User:Stevenmitchell

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. My name is Steven Mitchell and I am an older undergraduate at Stony Brook University as a triple Major in Psychology, History and Anthropology with Minors in Women's Studies and Archaeology. I am a former consulting network architect, electrical engineering infrastructure and telecommunications project manager for hire to financial service firms on Wall Street (companies involved in the manipulation of money for their personal gain; if you benefit, great; if you don't, they thank you for your contributions to their income) and the occasional pharmaceutical company. By that I mean that I designed global data delivery systems with their accompanying security requirements and developed corporate strategies (to accommodate policies) for Fortune 100 firms. One of my projects was in 1996-1997, when I was retained by the Clinton Administration through a Wall Street clearinghouse to revamp and upgrade the MBS securities network technology to accommodate an anticipated enormous customer expansion and buildout for the trading of mortgage-backed securities in the United States. I was at one time also a contributing member of the IETF, particularly in the area of routing and security protocols and was on the Board of the IEEE COMSOC in New York City, as well as other boards. However, the events of September 11th put myself and a significant number of people in the New York City metropolitan area out of work and ultimately discharged us from a career. (So please if you are in Boise, Des Moines or Phoenix and were dismayed by the WTC attack, keep in mind you were essentially unaffected and only marginally from a distance).

I like writing fiction, introspection and serious philosophical and theoretical work; great books; women; healthy & tasty foods; maybe some wine, maybe some smoke, great films; singing blues, classical and modern rock; listening to virtually any type of music (definitely including hip-hop) and nearly every intellectual discipline in the natural and social sciences. Doesn't it appear to you that all of knowledge is interrelated?

Why I Write - Some of the Things I Contribute Here on Wikipedia
I like to add intelligent thought to the discussions that are provided as substance of various Wikipedia articles. I normally write about people and sometimes topics of science. Once in awhile I do a translation or start an article on some overlooked historical characters, such as women or obscure intellectuals, especially ones that have made unassessed or underrated contributions or organizations of unusual leverage in modern human society. I have a particular interest in historical or political or social contributors. So that is what I do. Many times, having been a technician in an earlier life, I contribute to and start or build the Infobox of biographical articles. Many of the people I have edited and written about were presidents and congressman and congresswomen and other political forces in the sway and manufacture of the human current. I particular like to gather facts as empirical support of some of the data that has been collected. Humanity needs detail and intelligent argument that it has been able to recently provide. It is almost as if we are moving too fast for ourselves to be able to move in time. (one of the reasons I believe gold or silver needs to regulate the speed of human exchange as its primary tunnel is because the physicality of that transaction provides a needed anchor that is tied to the speed of our brains. I believe the human electro-chemical-magnetic ionization that guides and powers our actions has physical chemical limitations, as boundaries to our behavior, and that it is otherwise like a driving an automobile in traffic at 150 miles per hour and only accelerating, until we smash into a wall, to restart.) But I think that we need detailed granularity to articulate full arguments of why one decision should take place over another. To do that we need lists and arrays of human imagination that are aligned into pictures and illustrations that reshape the human conception of what can be logically possible. We need to devise tools - much better tools - that enable us to think smarter - offer wider capabilities of democracy - enable expression, even for those denied in many parts of the world, or here at home. One of the great marks of the time, is that with all of our technology, so many people are left unexpressed and disconnected with the system and its continuing generation. Boom-and-bust has left things broken. The Boom-and-bust economic policies of globalization without a plan has left things very broken and very in disarray. Look at our president just to measure how broken things have become. The violence, having spread even well into the security of the West, has become a disease, not unlike that of Smallpox or Tuberculosis or Typhoid Fever. The World is onfire but we don't have a fire department. So I in my small way, hopefully as many others will do, contribute my factual knowledge and perusals to the Wiki database we call Wikipedia, in the hope that knowledge will ultimately save Humankind from its own deluge of destruction.

Some Articles That I Have Started & Were Deleted by the Heavy Hand of Wikipedian Deletionists
(and several historical female persona)
 * Gujarat Heavy Chemicals Ltd.
 * Ssangyong Cement Industrial Co., Ltd
 * Eddie Durham
 * Paul Zimansky (2x)
 * Farmingville (film)
 * Central Asian-American Enterprise Fund

These are but a handful of articles that I can recall off the top of my head. As such, I no longer post an article on Wikipedia unless it is complete. There is too much ignorance amongst Wikipedia editors and contributors, and as a consequence it has curtailed my editing on Wikipedia. The deletionists usually operate in groups (what are the Wikipedia equivalent of gangs. Camaraderie appears to be the key element in decision-making.) And yet through their aggressiveness they dominate Wikipedia and in many cases, are considered the leading editors on Wikipedia (not by contributions of substance but by numeric superiority of edit counts). Instead, Wikipedia and its content is controlled by the most aggressive contributors and gangs of editors that control particular articles and projects. One example was a Word Processing article that no longer exists (it is now merged). I tried to add a word processor that was popular at professional firms in NYC at one point in time, but apparently unknown in other part of the U.S. or the UK, and the gang controlling the article, deleted my vetted entry - references and all - and when I reposted it, 5 editors ganged up to argue why, because they had not heard of the software package, despite its references including a Microsoft page on the word processing software, would not permit its posting. So it is now lost to the vapors of personal experience but will never be part of what we can call conscious reality. It is but one example of Wikipedia thuggery, and may be more indicative of behavior fundamental to the human species, as well as how human behavior works in freeform in its aggregation of systems formation (Wikipedia was largely left to the personalities of those who formed it through their assertiveness). It is how the world shapes itself in real form. After all, there is a lot of very successful aggressiveness and criminality that makes up the world. It is a foundational part of the human experience. But it is a free-for-all, take-what-you-can-grab scenario. There is considerable dearth of knowledge by some contributors with strong, assertive personalities, who have obtained considerable power. That is also probably why as much as half of Wikipedia is either outright wrong or incomplete... It is also why there are so many articles on celebrities that you have never heard of, yet probably half of human events and cognitive history is missing, and will never be a part of Wikipedia. A substantial part of the reason, and the underlying problem is that most of the editors on Wikipedia are technicians of some ilk or another, whether they are lawyers, programmers, server administrators, coders, futures traders, security personnel, etc., who are fast thinkers that lack the intellectual depth, education or detailed knowledge of any subject outside their technical discipline. But they need some form of outlet to escape their daily routines, so seek out various positions of authority on Wikipedia to satisfy their psychological deprivations. In many cases, they acquired lifetime appointments as administrators, with the power to decide these conflicted outcomes (they even decide who can contribute to Wikipedia and who cannot). But of course, there are no bullies in adulthood (as these same bullies maintain), this circumstance, it is argued, is only relegated to young adolescence, if it is acknowledged to even occur then.

On Technology
Quick Summary for the ultra lazy: Unfortunately, 1) we are a society that, because of technology, is quickly moving towards a one-size-fits-all featurability. If you want to live outside of the box, you will have to live in a cave (probably in Montana or North Dakota). To gain enough market share to be viable, all of technology has to dumb people down to appeal to the greatest common denominator, which isn't much more than an intelligent gerbil. 2) Technology is now in control of "human progress", as a living being powered and fed by humans. Eventually, humans will be merely instruments that are totally unnecessary for technology to continue. Ultimately, the Human Genome will become a digital culture rather than an organic one (or now being what is probably a partly-digital organic culture. But we will probably become totally unnecessary eventually to the digital organism. Both of these circumstances are the result of human decisions that are probably too late to get under the control of human management, predominantly because most humans are simply not intelligent enough to be aware or cognizant of any developments outside of their own body. Associated with this, is that as the more intelligent humans evolve their cognition and filter it down to their less fortunate brethren, it will have already come to pass in its cultural gentrification and be ubiquitous...

Aside from the internet, which I believe offers great potential to open up human democracy (especially with Wikipedia-type formats), I think technology is as an entity, momentarily and maybe for the long-term, obsolete, as a supplement to human life. It has become a religion rather than a tool. I think eventually it may become humanity's worst enemy and an impediment to its use (if it isn't already)... Very specific anecdotes of this are: human capacity and capability on the computer keyboard, monitor and mouse is already underserved by nearly 3 or 4 times our common contemporary performance capacity. DSL currently can't be used for corporate home user's connectivity to the mother infrastructure. Telephones aren't integrated with the Rolodex of numbers we keep nor to the handheld devices we may use. Few device databases can talk to any other device databases - most especially between generations of devices (there is no common repository tool that is cross-platform, cross-generation and cross-tool). Other than the internet, computers do very little now that they didn't do, 20 years ago, just a lot more volume. There are actually considerably less applications now for home or office PC's than at that time, thanks to the decline of software competition in the U.S. Now we all use the same product - one size fits all. Other than some specialized applications primarily for unix users, little has been achieved. The only effective Search technology currently available of any significance is "Google". While it has developed a much larger post-search database than was available at the time of their inception 11 years ago, as a tool it inhibits/prevents specific algorithm combinations, in spite of their official advertisement. (If you haven't noticed in 2010 they have changed their Advanced Search menu options so that despite their offering of them on the template they no longer are enabled) So as useful as the internet may be in the overall scheme of things, until someone or a group of people roll out an algorithmic search product to compete with "Google", many specific intelligent search techniques and information will be unavailable and go unexploited by the human population. In the larger scheme of things, because technology is totally market-driven and has lost its overall planned schema, small brains will drive the selection of small, incongruent solutions. Future Internets and world-wide-webs, which were the products of government planning will be less and less. But then again, in a self-centric, fend-for-yourself world, it's not about where we go as a group, it's all about who got where first and can capitalize on that most intensely, regardless of how many people that may leave behind or at a disadvantage. In an Ayn Rand World, her advantage is your loss. And if it results in many people's loss, so be it - the more the merrier... It was never about you to begin with...

Other than a few consumer redesign features (such as the IPOD and IPHONE - both ideas created in the mid-1990's), and social networking which primarily integrates consumers, very little new has been created. (actually quite a bit was created (e.g. virtual switches, etc.), it just wasn't entrepreneurially successful - so those things have disappeared). In the last 10 years technological innovation has plateaued, even in the context of the imagination. If anything, it has been a period of stasis, as analog technologies are converted to digital formats. (Keep in mind, the Internet was created in the 1970's and developed in the 1980's. I might add nearly entirely through federal government financing of government and private sector personnel.) Computers were constructed at the speed of light, but with all the horrifically-designed software, now only operate at the speed of a limping dog. All of the "channel-based technologies" (including DSL) being currently implemented emanate from innovations of the 1980's. Most television, film, art and music are derived from formulas... I am horrified that most people think "technology" is cool. It has both contributed to the rate of creation (and hence demands for human consumption and absorption) and added significantly to the demands on our time - probably more so for the latter than for the former. (There are also other factors such as the "no free-lunch syndrome" as a result of corporate cost-cutting with its onus of reassigning what were once public responsibilities of corporations and the private sector to private, personal responsibilities and the ensuing assumption by governments {free-lunch at work; private insurance vs. mutual insurance; public utilities vs. privately-held utilities, etc.}) Hence, we are standing still with simply more ornamentation around us. I think the positives of technology are canceled by the negatives. We have less time because of the demands of technology, not more. It has not given us a freedom, but become a noose around our necks. I guess we will have to wait for the NEXT generation that grows up disappointed and frustrated "by the collective zombie adherence" and corrects the "period of stasis", that is in fashion now... I can hear the low murmuring but I can't see anything yet. We still are the "Stepford Society" and growing more accepting of being an automaton every day. The Stepford World appears to have clearly arrived, just maybe from an unexpected source. I believe that technology has become maladaptive primarily because it is an adhoc adoption based on short-term goals and consequences. Technology has emerged for its own sake, not to serve a purpose. There is no captain steering the ship as it travels in the ocean. And I think a society without foresight is similar to a man or woman with poor eyesight driving a car in the dark...

On Libertarianism
Likewise, I believe that the recent fad of libertarianism, with its very close kinship to anarchism is a threat to a stable world (loaded with nuclear weapons in unstable hands with very different agendas, I might add) and a converse to an orderly, successful, anthropogenic civilization. I believe it is the direct outgrowth of illiteracy and oversimplification of thought and understanding propagated by a handful of active, completely self-absorbed, intellectually-muted, far-right individuals who seek their own advantage at the expense of the many and the species, ironically without much foresight for even their own future progeny. It is the supplantation of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) with a Winner-Take-All strategy that possesses serious logical flaws. It is premised on a rollback philosophy of back-to-nature economics. And that would be fine, if we were starting out from scratch in a world that we hadn't already created... But realistically, what social entities such as corporations, families, charitable organizations or governments could actually function with everyone doing what they felt like, when they felt like it? We are all interconnected and somehow libertarians fail to grasp that comprehension or its necessity. It appears to be inconsequential to the rules of the game. But, in an affinity with Communists and others of similar religious persuasion, and maybe for the same reasons, they are locked in the dark dogma of someone on the trail of a prairie dog's tunnel... Maybe it is the analogous experience of maintaining an allegiance or devotion to a "concept" or a "supreme being" that permits the interchangeability between the two. In either case, it is a syndrome of attraction with great appeal to the intellectually lazy. Whatever the cause, libertarianism and whatever chemicals compel its adherents, will have changed and destabilized the World to an irreparable state, as we currently know it; by the start of 2017 - at the latest.

(I post this to the virtual space we call the Internet, in case it is the only remnant left of the West for future visitors to our planet - so they may know what happened and why - and that it was thoroughly intentional by a small group of malcontents).

Other IP Addresses
I also have used the IP Addresses 68.117.37.121, or 24.186.198.189 when the "automated" technology (yea sure) fails to recognize my "cookies." I actually have several more but I am not sure what all of them are. On a separate note, according to my nephews and nieces, I have gotten the award for being the "Best Uncle in the World".

A Note on the Potential Value of Wikipedia:
Aside from being an electronic repository of "encyclopedic" information, Wiki formats also permit the organization and reorganization of data to exist in categorical and associative arrangements that cannot be emulated as readily in any other format. Unfortunately, because traditional learning has stymied the minds and imagination of some younger adherents and practitioners of Wikipedia, "they" are unyieldingly reluctant and obdurate in taking advantage of the organizational capability afforded by Wikipedia's potential. To take advantage of the associative arrays of database congruences offered by this format, is to realign information in a way that our predecessors could not. It is a way that humanity can take a further step forward into the 4 dimensions we have locked ourselves into.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of academic-caliber contributors on Wikipedia and the blog-orientation of its format, few universities for good reason, and especially those of any significance, will permit citations of information from Wikipedia itself, so Wikipedia as it stands is simply, and at its best, an informational tool on the level of a New York Post, Daily News or National Review. The fact that many Americans (even with a collegiate background) are so poorly educated and bereft of logical skills, and so many children (with less than rudimentary knowledge) make editorial contributions on Wikipedia further degrades the quality and potential of a community repository of "knowledge" such as Wikipedia, and probably relegates it to a "participatory" substandard online reference. If an eleven year old has the same authority to contribute as a seventy-one year old, than the sagacity gained from wisdom and life experience have been canceled. As such, Wikipedia is and will be, as other editors have noted, primarily a resource for popular culture.

Further, the overzealousness of certain administrators to delete articles is particularly frustrating. Some articles of note that I have originated to only have had deleted and some of which were then restarted by other contributors are Eddie Durham (an old friend and colleague), Paul Zimansky (an important archaeologist) under which I studied (who until recently someone else had reintroduced an article on, but it apparently has been deleted), a linguist that I can't remember offhand the name of, the Locrians, articles on the Eastern Locrians and Western Locrians and several articles on Medieval women of whom I no longer can either remember nor have the university library books that I used as sources. The There are others as well I am sure. The Medieval Criminal and Torture Museum (Museo della Tortura e di Criminologia Medievale) in San Gimignano, Italy was another article that I wrote, that was deleted. There are others still that I did restart and through my own efforts I was able to retain. (I mean Kaity Tong is more important than William Shakespeare, isn't she?) My particular frustration with overzealous administrators is that in any of these instances, they did not even notify me of the page's impending deletion nomination. This tendency toward anti-democracy I find particularly disturbing but so be it. It is tolerated by the Administrators who are local line managers and in many cases, Gods, on Wikipedia. It is consequence of what we call the so-called free market by the Earth's most dominant species, that the most aggressive individuals are the loudest - and in many circumstances that make the front pages of the news - the most violent, have the most impacting voice. Here too, on Wikipedia, the most aggressive editors of the human species are the ones that control the articles and their content, regardless of their actual knowledge. As such, it is also their footprint that is inevitably the largest and the deepest. So those who use Wikipedia, ought to be mindful that it is a microcosm of the human record and how it gets put together, albeit considerably more adhoc, and more susceptible to dominance by the most aggressive predator and in many cases, simple-minded contributor. It is in pure and simple terms a written articulation by an oligopoly determined by survival of the winner, not survival of the fittest. The winners simply call themselves the fittest... because they assert themselves the most strenuously to have the final word. Unfortunately, in an assessement of the contemporary world, Albert Einstein, would probably not have survived had he come of age in 2015.

So, if you walk away with nothing else, hopefully you will know that in the human record, as in real-life, the meek and the timid do not inherit the world (at best they are only the living's dead trophies), and are in fact almost entirely exempted from the human record at all. There is a real and genuine reason why the poor in the United States, living on welfare, are compensated at 50% of the U.S. Federal Poverty Level (FPL) in the 21st Century, as the result of the Herculean efforts of one-time U.S. Congressman, Newt Gingrich, to get them there. The fact that humans are positioned on top of the ecological food chain and that they have largely caged the remainder of the Earth's species for their own use and benefit, should also serve as a vivid illustration of the deductive evidence of this limiting condition of the human species.

That being said, I believe that all of us as continuing participants in Wikipedia, hold out hope for improvement and improved methods of contributing to Wikipedia's content.

On History
A final note on history. History is essentially the story of human evolution as told by humans both inside and outside of the experience itself. That being said, the natural sciences are an integral part of the explanation of human behavior, its consequences and its unfolding in the chronicle of what we can observe and readily admit to ourselves. It is the basis of neuroscience itself, extrapolated from fundamental physics up through the tree of scientific explanation until we reach human action. In the West as such, most human beings attribute human behavior to human decisions and choice - despite and in direct conflict with all of what we know about "science" (i.e. the human technology to discern the Laws of Nature). And that contradiction is simply a cultural legacy of earlier traditions and Christian dogma (St. Augustine would be the foundation and its biggest advocate), in contrast to what we are familiar with on a biological and physical cognizance. To apply rules derived from the Natural Sciences infers that humans may be subject to mechanistic responses and determinism. It also may imply that our ongoing battle against Nature may be futile and an inherent part of Nature itself. (It may even mean that some people have personal "defects" because of psychologically-defined illnesses, many of whom become through sheer force or through various strategies of "selection" become our leaders). That contrary to the notion of "free will", our options for choice are delimited by the possibilities Nature presents within the realm of our potential cognizance that has been allocated to us through the laws of physics.

History is not the accretion of human experience over time, but the storytelling of how humans formed larger and larger aggregates - the population dynamics of human formation as told through our own recognizable or accepted elements of a story - a history of our own adaptation and adaptations whether they are apparent to us or not. History is that record of our self or semi-self-cognizance. It is our mirror onto ourselves through our own published memoirs. History is the cognitive realm of our organism's own maturation. And it may simply be, that as humankind evolves, our evolution and our self-recognition of our achievements that currently suggests that humans are so unique, were merely byproducts of our role as a species in the larger folds of the Universe and its offspring... Maybe everything we have achieved, is in fact, simply a part of Nature... and free-will, as we traditionally ascribe behind the accomplishments of humans, is simply the figment of St. Augustine's and later biblical champions attributive imagination. Is it possible that humans do not understand their role in the evolutionary scheme of things or even how things may work in what we call, the Universe?

(to be continued...)

Steve

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Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.