A Ku Indeed!

Sullivan first quotes from the founder of Wikipedia:

There’s a whole worldview that’s shared by many programmers – although not all of them, of course – and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as “epistemic egalitarianism.” They’re greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

Right after that, he (Sullivan) comments: “This is a flaw? Give me epistemic egalitarianism over a propensity for authoritah.”

Is Sullivan serious? I mean sure, _if_ the claim here is that “if I had to choose one over the other exclusively, which would I want?” You’d want the claim out there for people to judge for themselves (which most times will require taking the claim and checking with sources independently), as opposed to some source simply telling you “I know what’s right.”

But we’re not being presented with an either/or. Instead, we have the claim that anyone is just as qualified as anyone else to assess the truth value of a claim as anyone else. That’s nuts. What you want is a level – at some point — of quality control that consists of actual experts. You can have it such that no one expert’s judgment is conclusive. As a corporate body they can make changes to additions made by non-experts, disagree, and so on.

But to leave the content and the content quality control completely up to people who have no expertise – because there really isn’t such a thing as expertise – is crazy. That’s not knowledge, it’s the collective opinions of the masses. We should be looking for a middle ground between the non-expert and the expert. That’s what should make Wikipedia different. It shouldn’t be different because it embraces in practice epistemic nihilism.

I’m too busy grading to post anything marginally substantial. So instead, and in the attempt to put off thinning the pile of papers further, I ran some mindless blog analysis.  Here’s what I found:

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I’m clueless — apparently this 2007 film, When Nietzsche Wept, came and went and I didn’t even notice. What caught my eye, though, was the fact that Armand Assante is playing Nietzsche. Armand Assante? Really? I don’t know. When I think Assante, I think of the kinds of “tough guy” types my dad hung out with in the very Italian sections of the Bronx — you know, the guys who are perpetually cursing, even when they aren’t mad although they always seem pissed off, and have extremely thick New York accents. I think Assante, I think Gotti. But Nietzsche? This I gotta see.

Anyone see this film?

I’ve been out of blog-world for a while, but ready now to return. School is over and the book is finished, and the summer is now in front of me. I’m almost finished with Jijuan Yu’s Aristotle and Confucius: Mirrors of Virtue (2007) and I’m reading through some older essays on virtue ethics (to prepare for the upcoming NEH seminar). I’m currently making my way through Phillipa Foot’s “Virtues and Vices” (1979).

If I still have any readers left, keep your eyes out for some posts on these pretty soon (I’ll probably start with Foot)!

I’m also in the process of “brooming up” this site. I like the old style format, but I need a change just to shake things up (it’s a psychological thing). I’ll likely change to something else, get tired of it, and then return to my older design. We’ll see!

I had a movie on in the background the other day while I was doing some school work. I’m curious if anyone can name this robot, and the movie it comes from. It’s an odd movie, stranger still when you realize what movie company put it out. And it has a strange ending.

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Christie and I went to see Cloverfield last night. Not surprisingly, we differed in our take on it. She loved the first half, and then seemed to quickly get bored (“no story” she said). I said that she mistook “the story” as being about a bunch of people when it was really about the big 500 ft. thing rampaging through New York. She said that she basically didn’t get the genre in that case. All in all, she gave it 3 stars (out of 5). I’d give it 4 out of 5, as a monster movie. I’m an old monster movie buff, and I appreciated the originality (I realize that Blair Witch is the first to do the “held camera” style, but I think they do a better job of it here).

(Spoilers below, don’t open if you don’t want to read)

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Hey Everyone,

If you’ve been reading along with any consistency, you’ll notice the power-down in the last two weeks. Sorry about that! I’m basically in the midst of being ‘superwhelmed’ (not a word, but overwhelmed doesn’t seem to quite capture the situation). Greg and I finally got our book contract (a book on Existentialism) and we’re under a lot of pretty intense deadlines. On top of that, I’m giving a conference talk later this week (with my wife, on establishing empirical proof for differences in perspective taking strategies between Eastern-Confucians and Westerners). Of course, I’ve also got my usual teaching duties and grading to do, and I’m up for tenure this year, so there’s the portfolio, letters to type out for it, and so on. Oh boy. Time to get back to work!

I’ll likely be back to regular blogging in a week or so.

My wife and daughter wound up in the Springfield News-Leader today in a photo taken at Apple Butter Makin’ Days (the festival held yearly in my town). To find them, click here and then go to photo 7.

They got my wife’s name wrong — it’s Christie not Christine. Whenever her name winds up in print they always print it wrong in some way. She also looks a little mad, but she claims she was pulling apart the thing she was eating (can’t tell what that was). My daughter looks pretty happy, though.

UPDATE: Christie says she was pulling fat off a rib sandwich.