Interview with Sam Vaknin:

http://globalpolitician.com/26423-wikipedia-cult-jimmy-wales

Better job than most of pursuing this analogy. I was impressed that unlike most he does not overestimate the size of cult, placing the number at 2000, which if anything is a little low. What he misses is the role that free culture and libertarianism plays in this cult. Tie these in while retaining the authoritarian top layer and you nail the nature of the beast.

"Pathological Narcissistic Space": best three-word description I have seen yet for Wikipedia.

Sam Vaknin is the subject of the CBC documentary "I, Psychopath". His opinions may be discounted by some because he is a psychopath, but like they say, it takes one to know one.

Ok, somewhat unrelated, but why is it always "the Wikipedia"? Was it ever actually called this? If not, why the hell does everyone call it that?

Looks accurate to me.

Yes, Sam Vaknin nails teh Wikipedia as a classic cult.

Sam Vaknin is despised by the Wikipediots because he is dangerously close to the truth about Wikipedia and he cannot be shut up by them.

His "Six Cardinal Sins of Wikipedia" is a classic dissection of what is wrong with Wikipedia. He is spot on about the cultish nature of Wikipedia and the narcissism of its leadership.

What fascinates me is how Vaknin managed to diagnose his own personality disorders. Is it in his book?

I don't know how Vaknin carried out his self-diagnosis, but it occurs to me that doing so is consistent with the Socratic notion of self-examination. Academics who are steeped in processes of peer review become accustomed to self-examination, partly as preparation for public examination by their peer communities. At times, philosophers do that to excess (where the practice is sometimes dismissed as "navel gazing"). Note that Vaknin's Ph.D. is in Philosophy.

Those six sins are as follows:
1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness

2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic

3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle

4. Wikipedia is against real knowledge

5. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia

6. The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights

Lest not forget this, for Doctor Vaknin is dead on with his experience and analysis of Wikipedia and and it's cult culture which it's admin elite operate.

When anybody mouths "the Wikipedia" I stop reading. I got 5 words with this guy. Teh internets.

Your loss, the Ceoil.

In order to be classified a psychopath, I believe you have to be a repeat criminal offender (in addition to meeting the psychological diagnoses). So he would be a sociopath, not a psychopath correct?

I agree with the Cedric. More to the point, I've always believed that people call it "the Wikipedia" in hopes that by doing so, they'll reinforce the singular nature of the site in the public perception, and thus discourage the people from trying to create more Wikipedias.


Interesting point, but "psychopath" is both a psychological diagnosis and a legal classification made by law enforcement (and judicial) entities - the latter's failure to classify you doesn't mean you aren't a psychopath. After all, you might have committed a number of crimes without having been caught.

In Vaknin's case, I believe he was using the psychiatric definition(s) in a strictly clinical sense, i.e., he recognized that he lacks emotional empathy, in particular for the suffering of others (including those close to him). We even had a member here on WR, currently inactive, who claimed to have dealt with Vaknin's lack of empathy, etc., first-hand. To some extent, this sort of thing can be tested using Clockwork Orange-like stimulus/reaction procedures, where they show you various images (some nice, some not-so-nice, some appallingly horrible, some taken directly from Wikipedia itself) while viewing extreme closeups of your facial expressions, graphing your heart-rate, and so on.

But regardless, self-recognition is fairly easy for a psychopath/sociopath - all it usually takes is a bit of reading, and a willingness to be objective about one's own mental processes. If anything, it's probably easier for people to misdiagnose themselves as whateveropaths than it is to correctly diagnose themselves as such.

Lack of empathy may be a characteristic of some clinical diagnoses (e.g. Asperger's Syndrome), but lack of empathy is also a fairly common trait throughout human society, especially in highly competitive societies.

Right, but supposedly a psychopath displays a complete lack of empathy, i.e., zero empathy, whereas someone who merely has limited empathy might be classified as, say, a "selfish jerk" or "arsehole" or "neoconservative." Also, in the USA we're forced to accept the current legal construction of corporations-as-individuals, and as such, all corporations are psychopaths almost by definition (i.e., a corporation in itself cannot have empathy, cannot experience love or hate, behaves in a cold and distant manner when attending social functions, refuses to put the toilet seat down after going to the bathroom, etc., etc.).

Mind you, I'm not a psychiatrist myself, I just play one on the internet.

Just for the fun of it, let me propose the thesis that it's logically impossible to have zero empathy, since for any emotional state that a person can find themselves in, there must be others who just happen to be in that same state.

A particularly notable example would be the emotional state of perplexity (or, if you prefer, confusion). While I can't speak for the case of psychopathy, I can assert with reasonable confidence that people with Asperger's Syndrome are often in a state of perplexity (if for no other reason than such individuals often take on career assignments that involve solving hard technical problems).

What's more likely is that someone may not be aware they are in the same emotional state as another person, and thus unlikely to express the (unobserved) fact that they are in the same emotional state as another.

I've had people who consider themselves very adept at reading the non-verbal cues that signal another person's emotional state tell me that I'm very hard to read. You might say they were perplexed at their failure to detect my emotional state. But I tell them that my default emotional state is perplexity. So if they don't notice a recognizable emotional state in my countenance or body language, it's pretty safe to assume I'm in a state of perplexity.

And notice that their own perplexity mirrored mine, but they simply failed to realize it.

Don't confuse ability to read other people's mental state, with the ability or willingness to have any sympathy for it (which actually doesn't follow automatically, although it does in most people). Empathy really requires both steps. Psychopaths and chainjerkers may only be able to achieve the first. Autistics, not even that.

Misery loves company

It's hard not to identify with someone who is in the same fix as yourself. The problem is recognizing that another person is in the same fix as oneself.

Sam Vaknin responds to Wikipedia's Signpost claims (16/6/2010):

Is Wikipedia a Cult? Wikipedia strikes back

YUP, WIKIPEDIA IS CULT TO MANY, AS WIKIHOLIC WIKIADDICTS LOL, SAD!

I thought all of this was excellent. I am ashamed I never came across him before. Whatever his personal defects, he writes well (perhaps with a rather lurid style) and he expresses himself carefully with an excellent command of metaphor. What he says here



concedes Wikipedia's strength, and devastatingly exposes its weakness. I am a sort of expert in philosophy, and he is dead right about that. About economics, true as far as I can see.

and I love this, particularly the 'cosmic grandiose mission'.




http://samvak.tripod.com/wikipedia.html

Vaknin was featured in this W-R Editorial from two years ago.

I also picked up on his work and posted my own views (which Vaknin endorsed).

KTHX!

And welcome to WR, Mr. Aword. Just try to remember that we try to only use ALL CAPS here when referring to Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen.

Just dropped by to append what is, to my mind, a lively and entertaining, as well as accurate account of Vakin's "credentials":
http://www.macedoniantruth.org/forum/showt...?t=3959&page=21

I just stumbled across some people making a fuss about Will Beback making WikiWar on the use of Vaknin as a source.