Citizendium Blog

April 27, 2007

Reply to Nicholas Carr

Filed under: Press & blogs, Theory — Larry Sanger @ 10:26 am

Nick Carr used snippets from my recent essay on Edge,Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge,” as an excuse to rant on at great length yesterday.  Apparently, Nick says, I didn’t just hit a nerve, I hit three nerves.

Well, I think Nick should be on my side, and his charming rant is based primarily on misunderstanding.  Let me explain.

Here’s a taste of Sanger’s deathful prose…

Gee Nick, you can’t blame me for writing like a philosopher when I’m reporting about philosophy!

Although I think Citizendium will flop - it’s too late to market and it comes wrapped in an ornate intellectual scaffolding that acts as a kind of force field against intruders (ie, contributors)…

Hold on there hoss.   You should probably read up on why the Citizendium will (probably) succeed as well as the most recent update.  I know we were supposed to fail, but apparently we missed the memo — we’ve been doing quite well.  And where, pray tell, is this “ornate intellectual scaffolding”?  CZ is a wiki.  We’ve got rules, but far fewer than Wikipedia, and we’re quite open to nearly everyone who is willing to work within some modest constraints.  (Sign up here!)

…I sense that if Wikipedia is afflicted by what I’ve termed the cult of the amateur (Sanger calls it “dabblerism”), Citizendium may be afflicted by the cult of the expert. Both cults operate at approximately an equal distance from reality.

That’s just a cheap shot for rhetorical glitter.  I mean, sheesh.  CZ ain’t elitist; we occupy the middle ground.  If there is a “cult of the expert,” it can be found in some segments of academia.  CZ isn’t called “the Citizens’ Compendium” for nothing: we really are open and welcoming to non-experts.  Really!

To be honest, I don’t see much difference between Sanger and his arch-nemesis and sometime collaborator Jimmy Wales.

Perish the thought.  For one thing, I didn’t think it was a good idea to make money from pictures of nekkid ladies.

They’re true believers arguing over a technicality - always the bitterest kind of dispute - and Wales recently sidled toward Sanger’s camp when he came out in favor of introducing a more formal credentialism into Wikipedia’s already extraordinarily bureaucratic operation. (Wikipedia was once about outsiders; now it’s about insiders.) As Wikipedia shifts from pursuing quantity to pursuing “quality,” it is already heading in Sanger’s direction. 

Except that it isn’t.  Apparently you don’t understand, Nick, that there is a power struggle going on at the highest, most exalted levels of Wikipedia-land.  Credible sources tell me that the Wikimedia Board greatly resents Jimmy’s authority, yet Jimmy stays in power.  (I’ll be damned — and quote this back to me in 2-3 years, if necessary – if I still behave as editor-in-chief of CZ when I’m no longer actually editor-in-chief.)  This is why Jimmy was able to nominate Essjay to the Arbitration Committee singlehandedly — a power no one else has, that I know of – even after knowing that Essjay had lied about his identity.  Anyway, when Jimmy started telling reporters a while back that Wikipedia would soon start checking and approving experts who claimed to have certain credentials, they simply reported this as a fact, a done deal.  Well, it isn’t one.  The Wikipedia community has soundly rejected even Jimmy’s proposed half-measure, and is striding boldly ahead with their dabblerism (def: the view that no one should have any special role or authority in a content creation system simply on account of their expertise).  I told you, over two years ago, that Wikipedia will very likely not be able to change what makes it dysfunctional.

Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of “human knowledge.” Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for “truth,” anyway?

Well, that depends on what you mean by “truth.”  They’re looking for truth in the sense that they’re looking for data that corresponds to reality, yep, that’s what they look for in reference works of all sorts.  But they don’t — particularly when it comes to Wikipedia — expect to find The Truth, which as far as I can tell means “deep, important wisdom that should change the way we live.”  Unless they’re very, very confused.  I’m sure neither Jimmy nor I believe that a neutral encyclopedia can deliver The Truth.  For one thing, The Truth isn’t neutral, which is why you shouldn’t expect to find it in an encyclopedia.  Unless, of course, you’re a conservative, and the “encyclopedia” is Conservapedia!

Now that I’m warmed up, I have to say there’s another thing that gets my goat about Sanger, Wales, and all the other pixel-eyed apologists for the collective mediocritization of culture.  

Nick, you are going to love Andrew Keen’s book, the title of which uses your phrase: The Cult of the Amateur.

“I am optimistic,” Sanger recently said, with a face as straight as the theoretical line that runs the shortest possible distance between two points, “about humanity’s coming enlightenment.”

Truth! Knowledge! Enlightenment!

Enlightenment, of course, presupposes darkness: If we’re to be delivered into the light, then we must be mired in the murk of ignorance. So Sanger has to paint a fantastical picture of the past for his observations about the present and future to carry any weight.

Nick, this is a Very Big Misunderstanding.  When I speak of “enlightenment,” I mean precisely the sort of thing you mean when you emphasize accuracy.  I mean that people will have fantastic boatloads reliable, vetted information, more than they ever have had easy access to in the past — and all for free, too.  That is something that until recently was very hard to come by in some parts of the world, and in some households and schools.

In his fantasy, “what we know” has through the ages been tightly controlled by all-powerful elites and doled out to us like so many spoonfuls of baby food:

In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media - in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.

If this isn’t complete nonsense, it is such a ridiculous exaggeration that, for all practical purposes, it’s indistinguishable from complete nonsense. What’s most appalling is the way it presents “we” - by which I assume Sanger means the entirely imaginary claylike mass of undifferentiated beings that to him and others of his ilk represents mankind - as being dumb receptor valves entirely without imagination or a capacity for free thought. If from the Enlightenment to the present, “we” were spoonfed “what we know” by some central cabal of elitist gatekeepers bent on thought control, then why are we - or, more precisely, were we - so smart?

This is another of your Very Big Misunderstandings.  I strongly agree with your objection to your straw Sanger.  If you read the opening of my essay, you’ll see that I know very well that there are plenty of people who rebel against those who articulate what “we all know.”  There always have been.  An excellent, timely example is the business about anthropogenic global warming.  We all know, or we are supposed to, that human beings are the cause of the recent global warming.  We’ve seen many official scientific panels, UN committees, studies, news articles, and Al Gore, all telling us explicitly that the debate is over and that the time for action is at hand.  Quite frankly, this annoys the hell out of me, not because I am a global warming skeptic, but because I don’t like being told that I can’t be a skeptic — or that I’m immoral, as Gore actually said in An Inconvenient Truth, if I am one.

When I speak of “what we all know,” I’m using the phrase in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.  So, when I speak about the people who are authorized to speak about ”what we all know,” I am talking about those who set the trends in what can be presented as if it were literally known, in schools, newspapers, and public discourse generally.  (See this essay for a more complete explanation, in the section called “What the debate is about.”)

So, you don’t know how much we agree about this, Nick.  I’m the architect of Nupedia’s and Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, which I did more than anyone to enforce and establish as a policy.  The reason I am so passionate about neutrality is that I don’t like being told what to think, dammit.  This is one reason, quite frankly, that I decided, back in 1995, that I didn’t want to be a college professor.  I just didn’t want to have to buy into the whole apparatus that it seems I had to, in order to be a well-functioning philosophy professor.  (Yes, yes, I ended up going back for a time…but that’s another matter.)

With this in mind, let me give you another example of a bit where your misunderstanding played out:

 I swear to God, I have not yet met anyone on this planet, whether sharp as a tack or dumb as a rock, who, if he desires to find out what “everybody knows,” feels that he is limited by what the New York Times or the Encyclopedia Britannica “declares.”

Nobody with any intellectual independence feels personally limited by such sources.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that these are classic examples of sources that have no compunctions about taking for granted, and further propagating, what we are presumed to know: society’s background knowledge.  The obvious fact is that there are many things that we are supposed to believe, even if we don’t want to, and society has mechanisms for enforcing those beliefs.

In a comment appended to Sanger’s essay, Jaron Lanier distills into four words the biggest problem with Wikipedia’s articles, and my guess is that the criticism will apply equally well to Citizendium’s: “The emphasis is random.” So true. Even when Wikipedia gets the facts right, the balance of those facts, a more subtle issue but one that’s equally important to accuracy, is often off. Small points get blown out of proportion - particularly those subject to debate - while big points get expressed poorly or glossed over. This is not a problem of expertise. It’s a problem of expression. In the end, Sanger’s barking up the wrong tree. The quality of an encyclopedia is not determined by the number of experts who sign up to contribute but by the skill of the writers and editors who translate what the experts know into the language of the lay reader. That’s a job that experts and crowds are both profoundly ill-suited for.

I agree that emphasizing points of controversy is an annoying quirk of some Wikipedia articles.  CZ is working hard to avoid the random emphasis that Jaron rightly identifies.  We’ve written into our article-writing instructions that a good article isn’t just a collection of random facts, but a narrative that introduces the topic.  I think we’re doing a pretty good job, too.  A lot of people like to diss experts for writing in Expertese instead of English (like, you know, that “deathful prose” remark — that cut deep, man!).  But we’ve found, not really to our surprise, that among our expert editors, there are some of the very best writers.  You say, “That’s a job [i.e., writing for the lay reader] that experts and crowds are both profoundly ill-suited for” — I think we’re proving you wrong.

4 Comments »

  1. Minor factual note: Jimbo suggested Essjay to fill a gap in the Arbitration Committee and asked the AC mailing list (present and former arbitrators) what they thought, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

    Comment by David Gerard — April 27, 2007 @ 4:47 pm

  2. And rereading Nicholas Carr’s piece, I still don’t get that “Wikipedia claims to give you The Truth” thing at all.

    Comment by David Gerard — April 27, 2007 @ 4:48 pm

  3. David Gerard, re your “minor factual note”: that’s irrelevant to the point made. Jimmy Wales is still in a position to make suggestions, and he abused that position by nominating someone that he knew committed identity fraud. Probably, a lot of the members of Arbitration Committee also knew, and didn’t care, either. This is inexcusable. And he has still not apologized for this, by the way, or even acknowledged this particular problem.

    Comment by Larry Sanger — April 27, 2007 @ 4:50 pm

  4. After thinking about it, I believe by “Truth” Nick meant something like “social process by which we determine knowledge”.

    That is, consider a hypothetical statement of “Wikipedia claims to get the facts straight” - a pretty laughable claim, given that anyone can toss any nonsense into it at any time.

    Versus “Wikipedia claims to have a social process by which we determine knowledge” - bingo, dead-on. NPOV, “wisdom of crowds”, many eyes, etc. etc. That’s Wikipedia’s “in the truth business” perfectly.

    Note the *Defends* to not getting the facts straight is almost always to switch to the *process* discussion - defending against wrogn facts by saying process does and will eventually yield correct facts.

    Comment by Seth Finkelstein — April 28, 2007 @ 3:56 am

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