And we’re just supposed to take his word for it
Every once in a while, Jimbo Wales will mistakenly schedule an interview with a reporter or talk-show host who is actually willing to broach the subject of how Wikipedia might cause problems for society overall, or have negative effects on individuals or social institutions. In most [...]

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080810/benign-he-says/

The distinguished CBS News journalist, Eric Sevareid, made a similar observation that is now called The Sevareid Effect.

He observed that every solution introduced to solve the pressing problems of the day creates a whole new set of problems that will have to be solved in the future.

More to the point, those downstream problems are typically not anticipated or minimized, because political processes generally fail to employ the caliber of systems thinking and model-based reasoning that would have led to devising best practices for the long term (rather than haphazard, ad hoc, and ill-advised short-term solutions).

In Medicine, a new treatment is not approved unless and until doctors are confident the new treatment is not iatrogenic — not likely to exacerbate or spread the disease they are trying to cure.

In politics, nearly all solutions are ridiculously and transparently iatrogenic, for reasons that political animals rarely seem able to learn.

(Actually, if one does learn it, one ceases to be a political animal and evolves up the ladder to become more like a real scientist and systems thinker).

One can observe the Sevareid Effect not just in national politics, but also in the haphazard management practices of Wikimedia Projects and even here in Wikipedia Review.

http://digg.com/general_sciences/Benign_he_says

Hi Moulton,

I have to say- there are problems with this claim. Doctors may be unduly 'confident' of their proposed treatments even in the face of evidence that they should not be.

Thalidomide, lobotomies, a confident belief in 'hysteria' - there are many more examples. The treatments propsed for ME/CFS (cognitive behavioural therapy, graded exercise) are based on highly flawed research results (high rate of drop-out, patients who cannot even be defined as 'ME/CFS') and have evidence of active iatrogenic harm to patients with 'properly'defined ME/CFS- yet certain doctors are confident to the point of culpable negligence when pushing for these treatments, and are 'approved' by agencies (NICE, for example here in the UK) who should know better, even by their own policies!

Not to make it about ME/CFS again of course, but it is a current example.

Dude. You forgot the link. And the Quote.

QUOTE

Wales is not sure how big Wikipedia can become, and he has long since ceased to have any say in that fact. He recently, in what sounded like a slightly controlling way, suggested the need for a blogger's code of conduct across the web. Before I left his office in New York, I had asked him if he lay awake worrying that he had created a monster, and he laughed a bit wildly. If so it is quite a benign one, he suggested - a big friendly giant.

"Laughed a bit wildly" - emphasis mine. Funny choice of words, hm?

"If so, it is quite a benign [monster]" - emphasis mine. His words after the 'a bit [too] wild' laughter.

The reporter 'got' it. Totally.

But then, he'd got a brief glimpse of being blocked and an almost BLP.

Lucky him. It got deleted.

Those historic examples are well-documented and widely studied. (The evidence for that is obvious: almost everyone knows about them.) They are widely studied because the medical profession doesn't want mistakes like that to become a recurring habit.

Politicians rarely study their mistakes.

Back in the 90's a Professor of Psychology at U-Mass Lowell had a 14-yr old daughter who was eventually diagnosed with CFIDS. She was unable to attend school, but she had a computer at home with Internet access. One of her schoolmates told her about a Muse I had installed at the Middle School where she would otherwise have been a student. I noticed that Angela was logged on at all hours. At first I thought she might be a truant. Eventually she told me that she was homebound because of an undiagnosed disorder. When I learned that, I opened up all available online resources to her. You can read about Angela's story here. She is now a graduate student at Stanford, doing seminal research in gene splicing.


In science and medicine, there is no absolute guarantee of ultimate success (and oftentimes little hope for timely success), but at least there is an ethic to discover and adopt best practices.


I played no role in diagnosing or treating Angela's organic disorder. But notwithstanding her CFIDS, I was able to meet her cognitive-emotive needs as a young student and would-be scholar who had been cruelly plucked from her schoolhouse culture. Using then-cutting-edge technology, I put Angela back in touch with her peers via online networking systems that (in many ways) surpassed the affordances of the traditional classroom. I couldn't solve Angela's primary problem, but I could solve her secondary problem of isolation and acedia.

Does your daughter have a similar secondary problem?


Notwithstanding the painfully slow pace of progress in medical research and treatment, would you be interested in solving the secondary problems of isolation, despair, and intellectual poverty that often arises among patients (and family members) who are awaiting more effective medical cures for their afflictions?

But even where that happens (the studying of mistakes- I actually do NOT see much evidence of that- and I've been looking out for it!) they're not necessarily preventing the same mistakes being made (the revival of 'hysteria' being a case in point). And the ME/CFS problems are not widely 'known' - at least, not among British GPs or even the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (over here in the UK), even though the evidence is there.

I am heartened to hear about Angela- but she's likely to be in a minority. I don't talk about it much- I'm wary of 'my story' type narratives for many reasons- but the way my daughter has been treated, at the hands of ignorant doctors, educators, other government agencies and even within our community is a horror story lasting over 8 years. The failure to take on board the evidence, in favour of subjective opinion, being the common denominator in the way all these parties have acted. It is happening even now- though abundant evidence of severe and life-threatening physiological impairment has long since accumulated. We're having to take on another government agency just to get her the care she needs.

There are many stories similar to my daughter's. The failure of medics to keep up with the science of ME/CFS alone is not historic. It is current: as is the revival of 'hysteria', despite all it's documented flaws as a paradigm. These are only my examples of course- there are others: but even by themselves they do somewhat challenge the representation of medicine as a benign, forward planning, carefully considering, rational discipline that learns by its mistakes.