Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt/Hillman-comment

Extended comment by another user with experience interacting with Carl Hewitt on WP
Dunno if this is the place for this; if not, members of the Committee should feel free to move this someplace else.

Like EMS and Linas (I don't know Rudy Koot) I claim expert knowledge of some of the math/physics-related areas in which Carl insists on writing, and I also have extensive experience in expository writing both at WP and at elsewhere. See for example two expository websites which I created a dozen years ago and which still have mirrors:
 * Relativity on the World Wide Web
 * Entropy on the World Wide Web

Like the complainants, I have wasted a huge amount of time trying to reason with Carl. Like them, I have been led to conclude that the only way to stop his misbehavior at WP is to ban him. It is important to recognize that, if Carl is truly interested in promoting possible applications of his Actor model to physics, we feel that directing his energies to developing his (currently highly inchoate) ideas is in his own best interests, because he is the only person who can develop his ideas until they reach a more significant status than "vague speculation".

OTH, allowing him free reign here would be highly detrimental to the health of WP and the community of expert editors whose presence here, I think, should be particularly valued (as long as they don't lose sight of the fact that WP is above all an encyclopedia, not a stump for personal speculations).

I am not participating in presenting evidence because I am so sick of trying to deal with Carl that I have told him I want nothing to do with him, and I certainly don't want to revisit talk pages to collect links or study the appropriate pages to learn the rules of the arbitration process. However, I thought I'd drop by here long enough to try to provide a summary of why I have concluded that Carl is a problem user, indeed a problem user whose actions here are habitually manipulative, highly insiduous, and particularly detrimental to the reliability and fairness of the WP as an encyclopedia.

The problems begin with Carl's refusal to accept the premise that WP is not the place for unbridled personal speculation. Particularly not WP article space.

Unfortunately, rather than confining himself to writing fair and factually accurate descriptive encylopedia articles on the current state-of-the-art (as reflected in current professional practice and the current research literature) on subjects in his area of acknowledged expertise (certain parts of computer science, henceforth CS), he has insisted on writing articles which claim, at least by implication, to describe well-established interdiscliplinary theories but which in fact contain badly expressed and ill-informed speculations about (vaguely described) relations he thinks should exist between a CS concept he helped develop (Actor model) and relativistic physics (see WikiProject GTR and note that both EMS and myself are members). These articles are often followed by long lists of citations which consist largely of Carl's own CS publications. You might look at... arghghgh, now I can't find the link, but somehow Carl manipulated me into completely rewriting an article called something like relativistic information theory. I was going to suggest you compare his version with my rewrite to see what I am talking about.

I and others have pointed out to Carl the existence of a huge (if rather disorganized) research literature concerning relationships between relativistic physics and information theory, and pointed that there are apparently no papers published in physics journals or by persons other than Carl Hewitt himself (or, at a stretch, according to him, one section in the unpublished Ph.D. thesis of one of his former students in C.S.) which speculate on possible applications of his actor model to physics. I and others have suggested that he keep his speculative essays (which aren't even very well expressed) at the MIT website, or at his own personal website, and have urged him to spend his energies on developing his thinking rather than in tying up valuable Wikipedia users like EMS or myself in endless and bootless content disputes here. If you consult the talk pages of various articles Carl has authored, I think you will see how hard users like myself, CSTAR, and others have tried to reason with him.

His response has been especially frustrating because so many have tried have tried so hard to persuade him to develop his speculations to the point where they are acknowleged by some significant subset of researchers in both relativistic physics and CS before attempting to describe them in WP articles. Because of his background, Carl is surely well versed in developing ideas to the state where they can be published in the research literature, yet he apparently refuses to pursue this traditional (and far preferable) route, in favor of (in my view) spamming WP article space with his ill-expressed and virtually incomprehensible personal speculations.

Clearly, Carl thinks there should be an interdiscplinary field applying his actor model to relativistic physics and information theory, and clearly he wants to bring about this state of affairs. If that were the end of the story, I am sure we would all say, "more power to him!" The problem for WP is that Carl insists on manipulating WP, often in very subtle ways, to mislead non-expert WP readers into believing that such a field already exists, which is absolutely not true. There is as I said a large and rather disorganized literature on various relationships between information theory (a field on applied mathematics) and relativistic physics, but I have seen no papers in this area which even mention Carl's actor model.

Carl's refusal to pursue what we regard as the proper route to establishing a useful interdisciplinary field in science (namely, publication in repected research journals in all affected fields) is particlarly bizarre because as a faculty member (emeritus) at a major university, he has extensive experience in getting research papers published. As someone with expert knowlege of the classical gtr literature, I took considerable pains to give him some good advice on one possible direction in which he could try to develop his ideas, which I am confident would be of interest to researchers in this field if he were successful in publishing a good paper in one of the journals they read, but I was very disappointed to see that he was ignoring not only my suggestions, he was ignoring even the elementary step of studying the existing relevant literature in field B before asserting that he is creating, or even has already created, a new interdisciplinary field combining elements of A and B.

For me the straw that broke the camel's back was seeing Carl engage repeatedly in what I regard as gaming the system, manipulation of other users, and so forth. He is clearly highly intelligent and I am baffled why he would devote his intellect and energy to manipulating WP (as I eventually concluded), possibly as some kind of "social experiment", rather than trying to develop his ideas in the academic environment which has been so kind to him (and in which he has enjoyed considerable professional success).

Since this is a critical point, let me try to emphasize it: I happen to be a rare user with expert knowledge of at least two of the fields (relativistic physics, information theory) in which Carl wants to create an interdiscplinary subfield, and I offered to help him do that, by providing suggestions, references, and at one point even offering to discuss his ideas in another forum (I was open to suggestion), one more suitable for speculative discussions and scientific development work than the WP. So Carl cannot plausibly claim that I am somehow trying to "suppress" his ideas. To the contrary, I offered to help him polish his ideas to the point where he can publish them in  respectable journals (other than CS journals; he has apparently published some speculation in CS journals, but the physics literature shows clearly that physicists don't read those journals and probably would need more help in explaining CS background than Carl tends to provide even if they did).

The issue is not whether his ideas have any merit (or rather, might one day turn out to have merit), the issue is whether he should be allowed to describe his speculations here as if they have the same scientific status as well-established theories such as information theory and general relativity, when in fact such a claim would be analogous to suggesting that some author's notebook of unorganized jottings is comparable to the Odyssey or The Great Gatsby. There is a huge difference, even if the author in question happens to be, say, J. D. Salinger. (Comparing Hewitt to Salinger is excessive, but no doubt you take my point.)

It is telling that another user with expert knowledge (in CS and physics), CSTAR, also offered to help Carl at every turn, and spent an enormous amount of time trying to help him clarify his thoughts (and to learn the WP way). And guess what has been the end result of CSTARs attempts to help Carl out? Carl's flagrant misbehavior has caused CSTAR to quit the WP! And now Carl is apparently on the verge of driving out EMS as well. If that happens, WikiProject GTR cannot survive, and I will have to leave.

If you somehow manage to add up the trouble he has caused here, I think you will be amazed at what you find, in terms of his driving away some of the most valuable editors I have encountered here. As a user loyal to the stated goal of creating an on-line, free, universal, timely, and accurate encyclopedia for the benefit of humanity as a whole, I find it extremely troubling that manipulative problem users like Carl are empowered by current WP policies to waste so much time of valuable Wikipedians like EMS, CSTAR, Linas, and now of course three members of the arbitration commitee.

Anyway, good luck, you'll need it. And be careful, in my experience, Carl is a master of gaming the system.---CH 02:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)