Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.

[...]

The difficulty, as many disaffected Wikipedians have discovered, is that there are far too many articles persistently “managed” by aggressive individuals who will simply not let it improve in certain respects. In disputes, these persons tend to drive off more knowledgeable people, thereby keeping the quality of articles low.

Yep, that’s it. I’ve seen this phenomenon play out several times. Someone who is factually and demonstrably wrong but passionate about a Wikipedia page will edit out anything which does not correspond to his incorrect views. There have been very many times I decided to not correct Wikipedia pages because I just do not have the luxury of wasting time. If I knew the improvements I make would not be undone by someone who obviously does not know what he is talking about, I would spend time editing because the time thus spent would not be wasted. I’m just not interested in spending precious time writing thoughtfully about a subject to then have some random guy who thinks he knows better mess it up or delete it entirely. Wikipedia apologists will say that it is always possible to discuss the edit in the Talk page. True, but that does not solve the problem. It makes it worse because it means trying to convince someone who has given up on critical thinking that his opinion is incorrect. This means wasting even more time. So I’ll leave it to other people to participate in the random walk. My view on the topic can be summarized as:

Editing Wikipedia is a waste of time.

You have to take that statement in context. It means that the time I could spend on Wikipedia is better spent elsewhere. There is always something to write elsewhere or something to read or some software to improve or something else I can do with my time which will be more fruitful than engaging in a futile edit war with some ill-informed guy.

The narrative goes like this:

1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.

2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.

3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.

White’s description of the underdog narrative seems to me to be right on the money. In his article, he discusses the mythical nature of the narrative very convincingly. Again, I urge people to read his article. What follows here is my reaction to the myth. Some of what I point out what also pointed out by White in his article so this is largely written in agreement with White but I discuss some of the same points differently than he does, I skip over some of the points he discusses in his article and I add some aspects to the discussion.

The way I understand it, all new proposed scientific hypotheses have to go through a period during which they are put to the test. During that time period, the hypotheses spread throughout the scientific community and are critically assessed. The hypotheses are usually reworked on the basis of those critical assessments and in this way become more apt to explain observations. Although initially the majority of scientists take a cautiously skeptical stance towards new hypotheses, if these hypotheses are able to weather skepticism and are found through experiments to explain the available observations, then scientists change their minds and the hypotheses become established scientific theories. This is precisely how science should operate: new hypotheses should not be accepted until they’ve been thoroughly tested. Pardon the analogy with software development but I would say that new hypotheses have to pass through an alpha and beta stage during which they are debugged by the scientific community until they finally they become “gold” and are ready for general use by everyone. This is normal and desirable. So in a sense, all scientists have been “underdogs” because their hypotheses had to pass through a debugging phase before they were accepted. If it is accepted that the status of “underdog” is normal, then the “underdog myth” loses its power because it relies on the fact that only some people are by force of dogma made into underdogs.

Moreover, the fact that it takes time to change accepted theories does not make currently accepted theories “dogma”. Usually, theories that are currently accepted by the scientific community have proved themselves able to explain current observation and in some cases have predictive power. These theories often fail in some circumstances, which is evidence that the theories need replacement or refinement but this is not evidence that the accepted theories need to be mindlessly discarded. Consider the following scenario. An accepted theory cannot account for cases A and B but can account for cases X, Y, Z. Then a new theory is proposed which accounts for A but not for B, X, Y, and Z. Ok, so case A is taken care of by the new theory. Great! But what about the other cases? If the new proposed theory is just accepted because it is “new” (and new is always good, right?) and takes care of a case that the old theory could not handle, then on the whole science has regressed. Rather than simply accepting the new theory, attempts must be made to see whether the new theory can be adapted to also account for the cases the old theory was able to handle. Determining what the new proposed theory can do, what cases it can handle, what predictive power it possesses, how it can be adapted — all of this takes a considerable amount of time and effort. The debugging process can be slow but that is not sign of “dogma” or “hostility”, it is just evidence that the problems being investigated are complex. This complexity is in fact inevitable: if any scientist is going to contribute to the advancement of science, forcibly, in this day and age, that scientist is going to be striving to solve complex problems. As White puts it, the simple problems, the low-hanging fruit, have already been picked by previous generations of scientists:

It’s a community where everyone wants to come up with the next big theory that overturns long-held beliefs. But that’s hard to do, especially in fields where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked over by really talented people for decades or centuries.

So it should not be surprising nor should it be attributed to malice if a new proposal takes time to be accepted or if it is eventually rejected. Just about all scientists, even those who are considered “geniuses”, have at some point or another proposed theories that the current scientific community does not accept. And I am not talking about cases like Newtonian mechanics which is good in some contexts but is not generalizable but cases where a scientist who is considered a major contributor to the field has been completely and provably wrong. Even the “geniuses” have been proved wrong sometimes.

Let me here open a parenthesis about a phenomenon related to the “underdog myth”. It could perhaps be labeled the “underdog theorem” (pardon my abuse of the word “theorem”) and it goes like this: “I propose X but the scientific establishment does not accept it. However, see how [insert famous scientist name here]‘s theory was first rejected by the scientific community and then accepted. When [same scientist as above] proposed his theory he was an underdog victimized by the scientific establishment. I too am an underdog victimized by the scientific establishment. This proves that the hypothesis X which I propose, just like [same scientist as above]‘s theory is in fact valid.” Scientists used for illustration are often Darwin or Einstein. The content of “X” is usually statements like “there is a method for building a perpetual motion machine”, “UFOs are spaceships from another planet”, “unicorns are real” or “meditation will allow you to walk through walls and fly”, etc. This “theorem” is invalid at so many levels that it is mind boggling but one interesting feature is that if the “theorem” were valid logic, then X, irrespective of its content, would always be valid. Either the scientific establishment accepts X right away and thus X is scientifically valid. Or the establishment rejects X, which is ipso facto evidence of victimization, which by the “underdog theorem” proves that X is valid. Either way X is valid and the victim is a great unsung genius.

As for the appeal of the myth, White points out how it is an attempt to get an emotional rise:

Beware the underdog narrative in science journalism. This narrative severely misrepresents how science really works. It’s designed to elicit our sympathy for a not-yet-established theory, maybe one that is socially attractive, and to arouse our indignation against the staid community of eggheaded scientists. This underdog narrative plays on our emotions, it makes for a good read, and helps us feel good about ourselves when we stand up for our convictions.

I would add that the underdog myth is also a way to make science articles more interesting. It is not by accident that science is often called “hard science”. It is hard for science journalists to accurately understand the science and report it correctly. The masses are not much interested in the scientific details which are the focus of debate because they are hard to understand. An article which focuses on the actual science rather than the human interest angle is much harder to produce and much less likely to find a large audience. The “low-hanging” fruit here is the human interest angle, science be damned! Since journalism is largely just a form of entertainment — and I do not think science journalism is any different — it is not surprising that science journalists employ dubious tactics to make their articles more entertaining.

So what does this have anything to do with peer reviews? Some questions have been bothering me during the past few months. What is the role of academic publishing? What is the value of peer review? What should be published? What should be rejected? I’ve read some published work that I thought was deficient in some areas. There certainly has to be some standard below which articles should be rejected. However, I don’t think there is a solid line which demarcates what is publishable from what is not. Because of this fuzziness, White’s article prompts me to think that peer reviewing should err on the side of accepting rather than rejecting articles. I realize this may come as “duh!” to publishers but I’m not a publisher and I do not have the interests of a publisher. There’s also a reflexive angle to this because I’m the first reviewer of my own work: at which point is my work publishable? If the bar is set too high, then interesting ideas which have not been fully worked out but which would benefit from exposure to the wider community do not get a chance to get that exposure. These ideas die in the womb, so to speak. (Pardon the gruesome image this way of speaking may suggest.) So the front door to the community has to be opened enough so that even if hypotheses do not fully explain everything they should explain, they can still resonate fruitfully throughout the community. Some of them will be modified, survive and become standards in their fields and others will be found to be so deficient that they will be pushed out the back door.

Let me conclude by returning to White’s article. He uses the example of Dr. Roughgarden to illustrate a case where the “underdog myth” was invoked. (Read White’s article for the full scoop.) Dr. Roughgarden’s theories having been in fact accepted for publication in “prestigious journals” is good evidence that there is no dogma operating here. Dogmatic attempts to suppress new challenging theories would not even allow for publications of those theories in prestigious journals. The peer review process would automatically shut the door on them. This is precisely why I think the peer review process needs to err on the side of accepting rather than rejecting. Such bias is necessary to prevent dogma.

I’m working on my Hinduism comprehensive now.

And then the methodology comprehensive.

And then the dissertation proposal.

And then 9 months of research abroad… probably Taiwan.

And then writing the dissertation and defending.

And then back in the workforce.

By and large, professors aren’t interested in using digital textbooks. Thus, for digital content to be significant in the college marketplace, it will require “a profound change in way professors teach”. (pp. 9-10)

The opinion expressed in the first sentence is most likely correct but the conclusion does not follow. Professors are a relatively minor part of the equation here. There are much more important factors at play so let me imitate the quote above to express where I think the problem really is. “By and large, students are not interested in using digital textbooks in arcane formats, delivered in ways that impede fair use or that are overpriced. Thus, for digital content to be significant in the college marketplace, it will require a profound change in the way digital content is made available.” The fact is that for any given textbook, if there were an acceptable digital edition of the textbook beside a paper edition, many students would select the digital edition. The publisher just needs to make an acceptable digital edition available. It does not matter whether the professor likes digital editions or not. But for the vast majority of textbooks I have had to buy, the situation boils down to this:

• In the vast majority of cases, there is just no digital edition.
• Or if there is a digital edition, it comes with unacceptable DRM. This is no joke. I’ve seen digital books which did not allow cut and paste or printing pages or some other nonsense.
• Or the digital edition comes in an arcane format. Again, I’m talking from experience. Some digital books available through our library at UVA are just not readable in any Unix-based OS because the company publishing them has chosen a proprietary format for which readers are only available for Windows (and perhaps Mac OS). When I’m paying for such book, I do not want to take a chance on a format which might lose all support because the one single company promoting it goes belly up.
• Or the price is unacceptable. Users are not idiots. If a paper book costs $20, I understand that part of that price goes to the printer who prints the copy I am buying, part goes to the shipping company who moves the book to the retailer and part of it goes to the retailer. There’s no way the PDF of the same book should cost $20. In this day and age, if a publishing company cannot market their digital edition of books with substantial savings over the print version then they just do not know how to publish.

This last point about price needs elaboration. Book publishers are infected with the same mentality afflicting the entertainment industry. They think that whatever profits they have made in the past are representative of the natural order of things. High profits and their continual increase is just the way the universe is ordered. Or it is a god-given right or something just as essential. The reality however is that how profitable an industry is changes along with cultural change. Publishers have to realize that maybe, just maybe, the publishing industry is destined to become much less profitable than it once was. By trying to protect their historical profits with restrictions like DRM, they are in fact making their product much less appealing that it would otherwise be and they are hurting their bottom line. And yet, the study reports:

In terms of the use of file format, one publisher candidly declared: “As long as the DRM (digital rights management for security) is good, we go into it.” (p. 10)

In other words, that publisher does not care about whether the format benefits the customer as long as it provides restrictions that will allow the publisher to sleep at night. Is it possible to be more anti-customer? Is it?

Now, go back to the first quote about professors above and reread it. Now consider that I am one of those future professors that the publishing industry is counting on. My interest is in the free flow of information but their interest is creating obstacles to justify their existence and the fees they impose on people who want access to information. Consider also that my opinion is not a marginal one but is shared by other future professors and by young professors who have just joined academia. If publishers think that they are marketing their digital goods correctly and that problems with iron themselves out once customer mentalities change in their favor, they are headed towards oblivion.

Of note also is the Issue Brief produced by the Association of Research Libraries. Their arguments overlap with some of mine but they also make great points in addition to those that I made in my post. People who care about this issue should certainly read the brief.

What strikes me in those reactions is that the AAP is alienating some of its potential supporters. After my previous post on this topic, my wife presciently pointed out to me that I had overlooked that the AAP’s position could potentially backfire by alienating those who would otherwise support it. She was right. Rockefeller University Press is a member of the AAP and yet does not support the AAP’s current campaign against open access. How many other members of the AAP are at odds with the AAP’s position on open access? Could the AAP’s position cause a schism in its member base? The Association of Research Libraries on the other hand speaks for the very people who buy the services and goods sold by the members of the AAP. (I write this while keeping in mind, as noted above, that the extent to which an association speaks for its members varies.) Again, those are people who could potentially support the AAP.

In both cases, the AAP’s deficient logic is alienating groups that would otherwise probably be on AAP’s side. There’s a real danger that the AAP will paint itself into a corner with its dubious rhetoric and find itself being relevant only to the dinosaurs who are trying to protect their ancient business model.

Motion Picture Association of America
…
Association of American Publishers
…
Recording Industry Association of America

There’s the proof that the AAP is in league with the RIAA and the MPAA.

Look up the term FUD on Wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with it and then come back to this article. According to an article in the online version of Nature, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) has hired a “pit bull of public relations” to counter the rise of free information. From the article:

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available.

From what I gather in the article, the strategy that the AAP will adopt is to spread FUD of this sort (quoted from the article):

Public access equals government censorship.

What a load of nonsense! This slogan is so patently flawed, it boggles the mind that scientific publishers would seriously consider it. (The phrase “Arbeit macht frei” comes immediately to mind when I read that quote above!) In support for that slogan Brian Crawford argues (again, quoted from the article):

When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity’s interests.

So Mr. Crawford, is the solution to prevent the free dissemination of information? Are you serious!? Crawford’s obfuscating statement conceals a quite different concern than ideological bias. The government is considering requiring that scientific articles that were published as part of projects that received governmental funds should be freely available to the public. This is a mandate that the government can seriously consider in this age because information technology has dramatically transformed publishing. Moving physical pieces of paper is no longer a requirement for publishing: everything can be done electronically. Granted, if governmentally funded articles are freely available and articles that offer counter-positions can be obtained only with serious difficulty (financial or otherwise), then the views presented in research funded by the government are going to be advantaged insofar as they are going to be comparatively more accessible than other views. This imbalance, in turn, will create market pressures that will favor a general reduction of prices. If my article costs $50 to get but the article of my opponent is free, then I am at a disadvantage in the market of ideas because the propagation of my ideas is hindered by the barrier of money. It is to my advantage to remove this barrier so as to favor the propagation of my ideas, hence it is likely that for my next article I will seek a mode of publication that will not erect such barrier. Slowly but surely, the actual producers of knowledge — the scholars and scientists — will turn away from publishers who cannot justify the costs they tack onto the books and articles they publish. Since I think the justifiable costs are much lower than what publishers currently require, I foresee that the quest to remove money as an obstacle to the flow of information will result in a dramatic upheaval of the publishing field: money will still flow but will flow very differently than it does now and the role of the publisher will move from being an indispensable center of power to that of an auxiliary, providing clerical services to associations of scientists and scholars. It is to this scenario in which publishers are pushed to the margins of power that publishers are objecting to. As long as the publishers are the gatekeepers of information, they can exact a toll and can maintain their revenue. Any movement towards removing the financial barriers to the dissemination of information is a threat to their position.

With their campaign the AAP is not really trying to defend the scientific process or democracy. The real goal of the AAP is just like that of the RIAA and the MPAA: it is trying to hijack public policy to preserve its obsolete business model. The goal of the AAP is neither to benefit the creators of the information they publish, nor to benefit their customers but to benefit themselves first and foremost. I offer for evidence the following reasoning. If the AAP’s primary concern was about the government promoting some specific views to the detriment of other views, they would be arguing against all government-funded research because the very act of selecting some research projects for funding and rejecting others results in the government promoting some views but not others. Eliminating all government-funded research would be much more effective at eliminating possible governmentally influenced bias in science than what Crawford proposes but Crawford cannot support it. Here’s the rub: eliminating government-funded research would also mean eliminating all the articles that are produced by that research. In effect, the publishers would lose a good deal of the content they are currently selling to their customers. So under the guise of trying to counter governmental bias, the AAP is really just looking after its own interests: there must be content for them to sell and they must be able to exact a toll on that content.

Now, I do not think that getting the government to stop funding research is desirable. I find the research they fund valuable. I also do not find that private interests intersect with public interests so I am not convinced by arguments that private funding is an adequate substitute for public funding. It seems to me that the solution to the problem invoked by Crawford is twofold and does not involve repressing free information in any way, shape or form. First, activists have to ensure that the government funds scientific projects on the basis of scientific merit rather than on the basis of ideology. What good does it do if the government erects barriers against freely accessing the results of the research it funds if the allocation of public funds remains influenced by criteria that have nothing to do with proper scientific process? Secondly, and this is rather ironic given the untenable position the AAP has taken, an excellent solution to government-sponsored scientific bias would the free dissemination of research that supports positions that the government is trying to suppress. And this is precisely what I said would happen in my little scenario above: if the government freely publishes the results of its research, then people offering counter-positions will also seek to have their own positions freely available.

The AAP represents publishers stuck in the age of dinosaurs who cannot conceive of a world in which publishers are no longer indispensable gatekeepers in the dissemination of scholarly information. Their know their position is increasingly threatened but instead of moving with the times, they are trying — like the RIAA and the MPAA — to force time to stand still with dubious logic and a general hijacking of public policy.

Everybody is familiar with the usual bouts of anxiety that manifest themselves as dreams (or perhaps, nightmares) of academic disaster. Although dreaming of going to class naked seems to be popular, that never happened to me, whether in dreams or for real. However, numerous times I’ve dreamed of finding at the end of a semester that I was registered to a class without my knowledge. Or that there’s an exam coming and I’m learning about it just 2 seconds before exam time. Or that I’ve been going to the wrong class all semester long. But nothing like the dream I had last night.

I guess new academic roles bring on new possibilities for disaster. At any rate, last night I dreamed that I had been selected for being a TA for a class called “Particle physics and theories of personality.” Good gods! In my dream, my Religious Studies teachers were assuring me that it was in my best interest to teach that class. Of course, to top it off, I had learned about it just 2 seconds before the first class. I felt I was a terrible choice for teaching anyone anything about particle physics. I was also skeptical as to the rationale for making particle physics and theories of personality the subject matter of a single class. Sounds like one of those flashy course titles that end up disappointing.

As for why I had that dream, that’s just the usual anxiety about making sure that I’m at the level I need to be to perform the tasks I need to perform as a graduate student. Luckily, I don’t have such dreams too often.

Alien is really a movie about immigration. Forget the monsters, the gore, the fear. It’s all about the trials and tribulations of a misunderstood alien looking for acceptance in an unforgiving world.

Someday, I’ll post an in-depth analysis.

Tamanaha seems to have made his mind up, but I am still deliberating what my own stance is going to be. I always tell my students that their grades does not represent their worth as persons but the message rarely seems to register. Critical comments meant to point out ways to improve are taken as personal attacks. A similar kind of problematic occurs in relationships with colleagues and those standing higher in the academic hierarchy (yes, they also make mistakes sometimes).

Contrarily to what some of the comments on Prof. Tamanaha suggest, this problem is not only present in academia. I’ve had experience in the technological sector and my wife manages an IT group. It’s been our experience that this kind of fear of providing critical comments is also quite present there.