Earlier, I wrote:
What I meant to say here is that you should not concentrate
decision-making power or wealth in the hands of any organization,
government or private. A "Manhattan Project" unified effort to solve
the energy crisis, or develop cold fusion, is bound to fail. We must
have free market competition with many different independent groups.
Here is an interesting and contradictory comment from an interview of
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia:
"On other occasions, Wales has offered a more erudite account of the
site's origins and purpose. In 1945, in his famous essay 'The Use of
Knowledge in Society,' the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek argued
that market mechanisms serve "to share and synchronize local and
personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse,
complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous
self-organization." (These are the words not of the Nobel Prize
winner himself but of Wikipedia's entry on him.) 'Hayek's work on
price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the
Wikipedia project,' Wales wrote on the blog of the Internet law guru
Lawrence Lessig. "One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia
without understanding Hayek." Long before socialism crumbled, Hayek
saw the perils of centralization. When information is dispersed (as
it always is), decisions are best left to those with the most local
knowledge. This insight, which undergirds contemporary
libertarianism, earned Hayek plaudits from fellow libertarian
economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman as the "most
important social thinker of the 20th century." The question: Will
traditional reference works like Encyclopedia Britannica, that great
centralizer of knowledge, fall before Wikipedia the way the Soviet
Union fell before the West?"
This is contradictory because Wales wants to decentralize knowledge
and reduce the role of authorities, but the rules and structure of
Wikipedia accomplish just the opposite. They drown out minority
views. They enforce a single, unified mainstream point of view.
Wikipedia could fix this problem by allowing articles on
controversial subjects to be split in half, with the first part
written by supporters, and the second part by opponents.
This article repeats the notion that Wikipedia generally succeeds in
maintaining a "neutral point of view," which I think is absurd. Wales
describes himself as a "pathological optimist," and I agree. He is so
blindly optimistic that he does not recognize there are people who
will distort articles for their own nefarious ends, and there are
serious controversies in the world. "Controversial" means there is no
such thing as a neutral point of view. Both sides sincerely believe
they are right, and you would have to be omniscient to be "neutral."
You cannot split the difference and find some compromise or neutral
position between the supporters and opponents of cold fusion. We have
no common ground. Huizenga believes that theory overrules replicated
experiment. Schwinger stuck to the traditional views, which are
diametrically opposite, and mutually incompatible. This difference
cannot be smoothed over except by noting a trivial exception to
Schwinger's view, which is that in the early stages of a discovery,
when there have been only a few replications, there may still be room
for doubt based on theory.
Any treatise describing cold fusion must be sympathetic to either
Huizenga or Schwinger; you cannot have it both ways. I suppose it
might repeat every assertion, once positive and once again negative,
or it might begin every sentence: "Assuming the experiments are right
. . ." That is tantamount to writing the whole article twice, once
for each point of view. It does not give the article one neutral point of view.
Having said all that, I must admit that the Wikipedia cold fusion
article is surprisingly good considering how many skeptics there are
out there anxious to trash it. It is better than it used to be. The
skeptics are largely absent these days. Perhaps this reflects growing
public acceptance of the field, but I think it probably reflects
vigilant editing by pro-cold fusion people. In other words, someone,
probably Pierre Carbonnelle, is devoting a lot of time to policing
the article. I think this is wasteful, and it should not be
necessary. If the rules were tweaked a little, it would be easier for
both supporters and opponents of cold fusion to see to it that their
points of view were accurately expressed.
- Jed
- [Vo]:More on the dangers of centralization, and Wikipedia Jed Rothwell
-
