Monthly Archives: December 2010

Reposted from BoingBoing. by Cory Doctorow. Joseph Reagle Jr‘s Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is exactly what a popular, scholarly work should be: serious but not slow, intelligent but not dull, and esoteric but not obscure. It’s practically a textbook example on how to adapt a dissertation as a trade book — dropping the literature review, moderating the stuff that’s meant to prove you’ve done your homework, and diving straight into the argument. Reagle, an avid wikipedian himself, nevertheless takes up an objective distance and tries to suss out how it is that Wikipedia works as well as …

(Posted on NeuroLogicaBlog by Steven Novella) The most succinct criticism of postmodernist philosophy as applied to science that I have heard is this – that proponents confuse the context of discovery with the context of  later justification. It occurred to me that the same is true of the role of both anecdotes and anomalies in science. Often when I criticize reliance on anecdotes or so-called anomaly hunting, I get feedback that makes the exact same confusion of context. The context of discovery refers to how new ideas are generated in science. Playing off of Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigms (and …

(Published on NewScientist‘s CultureLab; John Bickle and Sean Keating, contributors; Original article here) We’re hard-wired to turn our lives into stories – how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating “We are our narratives” has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in …