Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
It's really an aspect of the problem of scale. Those who could do
something about it are overwhelmed and must make snap judgments, so
when an issue is complex, really bad decisions are made.
This is true, and it is difficult problem. Sometimes, this is what
causes capable people in the top ranks of huge organizations to make
horrendous errors. For example, in the Federal Gov't, or at IBM or
GM. It seems likely to me that Obama or the head of the DoE have no
knowledge of cold fusion, for example, because they have so much else
on their plates, and so many people giving them advice. They have no
time to hear about cold fusion. No one in their office happened to
see "60 Minutes" last April. (I suppose . . .)
This also explains why skilled generals in the heat of battle
sometimes make huge mistakes that are out of character. The press of
events, fatigue, or the need to make snap decisions without enough
information causes them to make mistakes they would not normally make.
You have to sympathize with the Wikipedia Foundation in this regard.
When a method generally works but occasionally causes disastrous
failures it is hard to say they should abandon it. The free-for-all
technique does not work for an article on cold fusion, but it works
for hundreds of thousands of other articles, and many of these would
not even be written in the first place with a tighter set of rules.
Articles about Japanese comic book characters, for example, would not
be written. They have some social and literary value for people who
want to learn about Japan. See, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maison_Ikkoku
Not important, you say? Maybe not, but neither is most literature. It
is a good way to learn about what it was like living as a college
student in Japan in the 1980s.
Perhaps we need one set of procedures for comic-book fans and another
for physics. After all, in the real world information on these topics
is written, reviewed and published by very different means, with
utterly different standards.
There does not seem to be any acrimonious disputes in the talk
section of this comic book article, by the way. The article content
seems accurate to me.
- Jed
