I don't know if this counts - but:one of your own Wikipedia Review memes eventually permeated my consciousness after 1000s of obscuring posts, Moulton.
Concocting and Publishing a Haphazard Theory of Mind
Moulton is always banging on about this. And he has on occasion linked to the Wikipedia article, which describes a "
theory of mind" as:
QUOTE(Wikipedia)
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others. As originally defined, it enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of—and thus be used to explain and predict—others’ behavior
When Moulton refers to "Theory of Mind" here, he is usually doing so in a negative sense, to explain the "unseemly" practice of an internet figure attributing some intention or motivation to another internet figure, based on little or no evidence, and certainly no real life interaction. This happens all the time on Wikipedia, where many unchecked assertions are written about other editors' frames of mind, with scarcely a thought to the consequences. The classic example is:
QUOTE
User:XYZ is only here to troll
Moulton, in his role as an uber-scientist, maintains that published interactions of the sort we see on WP, and here at WR, should have some semblance of Scientific Method about them. This chimes with his evangelizing of "Ethics in Media" - and his constant calls for an intense process of deductive reasoning to be undertaken before statements are published as "fact" in any forum.
When Moulton famously challenged the assertions made on a WP biography of a colleague, one of his gripes was that the article writers had published "
as encyclopedic fact a rather dubious theory of mind" of his colleague's intentions regarding a well known sceintific petition.
Here, Moulton describes the concoction of a "haphazard theory of mind" as "one of the seeds of lunatic social drama." Meaning that to assume, and then publish an ill-thought out assertion about another person's intentions, is a sure fire way of causing a grim shitstorm. And such behavior will likely have negative consequences for all concerned. Everybody loses. Whether this is on WP, on WR or any other such venue.
Having seen this type of thing time and again, I can only conclude that Moulton is correct. (Most of us fail to to live by these lessons, including Moulton himself, it should be said.)