When You Reach Your Carousel
So anyway I was hanging out over at oxfordgirl's end of the woods (it's cool, they have parties there and also outbursts of hate) and there was some talk about wikipedia. I started posting a reply and then I got caught up in it, and before you know it I was back on my live-journal posting a post which having just checked my clock takes me an hour to do (I'm
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To some extent you have to not tell the truth though.
Let's take Chemistry. At GCSE I learnt that atoms have electrons that appear in layers, with 2 in the first layer then 6 in every layer after. At A' level I learnt that in fact this was an abstraction and really there's a number of differences in the shells and it goes (1s)2, (2s)2, (2p)6, (3s)2 (3d)10, (3p)6 - or something like that - and I'm told you learn that in fact it's different again at the degree level.
The second (or third) may be more accurate, but without the abstraction most people wouldn't be able to get a handle on it at all.
Now, I'm all for telling students learning this that in fact this is a simplified view of the subject and they'll have to study it at a higher level of education to know a more accurate one, but to some extent you could say that it's propagating the most widely understood theory over the most accurate because the most accurate is more difficult.
With the explosion of the amount of information that's available society has adapted; young people are much more adept at skimming large quantities of text for particular information than they used to be for example. In order to deal with the increased scope of knowledge one of the ways we handle it is to know less about more things, cherry picking the bits we need (or want).
And that's largely where I think the problem comes about; anyone who puts something forward is going to have it skimmed and, because we're expecting to see information that's been summarised and abstracted, things which aren't as thoroughly well reasoned or investigated will look as genuine to our skimming attention. Add in the media giving a "popular" view on most subjects (not that many people enjoy learning that what they thought is a load of rubbish and that they need to learn more), reinforcing the abstractions and half-truths (and downright untruths at times) and it's quite easy for nonsense to become well rooted simpley because "everyone knows".
Given most people don't work everything out from first principles (we don't have time in our lifetimes) I'm not sure we aren't stuck with it. As that teacher pointed out, the only thing to do is to be suspicious and critical of all data - particularly where there is no possibility of a definitive answer; if you want truth limit yourself to provable mathematics.
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One positive thing - I'm all positive today - is that proper wikipedia entries have a little "touch the screen to learn more" list at the bottom that takes you to other parts of the Internet. Which brings us back to the idea of wikipedia as a knowledge search engine, and is in its way could be a greater aid to genuine scholasticism than a list in the back of a reference book.
Listen to me talking about scholasticism. You've got more expert knowledge of current academia than I do, what're your thoughts of the current ogliarchy?
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That said, wikipedia is usually a fairly reliable source of information, and I usually have a quick read of the relevant pages even before I fire up the relevant journal search engines.
I find the truth-by-consensus aspect of wikipedia interesting rather than frightning. Because in practice wiki-truth isn't consensus-truth. Many people on wikipedia are constantly vigilant for mistakes, untruths, and things they disagree with. So the truth on wiki is shaped by the level of shared commonality an article can reach before someone will fight for it. For what ever reason wiki seems to have more militant academics than militant others, so wiki tends to reflect something close to the 'truths' taught to university undergraduates than any other kind of truth. Which is an interesting phenomenon in its own right.
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The text skimming is something I hadn't thought about - the more information is available, the greater the tendency to want to see it arranged neatly, the greater the risk of thinking in summaries. As you say though, it's something we're going to have to learn to live with. It's that whole mental toolkit again - needing the skills to find the information you need more than you need to know the information.
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