I went to graduate school with Larry. He's a pretty singular personality. While finishing his dissertation he taught himself fiddle and started jamming every week with the Columbus bluegrass and Irish fiddle scene. In a short time he got good enough to teach lessons. He also ran a web page on Y2K related stuff that ended up getting cited in several books. And he and Ty Lightner (of Yvonne Craig fan site fame; one of the first such sites on the internet, one that he started half as a lark, but that ended up getting him face time with much of the cast of the original Batman; Ty is now a computer programmer and one of the top Netflix reviewers in the world) and I used to go to the great performances put on as part of the choreography MFA degree at OSU sometimes once a week.
His dissertation was on epistemic circularity. It's really interesting how that work played a role in the way Wikipedia was initially set up and then with Larry leaving it. Here are some of the many money quotes (whole interview HERE):
Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But
my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical
schisms.
I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end,
although also some agreements. The first problem was what we were just
talking about: reigning in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce
the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.
The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism—it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that—but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.
Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?
Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of
amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their
tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude
that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very
fact that they had published on the subject—that
because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated
me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts
essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for
those who make it their lives' work to know things.
Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's
seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing
knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.
There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and
by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic
egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might
be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They
feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as
possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a
claim] itself, not its source.
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