Citizendium Blog

My Dad, Gerry Sanger, is a retired marine biologist and has been taking people out on the Prince William Sound, as part of his business, Sound Eco Adventures. The Sound is a truly beautiful place — as we often say, it would be a treasured national park if it were in any other state, but since it’s in Alaska, it’s just a national forest with some marine parks thrown in. It so happens I personally know the western Sound pretty well, having visited it since I was eight or so, and having worked there for my Dad for I think eight summers. But my Dad is a true expert about the Sound, its wildlife, and the interpretation thereof.

Anyway, a passenger posted this video to YouTube in which a humpback whale cow and calf come literally within a few feet of the boat. This is amazing to watch on video and even more amazing to experience, but it isn’t that uncommon of an experience on my Dad’s boat, the Sound Access, actually. The whales are clearly curious about the boat, and have gotten used to it somewhat.

Not exactly CZ related, but this might be of interest to some people. Over on Edge, I was invited to respond to an essay that asked, “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” My answer: no, or at least not if the scientific help takes the form of an allegedly ideology-free “economic Manhattan project” that attempts to make economics scientifically rigorous.

OK, so there was a call for papers on PhilUpdates, a philosophy announcement list. It seems Robert Arp is compiling a volume on the pressing topic of The Onion and Philosophy. This wouldn’t be particularly notable except that it called my attention to this classic article in The Onion: “Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The F— Up” (they solicit articles about the article; yep they really do):

HANOVER, NH—According to students enrolled in professor Michael Rosenthal’s Philosophy 101 course at Dartmouth College, that guy, Darrin Floen, the one who sits at the back of the class and acts like he’s Aristotle, seriously needs to shut the f— up.

His fellow students describe Floen’s frequent comments as eager, interested, and incredibly annoying.

“He thinks he knows about philosophy,” freshman Duane Herring said. “But I hate his voice, and I hate the way he only half raises his hand, like he’s so laid back. We’re discussing ethics in a couple weeks, but I don’t know if I can wait that long before deciding if it’s morally wrong to pound his face in.”

“Today he was going on and on about how Plato’s cave shadows themselves represent the ideal foundation of Western philosophical thought,” said freshman Julia Wald moments after class let out Monday. “I have no idea what Plato’s ideal reality is, but I bet it doesn’t include know-it-all little shits.”

…

The outspoken student has not gone unremarked by the course’s professor.

“Mr. Floen is a valuable contributor to our in-class discussions,” Rosenthal said. “His tendency to question and challenge everything before him captures the very essence of philosophy itself.”

Rosenthal added: “Having said that, I do wish he would occasionally do me the valued service of shutting his damn cake hole.”

Actually I think I would enjoy writing that commentary for The Onion and Philosophy. Maybe — just maybe — because I once was that guy. No snide comments from the peanut gallery there!

Here’s a reel called “The Piper on Horseback”…just because.

Well, I am now back and “back in the saddle” after a full week away.  First I went to Oxford, to have a public debate with Andrew Keen.  That was fun.  I especially enjoyed walking around the different colleges and meeting different people.  Andrew wrote his Independent column about the event.  Yep, I was honored to be invited to talk to the dons after dinner, but I think that’s just because one or two of the guests wanted to chat — nope, Andrew, it wasn’t to “illuminate the rest of the Balliol community with the secrets of wiki business.”  I did talk with the Master of Balliol who was a disarmingly unpretentious man, exactly the opposite of what some might expect, but which I found very much in keeping with old stories I’d heard or read about Oxford.  I heard from the man himself that Adam Smith, J. M. Keynes, Joseph Raz, and a host of other luminaries were or are at Balliol, and wandered that very quad.  We did not talk about how Balliol or Oxford might get into the collaborative knowledge production business. 

Then from the very old to the very new, I went to Santa Barbara to participate in a very interesting meeting, without presentations per se — but instead the more creative format of a giant group conversation.  S.B. may soon have a Social Computing program.  Liz Losh wrote about the proceedings in her blog.

Should be fun:

Is the Future of the Internet the Future of Knowledge?
Tuesday 27 May 2008 16:00 - 18:00

Larry Sanger, Editor in Chief of Citzendium and a founder of Wikipedia
Andrew Keen, author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture’

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

This event brings together two of the leading figures in media and academic debates about the value and potential of user-generated content. In this moderated debate, Larry Sanger and Andrew Keen will be challenged to answer a range of questions relating to the Internet’s role in creating and disseminating knowledge.

This event is organised by the Weidenfeld Institute Leadership and Scholarship Scheme in collaboration with the OII.

A few days later I’ll be in Santa Barbara (UCSB) for a social computing workshop.

We hope to make the initial announcement, finally, of that free educational content project in June.

One thing Andrew Keen said near the end of that video gave me pause.  He said something similar in his book, and it is something I have been thinking about, idly, for years.  It is that the Internet is making us more selfish, or more self-centered.  I have thought for a long time that we don’t talk together face-to-face so much anymore — or, I am honest enough to admit that I don’t.  I don’t see my friends as much.  Partly I’m sure that’s because I’ve gotten busier, and now we have a baby.  But I think we are becoming more self-centered as a society.  While I am an individualist in many ways, I also believe we are social and political animals, and as another gentleman said in the video, we are not fully human if we are cut off from others.

And I have to say that my talking to you on this blog does not count as full-blooded social relations!  Should I be telling this to a friend?  Well, I can speak to more people this way, and have a bigger impact.  But in doing so am I ignoring a subtle negative impact that the medium has on me?

Our lives would be very sad and weak indeed if all of our social relations were mediated by the Internet.  I think perhaps we are already seeing what this might look like among young people, whose social lives are mediated by FaceBook (or the social networking website du jour) and texting, who complain that there isn’t dating any longer, who more often “hook up” rather than develop serious relationships.

In our radical new digital world, who or what will teach us again how to spend and enjoy time together face to face –especially those of us who do not go to church, or are not in school, and otherwise have few opportunities for truly meaningful social interaction?

I have absolutely loved the PBS Jane Austen series.  (Anybody agree?  I’m so disappointed that it’s over.  That Pride and Prejudice miniseries, from the 1990s, is absolutely magnificent.)  While I have little romantic nostalgia for early 19th century manners and society — well, it would be nice if some of that politeness were back in style – I was struck by how people would pass the time, hours of it, in conversation with friends and family.  That is charming.  I suspect that serious face-to-face conversation makes us better and more human.  It seems to me that we are now much more perfunctory in our communication.

Of course, there is an old complaint that television is ruining the arts of conversation and friendship.  But the participatory Internet makes the problem worse, because it gives us an outlet for social relations, but it is by its nature a self-centered and self-directed outlet, and it is not fully embodied.  This is a problem.

Now, I love self-determination and self-actualization as much as anyone.  I come from nonconformist Protestant stock, but I’m a free-thinking philosopher; I’m also a Reedie, an Alaskan, and an American.  I remember my old 11th grade chemistry teacher telling me the platitude, “Be true to yourself for you are your own best friend.”  I was already taking that seriously.  This is why it is easy for me to work online for small, risky companies, buck prevailing Internet trends, not use my Ph.D. in philosophy to get an academic job, leave trendy Silicon Valley for a small Ohio town, etc.  I am so far off the beaten track, I don’t even know where the track is anymore.  I say all that to establish my credentials as a nonconformist and iconoclast.  My life has been extremely self-directed, and perhaps that is why I am drawn to the Internet: you can do what you want, when you want.  Freedom and independence are prized online.

I don’t pretend to be terribly unusual in my independence.  There are many other people, especially online, who are equally independent, in all sorts of ways.  They too are very self-directed.  The problem for us is that in being so self-directed, when we converse online, we choose the topics we’re interested in, we choose who to listen to, we often choose who hears us — and this all happens without the many benefits of being there in real time, situated and embodied with other people.

Can we still have friendships, real friendships, if we spend so much of our free time this way?

Especially those of us who work online (and increasingly, I suspect, all of us will, one way or another), and who want to keep conversation and face-to-face, full-bodied friendship alive, will have to choose to maintain friendships offline.

Perhaps we should start 21st century salons, offline, where many different people come together, physically, to talk, with our mouths, where we do not all necessarily agree, but where we practice the virtues of civility that make it possible for people who disagree to remain friends.

A message posted to Citizendium-L and Citizendium-Editors. 

All,

This is just an announcement which I hope to follow up on in the next few months.

I feel confident that, if I focus on fundraising for the project, I can get enough to make the project independent. Especially with a baby, I think my little family would be happier with something steadier; but please don’t worry about us, we’ve got enough from various sources to live on for a half year or more, and more funds appear as if magically from various sources.

So, as much as I would like to remain wholly independent, I actually think that it might be a good idea if I try to affiliate myself personally in some way with a university.

I mention this to you in part because I want to forestall a certain worry or criticism. You might think my affiliating myself and my work with a university might be seen as affiliating the Citizendium with that institution. That is not the case. Even if I am affiliated with a university, that wouldn’t mean that CZ will be as well. As one Executive Committee member said, editors of most academic journals are affiliated at universities, but the journals themselves are independent of the university.

In addition to active interest from one Big Ten university, I have another faculty friend at major west coast university who wants me to apply for an open faculty position there. This interest from friends is what gave me the idea. The field of online knowledge communities (or allied topics) is an enormous “growth” field, poised to really take off (as I thought it would — if you examine the original announcement of CZ), and I suspect I would have no trouble getting some nice research position at a good university. Basically, I doubt I would have to do much more than I’m already doing — I’d just be doing it under the aegis of a university, perhaps at a research center.

I think that if I simply send out notes to various departments and university centers, I might be able to generate some interest. But I suspect some interested parties might already be on the CZ lists. For the sake of persons who might wish to forward this to decisionmakers, I should say what I think I could offer a university:

• I’ve been called a “thought leader” in my field — online knowledge communities, the philosophy of the Internet, collaboration. I was “chief architect” of both Wikipedia and the Citizendium, having been involved in a wide variety of other Internet projects since the mid-90s, and as an active speaker and writer. I also fully intend to start at least one more major project after Citizendium (see http://www.textop.org/). A case can be made that such organizational and editorial naturally work belongs at universities.
• I would be willing to teach one course per term (I’d prefer one per year, though — teaching always gobbles up all available time). While I have taught a wide variety of philosophy courses since 1992 (intro, ethics, logic, law, epistemology, others), probably the courses an employer would be interested in would have something to do with the philosophy, politics, or ethics of the Internet or about online knowledge communities. (In grad school my specializations were epistemology and early modern.)
• I would of course be willing to do most of my work on campus and to hold office hours, and in other respects be an active part of the university community.
• I can help direct very innovative software projects that support the project(s) I am involved in. It would be a feather in the cap of a university to be the home of open source software projects for next-generation knowledge communities.
• I would be willing to supervise a few student projects.
• I would be willing to participate in fund-raising for any research center with which I might be affiliated.

–Larry

P.S. Still hard at work on the license essay (”dissertation”), 22 detailed pages and counting. I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel…dimly. The decision isn’t getting any easier as I proceed, either.

—–
Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/
sanger@citizendium.org

I needed a break, and a recent e-mail inspired this.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Citizendium.  No, really, it doesn’t!

Various cranks and nuts have written me over the years, just as they often write many academics. Academics usually ignore them. When I have (perhaps imprudently) written them back, I’ve discovered a certain pattern.

(1) The crank claims to have special, difficult understanding of complicated matters, something that constitutes a “discovery.” Usually, the “discovery” involves a thorough misunderstanding of some easily discredited theory, or else a complete system of thought developed out of whole cloth, but which bears little interesting relationship to anything in the history of ideas.

(2) The crank has completely irrational contempt or disrespect for the experts in the field. He (almost always it’s a he) also has contempt for traditional scholarship and methods. This is virtually invariable as a feature.

(3) The crank, ironically enough, has an obvious desire to be respected by those experts, and has no small amount of bitterness owing to the lack of notice, much less respect, experts have paid his “discovery.”

(4) Frequently, the crank also believes he has some special gift, method, or other way of knowing, which is rare, and which renders skoolin’ unnecessary or beneath him.  In fact, however, he is usually prone to the simplest of errors; it’s as if he has turned off all of his self-critical faculties.  See this fascinating article: “One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled.”

(5) The crank usually has some, but not a huge amount, of higher education–might have a bachelor’s degree, but often in a field outside of his own. E.g., a philosophy crank might have have majored in physics or business 30 years ago.

(6) For whatever reason, a lot of cranks seem to be older, over 30 and often over 50 or 60. I’m not sure why this is the case. Perhaps the older you get, the harder it is to recognize your own crankishness. (Scary thought.)  But there are some young ones.

I’m just a crank myself when it comes to theorizing about cranks, I suppose…