Just opening a space for eventual discussion of Ira's postings on The Volokh Conspiracy Blog.

I was going to try and make some kind of summary comment there, but I'm way too distracted with other biz right now, and the level of discussion there is sooooo 2005 that I just couldn't work up the motivation to wade through all that cloud cuckoo cluelessness again.

Jon Awbrey

Table of Contents (and Discontents) — copied here for ease of reference —

Actually, the comments so far on the Volokh Conspiracy site have been a little disheartening to me personally, because the really anti-WP ones seem to be mostly coming from right-wingers, and are apparently based more on personal experiences than anything else. Or rather, extrapolations from personal experiences.

For example, this one guy, "24AheadDotCom," objected to the way the WP article on Barack Obama clearly states that he was born in Hawaii, i.e., the United States, and to the fact that he (24AheadDotCom, that is) was blocked immediately afterwards for having an "inappropriate username." On the one hand, the block was almost certainly triggered by the objection, but on the other hand, the username is just as clearly against WP policy. Regardless, the suggestion that the WP article in question should reflect the notion that Obama is not really an American citizen isn't one I'd want to be seen supporting.

Does The Volokh Conspiracy have a general right-wing slant? Hard to say. Most, if not all, of the bloggers are either lawyers or law professors, but that doesn't necessarily tell us much... but there are an awful lot of right-wing bloggers and blog-commenters out there, nobody would deny that.

Yes, I was expecting much better — I have no idea why — both from Ira and from the blog habitues in general. The whole tenor of the discussion on both sides struck me as utterly 4 years ago. I was trying to hold my ire until Ira wrapped up the series, and trying to respect his request not to bog the blog down with excess anecdotage — which always depresses me to recall anyway — but then this pseudo-pseud "Timekeeper" jumped in and made it personal.

Oh well, wiki-par for the course …

Jon

Volokh conspiracy is generally libertarian, as is Eugene Volokh himself. Some of the contributors specialize in issues that would be considered right-wing. For example, David Kopel is a guns right advocate.

Here's a column Volokh wrote about the Federalist Society, where he admits to reading the National Review in college, which some WRers apparently find nauseating and un-American.

I noted this in the other thread too - he finally admitted that he's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) . Another right-winger, I might add, only this one's defending WP, in the back-handed sort of way conservatives often do ("well, it's true the media is totally liberal and against everything we stand for and Wikipedia reflects that, but if you all could just have a little patience, one day we may be able to finally take over...")

The Way I See It (TWISI), Wikipediot Culture is simply not principled enough to be either Left-Wing or Right-Wing. This is one area where the Information Prostitution Service known as Wikipedia really is just like a phone company — the sort of people who are perfectly happy to sell privacy-invading devices to one side and privacy-defense systems to the other side of the War On Privacy, just for one instance.

If it looks like one side or the other is winning on a particular front at a particular time, then it's probably just the fortunes of wiki-war. The only real winners are the arms dealers at the WMF.

Jon Awbrey

For another good analogy, one notices that Wikipedia's radar detector detector article actually mentions "radar-detector-detector-detectors". Now I need to buy one!

One, your grammar is ambiguous -- in all fairness, I didn't suggest that reading it were nauseating and un-American. But I did say as much about the publication itself.

One thing it tells you is that the participants are interested in the Law and the practice of law, which probably means they have a fundamental belief in the concept of the Law as humankind's preferred method of regulation.

The core belief in the concept of Law dates back some 4000 years and is rarely questioned as a fundamental concept in human civilization.

Chances are, most of the readers and participants in VC are unfamiliar with recent breakthroughs in mathematics suggesting that some basic assumptions about rule-driven systems are incorrect. The most important new development is the discovery that rule-driven systems are inherently mathematically chaotic, and cannot be relied upon to yield orderly, stable, or predictable systems.

The takeaway is that rule-driven systems are an inherent source of political drama, the outcome of which is essentially unpredictable.

There is a resolution to the resultant conundrum ("If not the Law, then what?"), but the resolution calls for equally advanced mathematical concepts associated with functions. The mastery of the mathematics of functions takes one into the challenging realm of Rocket Science (e.g. Calculus and Differential Equations), and thus tends to lie beyond the grasp of most lawyers.

Un-American? Since when is the mindless defense of wealth and privileged un-American?

I tried to work out some "right-wing internet" critique of social media and Wikipedia. Although there are some ingrained threads of "Randoid" and libertarian though over represented in places on the internet (including Wkipedia) this has never been as productive of an approach as a "game analysis," "dysfunctional social networking environment" or "interpersonal boundary erosion" approaches. It might account for the tolerance of irresponsibility to some extent, but at a miniman a political/ideological critique of social media is not yet ready for prime time.

The law has its own islands of ingrained right-wing though which include The Federalist Society and the University of Chicago. I have no opinion of Volokh from either a legal or social media perspective.

Assuming I understand what you're saying I'm not sure why this should surprise anyone.

Sure we can say people will balance the potential benefit of rule-breaking against the likelihood of prosecution for it. But short of reading minds we don't know what they think will make them happy or what corners they'll cut in order to obtain it. Even if we could record all their life experiences and moral signals and DNA and whatnot and feed them into some supercomputer we'd still be nowhere close to knowing where their next lunch will come from.

Game theory is only meaningful when each player knows that each player sees everything the same way, which just doesn't happen in the wild. Even the most dystopian of fiction isn't structured like that, otherwise would it not be... how do you say... doubleplusunreadworthy?

True or Else, it's hardly relevant, since Wikipedia is nothing like a rule-driven system.

Jon Awbrey

You're right, it's more exception-driven.

Best post of 2009.

I was impressed!

Still, just to follow up on myself, I've taken a closer look at this Volokh Conspiracy site, and I'd have to say it really is right-leaning, if not quite firmly right-wing. (When I wrote "hard to say" earlier, I only meant that it was hard for me personally to read through page after page of conservative diatribes looking for the occasional bit of liberal counterpoint thrown in for the sake of the n00bz.) That's not to say I disagree with everything they're saying, though.

It has struck me in the past that the ability to spot the biases of a particular person or group is mostly dependent on knowledge of the subject. Some Wikipedians clearly reject that idea, though, evidently thinking that bias can be spotted on the basis of "unreasonable" or "tendentious" behavior alone. That strikes me as an extremely dangerous attitude, both for WP itself and for society at large, assuming WP doesn't just magically disappear within the next few years.

WP'ers are generally able to spot biases on subjects related to US/UK politics, race, and religion without too much trouble because there are usually one or two of them around who watch enough TV news to have a vague idea about such things. Occasionally there will be actual experts too, of course, depending on what day you show up. As a result, those biases are kept mostly under control, particularly given the target demographic of the user base (young, technically savvy, and either intellectual or pseudo-intellectual).

Other biases are likely to be harder to spot, such as those based on nationality, ethnicity, economic philosophy, belief in various pseudo-sciences, preference for waffles over pancakes, etc...

The worst-case scenario, which IMO is also the most likely, is that WP will go into an "Attrition Phase" before the people running the site allow it to go into a "Lockdown Phase." The loss of thousands of "good editors," mostly from boredom and burnout, will bring about a period of Pernicious Creeping Bias™, perhaps even in high-profile articles like Barack Obama (T-H-L-K-D). That bias could easily become permanent when the Lockdown Phase inevitably begins, and the really scary thing is that this might have even been the Sole Flounder's intention all along.

Volokh's site reminds me of an old joke about political tendencies.
The political "spectrum" is like a semicircular rainbow.

On the left are the classical revolutionary socialists, pushing for change.
On the right, rigid traditionalists, wanting to go back (wherever "back" is).
In the center are the ordinary masses, usually with no opinions of their own.

The joke: none of them realizes that the "semicircle" is really a full circle.
Bland on the top, getting aggressively opinionated in the middle......and
1000% incoherent crazy on the bottom.

Go down the circle from either left-wing or right-wing, and they meet
in a deranged, incoherent paranoia-fest. (Supposedly that's where
you'll find people like LaRouche and Alex Jones, but that's another story.)

Wikipedia isn't even on this spectrum. It's off the circle, lost into political
meaninglessness. Making it perfect for opinion-pushers.

Hey, there's one guy holding up both puppets...