Philosophy – Page 23 – artdiamondblog.com

“Expert Scholarship” Versus “People of Dubious Background”

(p. 71) The acknowledgment, by name, of volunteers in the preface sections of the OED is akin to Wikipedia’s edit history, where one can inspect who contributed to each article. Some Oxford contributors were professors, some royalty, but most were ordinary folks who answered the call. Winchester, in The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, tells the story of the “madman” William Chester Minor, a U.S. Civil War survivor whose “strange and erratic behavior” resulted in him shooting an “innocent working man” to death in the street in Lambeth. He was sent to Broadmoor asylum for criminal lunatics. He discovered the OED as a project around 1881, when he saw the “Appeal for Readers” in the library, and worked for the next twenty-one years contributing to the project, receiving notoriety as a contributor “second only to the contributions of Dr. Fitzedward Hall in enhancing our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases and constructions.” Minor did something unusual in not just sending submissions, but having his own cataloging system such that the dictionary editors could send a postcard and “out the details flowed, in abundance and always with unerring accuracy.” Until Minor and Murray met in January 1891, no one working with (p. 72) the OED knew their prolific contributor was a madman and murderer housed at Broadmoor.

As we will see in later chapters, a common question of the wiki method is whether one can trust information created by strangers and people of dubious background. But the example of the OED shows that using contributors rather than original expert scholarship is not a new phenomenon, and that projects built as a compendium of primary sources are well suited for harnessing the power of distributed volunteers.

Source:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.
(Note: italics in original.)

“Better to Be Socrates Dissatisfied than a Fool Satisfied”

(p. 10) Happiness is, . . . , a complex concept and difficult to measure, and John Stuart Mill had a point when he suggested: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

For the full commentary, see:
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF. “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun.., January 16, 2010): 10.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 16, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

For 30 Years “Poincaré’s Elegant Math Prevailed Over Boltzmann’s Practical Findings”

(p. 182) . . . , Poincaré’s elegant math prevailed over Boltzrnann’s practical findings. For some thirty years, Boltzmann struggled to get his ideas across. But he failed. He had the word, but he could not find a way to gain its acceptance in the world. For long decades, the establishment held firm.

So in the year 1906, Poincaré became president of the French (p. 183) Académie des Sciences and Boltzmann committed suicide. As Mead debatably puts it, “Boltzmann died because of Poincaré.” At least, as Boltzmann’s friends attest, this pioneer of the modem era killed himself in an apparent fit of despair, deepened by the widespread official resistance to his views.
He died, however, at the very historic moment when all over Europe physicists were preparing to vindicate the Boltzmann vision. He died just before the findings of Max Planck, largely derived from Boltzmann’s probability concepts, finally gained widespread acceptance. He died several months after an obscure twenty-one-year-old student in Geneva named Albert Einstein used his theories in proving the existence of the atom and demonstrating the particle nature of light. In retrospect, Boltzmann can be seen as a near-tragic protagonist in the greatest intellectual drama of the twentieth century: the overthrow of matter.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Nationalizing Health Care: Communists Seized Pharmacy Owned By Ayn Rand’s Father

Source of book images: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) Ayn Rand poses theatrically in her signature cape and gold dollar-sign pin on the cover of a groundbreaking new biography. Rand also poses theatrically in this same Halloween-ready costume (Rand impersonators have been known to wear it) on the cover of another groundbreaking new biography. The two books are being published a week apart. And both have gray covers that make them look even more interchangeable. Yet Rand, whose Objectivist philosophy is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences, loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.
. . .
Ms. Heller’s book is worth its $35 price, which is not the kind of detail that Rand herself would have been shy about trumpeting. When Russian Bolshevik soldiers commandeered and closed the St. Petersburg pharmacy run by Zinovy Rosenbaum, they made a lifelong capitalist of his 12-year-old daughter, Alissa, who would wind up fusing the subversive power of the Russian political novel with glittering Hollywood-fueled visions of the American dream.
. . .
Crucially, both authors understand the reasons that Rand’s popularity has endured, not only among college students dazzled (and thronged into packs) by her triumphant individualism but also by entrepreneurs. From the young Ted Turner, who rented billboards to promote the “Who is John Galt?” slogan from “Atlas Shrugged,” to the founders of Craigslist and Wikipedia, who have found self-contradictory new ways to mix populism with individual enterprise, it is clear that (in Ms. Burns’s words) “reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “Books of The Times; Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand.” The New York Times (Thurs., October 21, 2009): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Legitimacy of Capitalism Rests on Rich Earning their Wealth

Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago. Source of photo and information in caption: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/luigi.zingales/research/date.html.

(p. A21) Luigi Zingales points out that the legitimacy of American capitalism has rested on the fact that many people, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, got rich on the basis of what they did, not on the basis of government connections. But over the years, business and government have become more intertwined. The results have been bad for both capitalism and government. The banks’ growing political clout led to the rule changes that helped create the financial crisis.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Bloody Crossroads.” The New York Times (Tues., September 8, 2009): A21.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated Sept. 7.)

The reference for the Zingales article is:
Zingales, Luigi. “Capitalism after the Crisis.” National Affairs, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 22-35.

Scientist Huxley: “The Great End of Life is Not Knowledge But Action”

John Barry calls our attention to the views of Thomas Huxley who gave the keynote address at the founding of the Johns Hopkins University:

(p. 13) A brilliant scientist, later president of the Royal Society, he advised investigators, “Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, “The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”

Source:
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
(Note: from the context in Barry, I am not certain whether the Huxley quotes are from the keynote address, or from elsewhere in Huxley’s writings.)

The Epistemological Implications of Wikipedia

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I think the crucial feature of Wikipedia is in its being quick (what “wiki” means in Hawaiian), rather than in its current open source model. Academic knowledge arises in a slow, vetted process. Publication depends on refereeing and revision. On Wikipedia (and the web more generally) knowledge is posted first, and corrected later.
In the actual fact, Wikipedia’s coverage is vast, and its accuracy is high.
I speculate that Wikipedia provides clues to developing new, faster, more efficient knowledge generating institutions.
(Chris Anderson has a nice discussion of Wikipedia in The Long Tail, starting on p. 65.)

(p. A13) Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.

In “The Wikipedia Revolution,” Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia — edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers — came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn’t Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.
. . .
By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in Chicago, was already at work on what he called “Nupedia” — an “open source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet.” Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate success. What turned it around was its conversion from a conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”) — that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.
The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, “the English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues.” Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The user community — Wikipedia’s core constituency — objected to the whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded through donations.
. . .
It is clear by the end of “The Wikipedia Revolution” that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when “dominant encyclopedias” were still hiding behind “paid fire walls” — and some still are — Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “Business Bookshelf; Everybody Knows Everything.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 18, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

RIP Marjorie Grene, Who Helped Polanyi with Personal Knowledge

“Marjorie Grene in 2003.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

The NYT reported, in the obituary quoted below, that philosopher Marjorie Grene died on March 16, 2009, at the age of 93.
Although I studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, my time there did not overlap with Marjorie Grene’s and I don’t believe that I ever met her, or ever even heard her speak (though I did occasionally walk past her former husband David Grene, on my way to talk to Stephen Toulmin).
I am increasingly appreciating Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge in which he introduced his view of what he called “tacit knowledge.” In particular, I am coming to believe that tacit knowledge is very important in understanding the role and importance of the entrepreneur.
So if Marjorie Grene was crucial to Personal Knowledge, as is indicated in the obituary quoted below, then she is deserving of serious consideration, and high regard.

(p. 23) In Chicago, she had met Michael Polanyi, a distinguished physical chemist turned philosopher; she ended up helping him research and develop his important book “Personal Knowledge” (1958). The book proposed a far more nuanced, personal idea of knowledge, and directly addressed approaches to science.

“There is hardly a page that has not benefited from her criticism,” Dr. Polanyi wrote in his acknowledgments. “She has a share in anything I may have achieved here.”
. . .
Her sense of humor sparkled when she was asked about being the first woman to have an edition of the Library of Living Philosophers devoted to her — Volume 29 in 2002. Previous honorees included Bertrand Russell and Einstein. “I thought they must be looking desperately for a woman,” Dr. Grene said.

For the full obituary, see:
DOUGLAS MARTIN. “Marjorie Grene, a Leading Philosopher of Biology, Is Dead at 98.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., March 29, 2009): 23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The reference for the Polanyi book, is:
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1958.

The Ascent of Science Led to Belief that the World Could Improve

I believe the following paragraph expresses the central message of Steven Johnson’s book The Invention of Air:

(p. 211) In the popular folklore of American History, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a (p. 212) kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve— if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it. And that believe emanated from the great ascent of science over the past century, the upward trajectory that Priestley had s powerfully conveyed in his History and Present State of Electricity. The political possibilities for change were modeled after the change they had all experience through the advancements in natural philosophy. With Priestley, they grasped the political power of the air pump and the electrical machine.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

Adams, as a Point of Honor, Defended the Innovations of Science

(p. 211) It is no accident that, despite the long litany of injuries Adams felt had been dealt him in Jefferson’s letters to Priestley, he chose to begin his counterassault by denying, as a point of honor, that he had ever publicly taken a position as president that was resistant to the innovations of science. Remember that Jefferson had also insinuated that Adams had betrayed the Constitution with his “libel on legislation.” But Adams lashed out first at the accusation that he was anti-science. That alone tells us something about the gap that separates the current political climate from that of the founders.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

“The American Experiment Was, Literally, an Experiment”

(p. 199) This is politics seen through the eyes of an Enlightened rationalist. The American experiment was, literally, an experiment, like one of Priestley’s elaborate concoctions in the Fair Hill lab: a system of causes and effects, checks and balances, that could only be truly tested by running the experiment with live subjects. The political order was to be celebrated not because it had the force of law, or divine right, or a standing army behind it. Its strength came from its internal balance, or homeostasis, its ability to rein in and subdue efforts to destabilize it.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.