I love Borges.

How does one reconcile contradictions between formal belief systems and personal beliefs based on experience? What if you’re personal beliefs contradict the beliefs of the larger order (moral or epistemological) to which you ascribe? Both cannot be right. One must concede to the other. But how do you know which one?

This dilemma can arise in all sorts of situations. I’ve struggled with it a lot in my graduate studies. Becoming a professional scientists requires that you scrutinize your understanding of knowledge and truth in the world…at least, I think it does. Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of scientists who go about their work without giving a moments thought to epistemology. But when you look at many of the constantly recurring arguments within the academy it is not difficult to see how many of them are rooted in unarticulated assumptions about how the world works and how we can know things about it. In hopes of avoiding this sort of problem in my own work, I spend a lot of time thinking about the basis on which I can build my knowledge of the world. How can I say that I know something about the world? Positivism? Naturalism? Postmodernism?

Recently I’ve found myself getting comfortable with phenomenolgy. As with many philosophical perspectives, phenomenology attempts to get down to the most basic truths of how we come to know things about the world. It starts from the premise that the only thing we have direct access to is our experience. Thus, our experience of the world should be central to how we evaluate the truth of any piece of knowledge. This is not simple relativism, though. It is not license for everyone to establish their own truth and morality. Phenomenolgy also assumes that there is a truth out there providing stimulus for every person who is experiencing it. So, discerning truth must be a fundamentally social endeavor. We must look for similarities in the experiences of others.

What does this have to do with doctrine, belief, and faith? Phenomenolgy calls for an inherently social religion, one based on community understanding.

This blog entry by a 20-year-old Catholic struggling with homosexuality resonated with me. In his post, he is dealing with big questions about knowledge and faith that are central parts of the life of anyone actively seeking to understand the nature of the universe, be they scientists, theologians, or average people simply living their lives. How do we reconcile contradictions between the Church’s beliefs and our own? How do we live the tenets of our belief systems as part of our daily lives when the two are not easily compatible? I don’t have any clear answers but I struggle with these kinds of questions regularly. My heart goes out to him.

Liz Lawly’s post on the social consequences of social tagging is great. Not only does she pull together a lot of threads from across the blogosphere she offers an excellent analysis of the ESP game developed at CMU.

The gist of her argument is that bottom-up tagging has the potential to give you poor metadata. The ESP game in particular really encourages the lowest common denominator in terms of categorization. While this is obviously a serious problem for social tagging systems, I also wonder what this phenomenon tells us about social cognition in general.

In his book Social Mindscapes , Eviatar Zerubavel talks about three levels of cognition: individual cognition, universal cognition, and social cognition. Individual cognition refers to how we think as individuals, what about our thinking is idiosyncratic and unique. Universal cognition refers to what is common in thinking amongst all humans. Social cognition is everything else: how we think as Americans, as Texans, as Catholics, as Generation X-ers, etc. Could it be that in all of these social groups, the limits of our social cognition are defined by the simplest commonly share concepts?

Jake’s comment to Clay’s piece echos many of the points that I raised in my last post on this topic. David Smith’s post does as well.

Authority of information and knowledge is about quality not quantity. You need some way of establishing and representing that one person knows more about something than someone else. I’m as much of a supporter of the common man (and woman) as anybody but the fact of the matter is I wouldn’t want to randomly pull someone off the street and ask them to make the call on whether the space shuttle should launch today or not. You can’t get away from the need for experts.

That said, the real issue is how expertise is established. Educational credentials? Ordination by other experts? Whoever shouts the loudest? This is where my comments about how Epinions works come in.

“I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.”
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Danah has some great thoughts about wikis. Her post is a response to Clay Shirky’s K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism which, in turn, is a response to Larry Sanger’s Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. She and Larry articulate many of the reasons that I have been resistant to wikis since the beginning. Their posts also touch on a lot of things that have been floating around in my head of late so this post will likely meander a bit. As the title of this post makes clear, these thoughts will out me for the elitist that I am, though perhaps not an elitist of the worst sort.

First off, I have to say that I see the value in wikis. If nothing else, their democratic ideals are noble and social software is clearly a good way to go when trying to assemble and cull a large set of information. That said, for the most part I have gotten little use out of wikis except when the base of contributors was restricted to people who already had some credibility to me. I’m all for democratic approaches to information and knowledge but I am also a firm believer in interaction design and information architecture. I’m a socioligist and an engineer therefore it isn’t surprising to hear me champeoning social software. But there are many ways to build a social information system. Rating and recommender systems like Epinions.com and Amazon are one (more on that below). Wikis are another. In mot cases, my experience has been that wikis often reproduce the chaos and uncertainty of information on the internet generally. I can never find anything and, more importantly, I have no idea if the things I do find are reliable. Why is this particular version of the article here? Who wrote it? Will it be “corrected” or changed in five minutes?

This desire for reliability is probably the root cause of my elitism. A few years studying sociology and philosphy of science has only served to cement the perspective. The fact is, in most situations, some people’s perspectives are more right than others. We can debate this objectively but it is irrefutable subjectively. I don’t care how much someone has embraced the postmodern perspective, they still believe this. Otherwise, they wouldn’t spend so much time bashing positivism as wrong or claiming that peace is the answer, etc. If there’s no hope for finding truth why do people, especially scholars, even get out of bed in the morning—other than to establish their on critical superiority. But then, of course, it can’t even be true that they are superior.

The fact is people believe that they know things about the world. We believe we know things and even believe that they are true in a generalizable sense. My research on epistemology as well as anyone’s everyday experience supports this. Relativism is a nice abstract, academic mind game but noone actually lives their lives believing that everyone’s claim to truth is equally valid, nor should they. (More on Relativism below.)

So, once we realize that there are many claims to truth AND that some are better than others, the key is to make sure that any claims to knowledge are vetted through an explicit process. There are many such processes. One example is the labor-intensive democratic process in which everyone has a say and truth is decided in an explicitly social and political way. (Science and knowledge are always social and political; making this explicit merely helps to avoid some measure of unfairness.) Another example is the relatively efficient process of establishing trusted, expert sources. Both have their places.

While I agree that some—perhaps many—librarians and academics are against wikis because of the threat to their privilege as gatekeepers of knowledge, I think many more of them cringe because they are well aware of the need for explicit, controlled processes for vetting knowledge. As Danah points out, defining concepts and terms is hard. You have to have respect for the people who do it and do it well. It is not something that everyone can do. If it was, there would be little need for dictionaries and encyclopedias because everyone would have worked these things out for themselves.

Getting back to Relativism, aside from a lack of support in our lived experience, it also has seriously negative implications for design. From a human-centered designer’s perspective, my major problem with the Relativism that comes from most strong postmodern stances is that individuals are tasked with ALL the responsibility for information gathering and interpretation (afterall, their subjectivity is the only truth as far as they are concerned). Centralized systems with any measure of control are implicitly untrustworthy. Taken to an extreme (though not an entirely unjustified one), this makes any attempt to create an information or knowledge system pointless at best and oppressive at worst.

So what is my take away message? Should we be tossing the wikis of the world and intensifying our support for good ol’ fashioned credentialed experts? Like a good academic I’ll say yes and no. We have clear evidence that too much power in the hands of an elite can be extremely dangerous. However, the majority of us believe that knowledge is not merely a matter rhetorical consensus. Some people really do have expertise and we should take advantage of it. Perhaps the wiki model as it stands now is not the right way to address this. Personally, I think something along the lines of a rating, reputation and recommender system offers more promise. I’ll end with a very brief example.

I use to work at Epinions.com. One premise behind that site was the idea that “everyone is an expert in something.” While I believe this is generally true, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a closely related corollary that is equally important: “nobody is an expert in everything.” For that reason, Epinions spent a lot of time coming up with systems for rating content and content providers. This meant that anyone could post (openness) but everything and everyone was rated by the community (vetting process). In my view, if you want democracy, this is better than a committee deciding when it is in the community’s best interest to “close down” the openness but still allows for experts to establish credibility for themselves.

I cannot even begin to express how happy I am about the formation of the Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Research Group here at UNC. I can’t wait for the first meeting. I am literally shaking with excitement.

After considerable deliberation and then considerable tinkering, MoreSmarter 2.0 is launched. I have been too long removed from the world o’ blogging. Academia somehow had me convinced I should be sitting in my windowless office pouring away over journals and books, unconnected from the outside world. But that is a maddening and lonely life—and I’m through with it.

This site will primarily be a place for me to catalogue my toughts, internet resources, and reading notes. I am posting them on a public site because my thinking has always benefitted from feedback. Hopefully, this will be no exception. Of course, that is assuming anyone reads any of this.