User talk:GreggEdwards

{Unblock| ... Blocking message: " You are currently unable to edit Wikipedia. You are still able to view pages, but you are not currently able to edit, move, or create them. Editing from 207.244.64.0/18 has been blocked (disabled) by KrakatoaKatie for the following reason(s): Server-multiple.svg The IP address that you are currently using has been blocked because it is believed to be a web host provider. To prevent abuse, web hosts may be blocked from editing Wikipedia. "

- Sometimes I use a VPN. But... I turned it off, and was still blocked.

My PC reports a different IP address than the one reported as troublesome and so blocked. Could it be you are blocking all subscribers of the RCN service, which provide relatively cheap web connection to several million users?

Proposal: Perhaps you might allow Editors logged in under long-standing and constructive log-in credentials to over-ride block-buster IP wipe-outs...

GreggEdwards (talk) 06:54, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Nabla, for your gracious response, your report on why you initially moved my section, and your suggestions for better engagement given WP culture.

My thought has been to occasionally put on the record [thanks WP for establishing such a massive corpus!] what I see as glitches so that -- if there are patterns of interest to others -- then such later might be detected and addressed.

Later? Now, I don't have the resources to address the issues that I have been raising. To responsibly follow up on your good suggestions seems likely to be just a waste for everybody, since I can't now engage sufficiently to make a lasting difference.

Here's a hint on why:

For WP participants, public officials, and most anybody attempting the decide questions using commentary from others, there is a concept variously called the "N-Scholar" or the "M-issue, N-Scholar Problem.

When I have been so responsible, I've modeled the situation as follows: If an issue can by common consent be analyzed into just one initial level of only M sub-issues, and if there are only N qualified participants whose comments must be considered, and if some fraction F of those N participants address the comments of others in R rounds, without even being allowed to raise any more issues, then the task and the record explodes rapidly at some factorial of the above numbers.

Of course, this kind of situation arises continually in human affairs, and even might be said to arise continually for all "sentient" actors, including AI and animals.

Clearly, survival of relatively-fit sentients shows that biology and cultures have workable solutions that might be modeled for clues to improve. I guess my point is that WP might improve its current culture by setting up means for a "meta-culture" that encourages rational reflection on how things are working in the light of models of the workings of other successful culture. After all, rationality comes from ratios, or constructive comparison with metric models of some other similars. With the notable exception of this your response, so far and for many years my attempts at such meta-commentary in WP seem have shut down. Sure, cancelling, forgetting, suppression... are all necessary focus-functions of any outfit that is not going to quickly devolve into blooming, buzzing confusion. Still, a one-track mind inevitably runs to ruin. GreggEdwards (talk) 13:44, 23 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi, If I understand you well enough, I agree with the core idea: if anyone, of a lot of people, may comment on anyone else's opinion, on a lot of issues, whose discussion may raise more issues, it would have unbound (exponential?) growth. Still the world exists, meaning that somehow decisions are made that are not so bad as to cause terminal destruction (of society, or a species). Studying collective decision making is an interesting issue, but I think it needs to be done outside WP, maybe mathematics supported by insights from sociology, psychology...? I doubt you'll get much positive feedback about that within WP. The most open discussion place I can think of is the wp:Village pump (or some subsection of it), and even there I don't know if there is a place for that kind of reasoning, maybe because WPedians believe WP is already the solution to that problem. - Nabla (talk) 10:25, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
 * And only now I understood how your text is related to the page I moved it from. (though by WP policy talk pages are to discuss the article about the subject, not to discuss the article's subject) - Nabla (talk) 10:25, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Nabla, for your understanding a further advice.

I quite agree -- "doubt you'll get much positive feedback about that within WP".

Indeed, the same is true in most communities of smart-normals ... including my personal experience whilst at NSF as a participant observer of this kind of mono-practicality in Maths &c.

Thus, in my Talk comment on that page I wanted to address the calls for suppressing using Notability and the other usual arguments.

Of course they have a point, but their lack of balanced respect for other perspectives tends to foreclose a steady development of imaginative contribution so essential to the long term development of any sentient.

Further, such mono-cultural rationalization too often suppresses other kinds of cultures and social roles, until enough of the oppressed either leave or rebel.

EG In the French Revolution four-fifths of the executed elites were not aristocrats but smart normals luxuriating in their protection from having to broadly inform themselves, imagine and think thru alternatives, and engage in the arduous hazards of continual exploration and experimentation. In the US, some sociologists report that four-fifths of the population don't respect and even "hate" the Boss-class partly because they don't use their advantages for significant progress that can be shared.

Without some big cultural and constitutional changes - such as seen in some carefully vibrantly developing societies - WP might mindlessly munch its way down verdant valleys into the tar-pits.

SUM

Like any other practice of management, Knowledge management (including Maths and WP) needs imaginative and reflective insight and oversight so that its ordinaries do not over-purify the content and contributors. GreggEdwards (talk) 22:12, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

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How about Useful -- A Protest against the Cancel Culture of Notability

 * (moved from  Talk:Mathematical knowledge management, by Nabla (talk) 17:16, 15 December 2020 (UTC))

I landed on this page from another reference, and it helped me a lot.

"Notable" is the root concept of "Nobility", and in our world today is a conservative re-enforcer of "Them that has, Gets".

Thus it is deeply anti-democratic, as seen in the increasingly in-grown culture of too many [far from all!] WP editors.

From what I can see, the great success of Wikipedia is based on [1] usability -- it quickly and cleanly in-forms especially when outside events triggers a "need to know". [2] neutrality -- no need to block learning by provoking a defensive skepticism about being manipulated by biased sources.

My argument is for a slight extension of Know-ability to include evidence of unexplained or biased occurrence. This might shift WP's intents missions of helping people learn, and love to participate in learning. Such explicit metrics -- that can be measured and evaluated -- are required by the Ethics Codes of professional fundraisers for for non-profits.

Participation is a Best Practice found by evaluation research. Failure to seek, find and implement best practices has been used since the late 1800s by courts to judge Professional Incompetence and be used to award damages. It's not new: Colonial New England had a productivity advantage over UK because of the Lincolnsire (sp?) system - big barns of kids with "Each-One Teach Some".

Many of these issues came up 50 years ago when NSF spent millions setting up an earlier version of WP, including leveraging a version of the Internet. Many thousands of students and professors from around the world wrote articles covering the STEM curriculum. Reagan shut down the program, fulfilling promises to folks alarmed by NSF development of explanatory modules on "Evilution". Everybody working on the program were de-funded or fired.

Un-scientifically, that major NSF program was not well documented and evaluated, and soon disappeared without issue. So it wasted the huge contribution by perhaps millions of participant, and vast tranches of tax-payer dollars.

So why? My take? This is a commonplace. Because such programs are controversial. As Oscar Wilde wrote: A creative force need be covert and irrational, or at least ambiguous. Because -- To be Understood is to be Found Out/ And to be Found Out is to be Destroyed. [Lady Windermere's Fan]

Perhaps, for similar reasons, WP has to appeal to Arch-Conservative Labels like "Notability".

Some of us still struggle to be optimistic. After all, Pessimism is too often self-fulfilling.

Still, it's kinda fun to consider the evidence that Wikipedia, luxuriating in its world-changing success, is a refugee from * Science * Ethics * Progress * More explicit and measurable service to humanity.

In its continuing Witch Trials on Notability ... -- Does WP fail to meet one dictionary definition of Nobility as the engine for Notability: "high moral character"? -- Is this behind WP's failures to meet the emerging empirical tests on implicit, but pervasive and systematic bias?

04:38, 8 June 2020 (UTC)GreggEdwards (talk)
 * ''(end of moved content)
 * Hi. I notice you reverted my removal of this text from Talk:Mathematical knowledge management. I am sorry if it bothered you in any way. I thought the text was not specifically related to that article, but looked like worth being posted in some place with a more general discussion (the village pump, or wp:Notability maybe?). So my intention was solely to preserve the text (so I copied it here) and clean up the talk page (so I deleted it there). Again, please forgive any inconvenience. Enjoy! - Nabla (talk) 19:18, 18 December 2020 (UTC)