For The Master Of The Games On His Birthday

Do we feign understanding of what underlies,
And so become victim to the figmentations
That the mind posts up to the lintels of sense?

Or do we but array the Data Of The Senses
Along the lines that they themselves suggest?

Then again, on third thought, what's the diff?

— Jon Awbrey, 16 December 2007

The two birdfeeders on the maple tree in our backyard are specially designed for dispensing thistleseed to the goldfinches of summer who stay to tough out the cold, more grey than gold in their winter plumage. And the snowbirds (juncos) and the occasional deer glean the bimodal distribution of seed that falls to the ground. But heavy snow this weekend covered the patch of ground beneath the feeders, as it did of course everywhere else. So when it finally stopped snowing yesterday I scattered a few extra handfuls of thistleseed on the area just next to their usual place — that was as far as I could manage to throw it from my cozy but lazy station at the kitchen door.

It's been a whole day now and the snowbirds still haven't found the bounty that lies just adjacent to their usual scratching grounds, now so sparse of seed they had to wait for last night's passing deer to paw a bit of the snow away.

Jon Awbrey

Pictures! Post pictures, please.

Flash, and it's gone …

A moment frozen in time …

Alas, the snow is still blowin' …

Jonny

We have been observing a social phenomenon and testing explanations of its more puzzling features. People who do a lot of this sort of thing will tell you that there are many pitfalls on the way to a working explanation of any social phenomenon, and I have mentioned a couple of these cautions in a previous post on this thread.


Being aware of our natural inclinations to various types of error makes it easier for us to reframe our attention, to shift our paradigm, to escape the drowning ships of theory that might otherwise doom our hopes of arriving at an adequate explanation of any social phenomenon.

McLuhan's maxim is another one of those attention reframing devices. It serves to nudge our focus away from the message and onto the medium. It may not sound like much, but that slight shift of attention is often enough to unstick a moribund process of inquiry and get it moving forward again.

Jon Awbrey

A lot of what we are watching looks like Machiavellian Power Games, where players vie for status and power, with dynamics something like Survivor where each episode ends with someone being pitched overboard -- the scapegoat du jour.

It reminds me a lot like King of the Mountain, where players try to topple other players until they make it to the top (until they topple, too).

Those are good descriptions of the phenomenon. But an explanation calls for something more than mere description. We know why the producers of all the various and sundry survivor shows, from the Wikest Link to Borg Brother, do what they do — it's cheap entertainment in every sense of the word cheap. That factor probably accounts for some of the fandumb of WikiΦantasy Egoland, but I think that there has got to be a lot more to it on the side of the producers of the show.

Jonny

Well, there's this model, adapted from a general model of competition and conflict developed by Rene Girard...


That version focuses on the competition to control content, but we could tweak it to shift the focus to the competition for status and power.

You continue to focus on the players, the amateur actors.

What about the producers of the show?

Jonny

They're too clueless to appreciate the dynamics of system modeling, which is why the unintended consequences of their Frankenstein baby is characterized by Girard's Model of Mimetic Lunacy.

I'm betting that Jimbo knows more models than you do.

It's all he needs to know to tell what the boobs will buy.

Jonny

The folks at Google are not boobs, and they didn't buy Wikipedia, even though they could have picked it up for chump change.

The problem is, they would have had to change out all the chumps who operate it.

There are days when I think that SlimVirgin must have stolen your identity.

Or maybe you were her all along.

Now go have a cup of coffee or three and quit pretending to be such a blithering ediot.

Jonny

Please refactor that.

Sorry, it's a prime invective.

Jonny

Harrumph.

Moulton,

Here is what I find annoying, and it's something that you seem to do as a matter of character. You come up to the verge of some important epiphany, and then jam your gyres in reverse and back away as quickly as possible, with a dust of cloud and a wimpy «Ho Hum Slither Away». As it happens, I have known a number of people who recurrently run through this very routine — «This Vehicle May Back Up When It Comes Time To Draw A Conclusion Or Heaven Forbid Act» is a Sign of the Climes in the Tropic of Academe — and so I long ago dubbed it the «Slip Slidin' Away» phenomenon.

For instance —


Here you draw the very apt analogy between Wikipedia and the recent TV de-genre of Survivor shows, but then you do everything but apply the analogy to draw the obvious inference about Wikipedia, that it is a Production, that it therefore has Producers, Directors, Deputy Directors, and maybe even a Script.

Unless you think that Kid Nation really is just a bunch of kids cast off in the wilderness on their own, with no direction the home audience is solicited the obsequels of which to keep on keeping on tuning into?

Now what is so frightening about the idea that this Production might have Producers?

Jonny

Producers? For the whole thing? No.

Not because it's so frightening an idea, but because if there were centralized control built into the very foundation of Wikipedia, it would turn out a more polished product. It's easy to reject an Intelligent Design hypothesis when the design isn't any too intelligent.

The process of control at Wikipedia is one that will predictably lead to one particular, mutually re-inforcing group of people to control the thing. But that doesn't seem to be what you are hinting at.

I think it's a false conclusion.

The producers of Survivor clearly intended the suspense drama they produced. At the end of every episode, the players were obliged to kick someone off the island whether they wanted to or not.

But the producers of Wikipedia clearly intended something other than what they have in fact unwittingly produced.

After three decades in Washington, Wyoming's Senator Alan Simpson noted that with all the Congressional legislation he had helped craft over the years, there was one law he discovered in the sense of scientific discovery of natural laws. He said he discovered the Law of Unintended Consequences, wherein Congress wrote legislation intending some desirable anticipated outcome, but time and again the actual outcome sadly departed from what the legislators had anticipated.

My view is that the actual outcome of the Wikipedia Project includes lamentably unexpected and undesirable events which have brought the project into considerable disrepute.

That's why I invoked the Frankenstein metaphor, since I don't believe Jimbo and his personally appointed sycophants actually intended to produce the monster that they have given birth to.

What purpose do the producers of a TV show have?

Is it to turn out a highly polished educational or otherwise enlightening product?

No, they tried that in the 50's, and they mostly gave it up.

Their purpose must be sought elsewhere.

I see a lot of people still buying the populist myth that Wikipedia is some kind of grass-roots phenomenon. I can see that a line like that derives a lot of its obvious attraction from the appeal that it makes to popular narcissism. I can see how people might have believed that 2 or 3 years ago, but there is no real justification for it now, the eternal popularity of narcissism aside.

People who go on dreaming that Wikipedia is a grass-roots phenomenon are simply ignoring the "transparent" groundskeeping team that controls all the mowers.

Jon Awbrey

Compare Intelligent Design to System Design and Mechanism Design. The latter two are successful design projects, because the outcome was what the designers intended. The Wikipedia Project is not an instance of intelligent system design because the outcome is a chaotic game full of Wikidrama in which the dominant players are those who are most successful at gaming the system to advance their individual personal hidden agendas.

We've discussed this many times before.

You assume that the Purpose of Wikipedia is just what its advertizers say it is.

It is time to examine that premiss.

Long past time.

Jon Awbrey

Well, we're back to original intended purposes, advertised purpose, evolved and continuing purpose, emergent and unintended purpose, and unauthorized subverted purpose.

And the standard heuristic for abducing the telos of a potentially endirected system is to observe it in action and note the states to which it most persistently tends.

I think that we've all been watching the system do what it does — with various degrees of due diligence and for sundry lengths of time — but there is an evident difficulty that many observers seem to have in reframing their views of the data in ways that would make it make sense.

Jon Awbrey

What I see the system doing is tending, over time, to increasing levels of contention, disharmony, ephemeral wikidrama, gaming the system, chaotic reversals of state, confused and inchoate policy disputes, progressive decline of overall levels of trust, increasing levels of disaffection, criticism, and alienation of critics, and a resultant groundswell of external competition.

As I see it, Wikipedia is exhibiting the characteristics of a Polionic System.

Moreover, the energies of the system are increasingly being expended in support of the system's internal immune response, rather than in support of an external system goal.

You keep calling Wikipedia dysfunctional.

Yes, it fails to optimize certain objectives that are most loudly espoused for it.

But the day that it fails to satisfice the objectives of those who have their mits on the plug, they will pull it without a day's notice.

As for what you are calling polionic systems, there used to be a lot of lit on double-bind theory from all the usual supects back in the 60's and 70's.

Jon Awbrey

Care to spell out your estimate of the "objectives of those who have their mits on the plug" (as well as the names of those mit-wearers)?

I stated a general principle.

The fact that a plug-based system is still plugged-in constitutes prima facie evidence that those with their mits on the plug are currently satisficed with what they see the system doing.

As to more specific hypotheses, well, this site is full of 'em.

Jon Awbrey

I dunno who the mit-wearers are, nor do I know what the hidden agendas of the presumptive mit-wearers are.

Our Dunno Elegies Are The Envoi To Enchoiry.

Jon Awbrey

The compressed dump of WP will fit on a DVD and is available for public download. There are versions with and without edit histories and talk pages. Even if someone at WMF pulled the plug on the main servers, the recent snapshots would be available in perpetuity for mirror sites, scraper sites, and archive sites.

We have toxic waste dumps in my region, too. But we apparently can't produce enough locally so we import a lot from Canada.

Sound Familiar?

I think I need un heimlich maneuver …

Jonny

The point being that pulling the plug doesn't drain the bathtub, never mind scrubbing away the ring.

And what does that telus about the mind of the brain-washer?

Jon Awbrey

Old brains shed their mortal coils.

Children only learn of the past through well-told stories.

Where are the bards who will craft the durable stories our bumbling generation?

I have already put forward many hypotheses about the real objectives of those who control the ongoing development of the Wikipedia media platform.

The next page collects links to a number of relevant posts and topics.

Jon Awbrey

Dynamic Page —

Effective Goals and Enacted Values in the Wikipedia System

How Wikipedia Really Works


Guide to Wikipedia for Reporters and Researchers

I think I understand what Jonny is talking about.

A true reality show would just have cameras that no one would know about and people would just go about their lives with no interference from the producers. But there are no such true reality shows.

I understand that the Cabal are basically a bunch of pirates with a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" alliance coupled with every Cabal member knowing that every Cabal member carries some dark secret that can be blackmailed.

But I have a hard time understanding why any Cabal would be happy with running a dystopic reality show like Wikipedia.

Perhaps by means of private communications (IRC, AIM, e-mail, etc.) Cabalists can poke certain players into committing a certain action that results in drama. Those that push for what the Cabalist wants are saved and those who did not were "trolling." Cabalists create the reward and immunity challenges, pick their vassals, and punish those they consider peasants.

And in a dystopia, people look for leadership. That's how the Cabal benefits. They say "Never fear! We shall protect you from evil and discord in exchange for your loyalty!" That's what Robespierre and Marat did in the French Revolution and what Palpatine did during the Clone Wars.

I think though that sometimes the chaos does not yield what the Cabal desires. It can even go so far out of control, the producers (Cabalists) cannot control the actors. I remember DennyColt (search for him with the forum's search function, ye newcomers!) and his tirades. It was speculated that he was some Cabalist's meatpuppet who went out of control of his handler.

It must be great to be a Cabal Warlord on Wikipedia. But there's always a conspiracy, always a mutineer in one's midst, and always the fear that one's "controlled drama or chaos" can go out of control.

You can't even trust you're fellow producers, it seems.

That's my point. The drama takes on a life of its own, because unlike Survivor the Wikipedia Soap Opera is not a small cast of characters carefully chosen by the Producers.

So you end up with a character-driven drama with many dozens of characters. There is no way the outcome of that is gonna be controllable.

I think Jonny, apart from not having named in detail his hypothesis about what exactly "the producers" want to accomplish ("Springtime for Hitler" revival?), has not addressed the null hypothesis: that human nature and normal background biases have created the mess that is Wikipedia's regime, all without any conspiracy at the formation of the project. Was "The Lord of the Flies" completely unbelievable? If not, then why is there a need to figure out what sinister force is behind the Wikipedia fiasco?

I tend to go along with the Lord of the Flies model for what transpired on Wikipedia.

Had the organizers done their homework better, with more due diligence, I daresay they might have adopted a more functional regulatory model, such as one based on a realistic social contract.

Moulton, Saltimbanco,
Put Down The Remote !!!
Pull Your Heads Out Of The Tube !!!

Jonny

Please refactor.

Is the entire history in there, or just the top layer of Wikipedia?

One thing that keeps the con game going is that the marks just keep denying that they have been conned.

Jonny

Trust is a fragile thing. Once broken, it's very hard to rebuild.

Tell your story, Jonny. I'm generally willing to believe the worst of the Wikipedia lot (as an old friend and co-worker once said when I blandly asked her if she was familiar with another, somewhat infamous co-worker, "Whatever it is, he did it."), but there are an awful lot of awful counter-indicators to what you seem to be suggesting. I've stated my null hypothesis; tell me your test hypothesis and give me a chance to shoot holes through it. If it withstands the barrage, then I'll believe you have something. If you're insisting that your Sooper-Sekret Mailing List of Uber-Admins has already vetted your hypothesis, I'm not biting.

In a line of theory about the inquiry process that Aristotle kickstarted and Peirce geared up to contemporary speeds, the generation of an explanatory hypothesis is said to be the result of "abductive inference", or "abduction" for short (Greek απαγωγη).

An explanatory story is useful to the extent that it reduces the amount of bewilderment, puzzlement, or uncertainty that we experience in the encounter with a surprising phenomenon.

Now, it's been a bit of a strain on my acting abilities trying to play the parts of all Seven Siteless Sages, but I do think that the record will show that I have generated a number of useful hypotheses, each of which would serve to explain some aspect of the Wikipachyderm's physiognomy.

The hypothesis that Wikipedia is a con game goes a long way toward explaining many features of the generic Wikipedia game that have historically been rather hard to explain on any other hypothesis.

I would not say that it accounts for all of the variance from the path of null-hype-ness, but I do think that it accounts for a lot.

Jon Awbrey

Wikipedia may well be a confidence game.

But if someone unfamiliar with the story asked me to explain what the con game is, or how it works, I would be hard pressed to provide a coherent answer.

The engine that drives the confidence game is an unrealistic expectation on the part of the mark, typically rooted in unconscious strata of unrenounced fantasies, for example, delusions of entitlement or infantile wishes for glory, love, power, etc. The confidence artist is an expert in reviving whatever unrealistic hopes the mark may harbor and in using their imaginary values to deprive the mark of goods that have real value.

Jon Awbrey