionated refactorers who delete content they don't agree with, resulting in lots of highly politicized meta-discussion and lots of screaming and fuming and stomping out.
My ideal SociologyWiki involves a place where people discuss these issues passionately but remaining respectful of differing opinions. A place where people fearlessly refactor in a way that retains all that diversity of opinion.
However, I'm not sure if I believe such a wiki is possible. ~ francis
Ok, then, let's look at the main disagreement here. Personally, I value truth very highly, so maintaining opinions doesn't interest me should they be completely invalid. The Sep 11 ideas about a grand war between Xianity and Islam were part of the diversity here, but I wouldn't miss them for an instant. This is not to say I want everyone to agree with me all the time, far from it - when I'm wrong, I want people to tell me so and explain why. This is not always comfortable, so I might resist and not thank them afterwards, but I'd far rather that than being left in blissful ignorance.
RichardKulisz, who made the initial suggestion up top, I believe has somewhat similar priorities. Evidently you, and the majority of the wiki community, would rather preserve diversity even when it means abandoning the pursuit of truth. I think this is not without its worth, and certainly do not oppose you from doing so. It's the dominant ethos for this wiki and for many of its progeny, and has contributed lots to them. But for this particular topic, it doesn't appear to have been particularly successful, and I feel the other approach would be more useful.
If you think the only thing that sets wiki apart from usenet or straight text is its ability to tolerate full diversity, I must strongly disagree. Wiki is a powerful tool for collaborative exploration, and you can explore truth and easily as you can explore opinion. That's why we're proposing a different wiki, whose values can be directed to the former without interfering with the latter values of this one, to deal with sociology.
Or that's my take on the proposal. Of course if only one or two others are at all interested then we'd have nowhere near critical mass, especially since I'm not especially knowledgeable on the subject. But it's what I'd like to see. -- JG
Written simultaneously:
What I'm concerned about is the ability to refute a viewpoint or ideology, like what I started on AynRand. That has to be possible or else the whole thing is a farce.
I don't care whether or not people call each other's arguments and opinions drivel or rubbish, because someone has already said that on Why about NoamChomsky. There will always be people who dismiss anything that clashes with the dominant ideology and as long as they limit themselves to that, it's not a big deal.
I'm not worried about flamewars erupting between honest people, no matter how much their ideologies clash, nor how shocked and offended they are. I'm not concerned about the people who think theirs is the one true way. I'm not even concerned about blatant idiots like the 'Yank with the tank' on ThirdWorldDieback?. What I worry about are the dishonest people who don't care about thinking clearly about politics, don't care about counter-arguments, and think that their opinion is valid just because it's an opinion. I'm concerned about the post-modern types who think that politics is just opinion, just culturally relative, and that arguments and scholarship don't matter. That's why I'm in favour of one big pressure cooker instead of islands of inbreeding.
Now, this affects diversity. It's pretty clear that the diversity of every person thinking and saying their own thing independently of any other opinions, arguments and facts on the site, would be absent. I think that's a good thing or at least not a BadThing. There would be another kind of diversity instead. One where people interact with each other, responding to counter-arguments and criticism. If fascism is explained and vigorously debated, then it's a good thing. If a fascist can go on the site and say what he likes without refutation because everyone "respects" his viewpoint, then that's advertising. -- rk
Right, then, we have an honest disagreement about what sort of SociologyWiki we'd like to see. Nothing wrong with that. Perhaps it'd be good to take a vote, because I think the two styles might be mutually exclusive. Though perhaps it's inevitable that whenever you spawn a SisterSite, some people just won't like the style of the new place. ~ francis
It might be a good idea to weigh the vote according to how strong the person's secessionist feelings run. To me, there is no point making a politics wiki if it will have the same culture, and associated problems, as WikiWikiWeb. It might be a good idea to adopt the more radical proposal both to make the secessionists happy and for purposes of experimentation.
And if that isn't enough, your proposal has many serious shortcomings, ranging from the practical to the philosophical.
The purpose of wikis is collaboration. In most cases, this means collaboration in search for truth. It's just that truth is difficult to discern and is established at an extremely fine grain so it seems like a search for it isn't going on on a grand scale. (If someone wrote that the internet was invented by BillGates, many people would correct it, with the illusory issue of this being an opinion never being raised.) Further, the entire point of DocumentMode is to synthesize objective truth, leaving personal truths (eg, "I like Emacs") behind. So being that the purpose of wikis is a collaborative search for truth then it is philosophically ugly to limit collaboration between participants of SociologyWiki to those of "one's own kind". Why is it that anarchists should collaborate only with other anarchists, capitalists only with other capitalists, et cetera? If we are to limit collaboration in this way and deviate from TheWikiWay in such a radical manner, then it should be justified.
Now, how could this be justified? Most obviously by claiming that collaboration on high level political issues is impossible, that dialectic between people of opposing political viewpoints is futile. I don't believe that for a minute. (Has anyone else noticed that both Joshua and I are Canadian while Francis and Ward are both American?)
The practical problem is that by eliminating collaboration between different viewpoints (possibly going so far as creating separate wikis for each of them) you're left with non-viable subcommunities. Since they would be islands of inbreeding, filled with members who all Think Correctly, there would be little or no need to communicate between members of those groups. As long as everyone was up on the latest party dogma (something which a static web site would do better), there wouldn't be any need to say anything except maybe to express how Chairman Mao's Red Book (or AynRand's AtlasShrugged) helps one through personal crises and inspires one to greatness.
And if there is some viable subcommunity then it will be made viable from the strength of its internal disagreements. (Apparently, people have forgotten that communities in the real world are formed for the purpose of resolving conflicts.) But if that happens then we have a real problem because its political opinions will be unrepresentative of political thought as a whole. So for the sake of presenting every political opinion on an equal footing, we'd end up with something arbitrarily skewed, probably towards the currently dominant ideology (pro-American corporate capitalism). Or possibly nothing at all. (There is a good reason why opponents of a scheme should have no say in its implementation. It's because they frequently end up sabotaging it, either deliberately or through misunderstanding.)
These problems arise because without a mediating force between different political arguments (ie, reasoned arguments, facts and logic) we are left with an extremely severe problem. Wildly divergent and antithetical opinions have to coexist in some manner. On WikiWikiWeb they don't. Even on WhyClublet they don't. They're suppressed by mutual consent, deletion and occasional banning of users. So the only way they'll coexist on SociologyWiki is if people completely ignore each other, limiting collaboration to those of "their own kind". The proposed moderating force (a powerful dictator to micromanage interactions) is unacceptable. Not least because no one will volunteer for that position.
And here's a final problem. Nothing short of creating separate wikis will make it possible for people to ignore their ideological opponents. I tolerate opponents because I know that I can respond to them and dismantle their viewpoint with arguments, facts and reason (and if not then maybe they have something worth listening to). And we know how most people tolerate ideological opponents: not at all. Unless people's toleration of what they consider drivel becomes magically greater just because they're on SociologyWiki instead of WikiWikiWeb, the proposed scheme won't work and will, at best, degenerate into SearchForTruth. At worst, well we already know what happens to politics on WikiWikiWeb. -- rk
I don't think there's good reason to have a separate opinion wiki because it wouldn't differ much from WikiWikiWeb. Contrast with:
Proposed Charter
The SociologyWiki exists to ... discuss and explore political, economic, psychological and philosophical issues.
The SociologyWiki shares these values with the original wiki from which it was spawned ...
It should be noted, though, that the goal would not be to aspire to some standard of objectivity, but to make genuine reasoned evaluations and dismantle unsubstantiated positions. Thus, on the actual sociology wiki, things like the claims above would be immediately subject to scrutiny, and some quite likely rejected very quickly (let's not bother anticipating the conclusions here, ok, please?).
Well, here's how I imagine that going in the best case. It is almost inevitable that Kulisz would pop up and declare America to be a great evil, and as far as I am concerned welcome. Other people would be permitted to dispute, either with counter-arguments or more likely by declaring his claim unsubstantiated. Hopefully this would be followed by a thorough exploration of the issue, with pages like AmericaInAfghanistan?, AmericaInIsrael?, ClassStriationInAmerica?, GodInTheAmericanGovernment?, and so forth, which might simply be references to existing documents (and again, these would have to be argued down, not just dismissed because they were from Chomsky or Rand or Lincoln or whoever). This would likely prove very tedious for a while, but when done, would either give Kulisz a thorough reference to say what he likes or give people thorough grounds to discredit him on, either of which would be adhered to throughout.
Question: should speculative/futuristic (not StarTrek but MolecularNanoTechnology) be included under the rubric of philosophy?
My vote would be no, at least initially. Sociology and psychology are broad enough without including material directly connected to them, so I would leave technological speculations out of the charter and seeds, and that wait to see whether or not they turns up. And actually, I'd recommend the same attitude be taken to most of philosophy - the last thing the world needs is a proliferation of philosophy wikis identifying themselves through slightly different approaches. We're simply trying to give a home to something without one. -- JoshuaGrosse, btw (so now you can decide whether or not my opinion should count. :)
Moral philosophy has strong tie-ins to politics though now that I think about it, I don't know whether that's sufficient reason to include it. Then there's philosophy that touches on moral philosophy. -- RichardKulisz
I had ethics in mind when I said most and not all. If we get for instance something like the problem with that system is that it relies on other people, who do not have a franchise, to do all the work, with the reply, which is fine, so long as the work gets done, then we have a problem, which I believe needs recourse to philosophy. More moderate cases I can see coming up a lot. But perhaps it would be best at the beginning to create block summaries and back-links instead of actually seeding the wiki with the material here.
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