User:Sj/essays/Consistent or Complete

This is a personal essay on my Wikipedia editing philosophy, to perhaps give some perspective to my participation here, should anyone wonder. It may or may not expand or contract with new light. -- QTJ 23:49, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Consistent or Complete?

I'm not any any particular mission here on Wikipedia except to try to help within my areas of knowledge and expertise as well as I can given the various constraints of my available time, the medium, and the forces working behind each article in the main namespace. This to say, I have come across some articles that I've realized could use some help that I may be able to offer, but in some cases I'll pass on the chance after realizing that if I dip my toe too deeply into some of the deep waters behind the scenes, I may end up drowning. In such cases, I count on eventualism to kick in at some point in the future. This doesn't mean I am timid; some of my edits to date have been bold. It just means that I'd rather try to avoid conflict that has little or no chance of doing anything to improve the public face of the project.

My particular field of computing has all the juice of a petrified potato, although it certainly is no stranger to controversy.

“Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.”—Russ Rymer

Would you believe, despite Rymer's remark about the field in general, that I think of Noam Chomsky only as his work relates to formal grammar theory and not for what many people would recognize? To my mind, Chomsky is an innovator for his seminal work in linguistics and linguistic theory as it relates to parsing, and all the rest of the passion and furor surrounding him has totally escaped my thinking on his work. I first encountered his name the same way most who study formal language likely do: while at university. I had a friend who was a political science major at the time who also had encountered the name in a completely different context, and had no notion that Chomsky was so influential in the field of petrified potatoes. Chomsky's outspoken views on issues were never mentioned in "The Wonder of Words" (the course where I first was introduced to his work). His work in formal languages was likewise never mentioned in my friend's political science courses.

In my insulated, isolated corner of the world, scientists tend to get along, or at the very least they have evolved a set of protocols of demeanor and interpersonal techniques such that even when they do not "get along" they don't go to the person, but only to the results. Approaching the person is very, very bad form in the sciences — it's looked upon with great suspicion and distaste. Even those who are competitors in the commercial sense are peers. This is not to say it's always a big dance around the maypole holding hands, it has been a collegial experience being a computer scientist. When called upon to do so, computer scientists tend to be able to look at one another's work and results with a certain impersonal distance. Is the math correct? Does the darned thing work? Great!

In this sense, I'm somewhat disappointed to have seen the biographies of both living and deceased figures in society used as the fields for ideological skirmishes of Science vs. Pseudoscience and such. It's a sad indicator. How does a deceased mathematician's entire product, commemorated in at least 3 theorems that bear his name, and numerous other achievements across many branches of mathematics (and some in medicine) get reduced to an imbalanced summary of his outspoken views on evolution?

This is not how I am used to those who would call themselves proponents of science going about their business, and it disturbs me that the recounting of people's lives has become a place some might feel it is appropriate to interpret one's high ideals about larger ideologies. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, however. Science doesn't care for race, creed, or color. No scientific result ever cared who uncovered it. Math either is or is not correct. Math is not a person. Math just is. And so for the hard sciences.

And not just science proper, either. Where would we be collectively without epistemological and ontological inquiry? Absolutely nowhere as a species collective. Without the ability to consider our being-ness, we cease to be anything more than, to use an old ST:TNG phrase, "Ugly bags of mostly water." Our need for awareness and our search for new knowledge have always been driven by a fundamental need to exceed our limitations. To reach for an enlightenment we suspect we'll never fully obtain.

Take poetry, for instance. Useless, on the surface. Would the study of poetry from the viewpoint of science be pseudoscience? Tell that to Douglas Hofstadter with a straight face, and be sure to bring along a well-worn copy of Le Ton beau de Marot with you. The deep consideration of things such as faith, religious constructs, informal philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, music, dancing, whatever you can imagine, by real scientists is not always going to be so easily classified into one big, easily dismissed crock as some of the forces working to "clean up" Wikipedia for the "mainstream" view of the world might imagine.

Is the goal of an encyclopedia to tell only that which is [believed by some amorphous "majority consensus" to be] true or to report that which is part of human knowledge? Not everything that we believe to be true is true. Sure, we can apply the scientific method, do the null-hypothesis and run it around the $\chi ^{2}$ mulberry bush and come up with some confidence level that it's not going to fall apart anytime soon, but the paradigms will shift. Absolute certainty is for formal mathematics, and every so often even the formal maths get their share of controversial results that nonetheless hold. Don't imagine that I'm about to mention the famous result of Gödel, as I'm well aware that his result enhanced the field, rather than destroyed it. And that's my point: even the most controversial of results enhance human knowledge and understanding.

But to be more realistic, just how much of the body of human knowledge is formal mathematics? How many transcendental numbers have you figured in your head lately? A result due to Georg Cantor says that there are more of them than algebraic numbers. In fact, almost all numbers are transcendental, so it shouldn't be hard for you to recite a list of them, right? Ah. Well. Sure. They exist in theory space, certainly, but when was the last time you needed a couple hundred jillion brand spanking new transcendental numbers? $\pi$ and $e$ and a handful of others have some "use" in the here and now, the rest, well, just are. Knowledge, too, is like that. There is both transcendental and algebraic knowledge in the real world, and it all happily manages to co-exist without the fabric of reality falling apart.

Yes, I know, Wikipedia is not the place for original research, but it seems to me that it is the place to capture the essence of the world as it is without judging it. It is full of many astounding ideas, notable not because we editors of Wikipedia agree, or espouse, or even always fully understand them: but notable because they have been noted by the world in which those ideas have been put forth. Not all of those things are as dry as a petrified potato. As humans co-exist, so do the many conflicting views, ideas, theories, and interpretations that spring forth in the collective human journey towards enlightenment.

Now if I may, for but a moment, whitewash Gödel's result just enough to sink the point and tie it all together: his result forced the mathematicians of the time to realize that they could strive for consistency or completeness, but not both within a given system. In the case of mathematics, consistency was chosen, and the notion of a complete set of formal rules and axioms that covered all mathematical possibilities was abandoned. (And I'll be honest, that's definitely not to say his result can't be further enhanced to close that loop such that a system might be obtained that can speak of itself without arriving at the contradiction ... but it sure won't be by a dull mind such as my own. Part of being a scientist is recognizing one's own limitations without projecting those onto all of science or declaring the matter of human knowledge static and settled at one's own limited perspective.)

The monumental result of Gödel forced mathematics to put (at least in the knowledge-space of the time) a very tight gate onto what was allowed into its systems. Every rule, every definition, every axiom allowed in had to be consistent. But math can never be complete, at least until the loop is somehow closed formally and new light comes to mathematical understanding. An encyclopedia, being a sufficiently complex system, is faced with the same decision: it can be consistent, or it can be complete, but not both at the same time. After all, if it is to capture knowledge, it must be inconsistent. Knowledge is full of contradictions. One God, or ten, or millions, or none? Infinite universe, or finite? What happened to Jimmy Hoffa? A repository that strives towards capturing all human knowledge cannot be consistent. Sure, it can select on notability — but once noted — it's part of the body of human knowledge and experience, and that is what the readers of an encyclopedia come to read: about human knowledge and experience.

The price of selecting to our personal views as editors is the eternal ignorance of the readers. We cannot know what will enlighten them, so perhaps it's best to not even try to second guess the masses, and just do our best to impartially document the body of knowledge of our age, without emotion or selection based on anything but the very low bars that it is somehow notable and verifiability documented outside the Wikipedia system.