User:Rocksanddirt

ACME drama rating

NEEDS MOAR DRAMAHZ!

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information... Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.
— Adam Gopnik, "How the Internet gets inside us"; New Yorker, 14 February 2011

-highjacked from mastcel's user page via talk page stalking of bishonen.

Wow, no wonder the project is teetering on its rails.

summary of irc, and mantanmoreland arbcases

Important resource

Please remember that, on the Internet, when there is smoke there is usually someone blowing smoke out of their ass.

from User:Coren on Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Motions.

My faith in the en.wikipedia governance and content management pracitices is currently quite weak. A few thoughts by others are below.

Why the constant labeling of pseudoscience is wrong (from the article on pseudoscience)

Philosopher of science Larry Laudan has suggested that pseudoscience has no scientific meaning and mostly describes our emotions: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘unscientific’ from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us".^[1] Richard McNally, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, states: "The term 'pseudoscience' has become little more than an inflammatory buzzword for quickly dismissing one’s opponents in media sound-bites" and "When therapeutic entrepreneurs make claims on behalf of their interventions, we should not waste our time trying to determine whether their interventions qualify as pseudoscientific. Rather, we should ask them: How do you know that your intervention works? What is your evidence?".^[2]

Notes

^ Laudan L (1996) "The demise of the demarcation problem" in Ruse, Michael, But Is It Science?: The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy pp. 337-350.
^ McNally RJ (2003) Is the pseudoscience concept useful for clinical psychology? SRMHP Vol 2 Number 2 Fall/Winter[1]

User:Rocksanddirt/sandbox - stray thoughts, text to fix.