As a longtime contributor, I have absolutely no problem with considering Eliezer to be king of this place. Not saying that everyone here should accept this “king” concept without qualms, but once accepted, it does cut away a lot of the mind-killing political bullshit. Yay monarchy as long as it’s benevolent!
The internet has a different track record with “tyranny” or “dictatorship” than the real world. I’m concerned that internet people will generalize from this experience, and form opinions like “It sometimes works” of unchecked tyranny or dictatorships even in national governments.
The internet makes makes it very easy to switch to a different site or project. This possibility forms the “checks and balances” that are historically necessary for national governments to be moderately benevolent.
The internet makes makes it very easy to switch to a different site or project. This possibility forms the “checks and balances” that are historically necessary for national governments to be moderately benevolent.
Yay checks and balances!
The conventional term for what you are describing is low exit costs.
And yes, exit costs are much lower for a participant in a group blog than they are for a citizen of a country, which greatly reduces the need for formal checks and balances.
Exit costs for example were atypically low for citizens of the early U.S. when there was still a Western frontier. Once the frontier closed (and once agriculture, fur trapping and mining no longer provided a good living relative to other occupations for a large fraction of the U.S. population) the formerly very libertarian U.S. became steadily more socialistic.
The governance of Wikipedia, for example, would probably be improved in my humble opinion if they did away with the elections to the board of directors and made it as easy as possible for individuals and groups to re-use Wikipedia’s content in competing encyclopedias.
What Wikipedia does now (or rather did several years ago the last time I checked) is to make publically available a snapshot of Wikipedia made every few months. If re-use were made as easy as posible, there would be an API that competitors could subscribe to to get real-time notification every time an entry in Wikipedia changes. Although Wikipedia probably still has a recent changes page, the way it is now, if a competitor tried to scrape it, Wikipedia’s administration would probably block their IP address, which of course increases exit costs. And alternative way for Wikipedia’s administration to lower exit costs would be a mechanism by which prospective editors who disagree with Wikipedia’s policies and editorial decisions can publish on Wikipedia’s servers their own version of (some) Wikipedia entries and by which users could indicate a preference for getting the alternative version instead of the Wikipedia version when an alternative version is available.
An[] alternative way for Wikipedia’s administration to lower exit costs would be a mechanism by which prospective editors who disagree with Wikipedia’s policies and editorial decisions can publish on Wikipedia’s servers their own version of (some) Wikipedia entries and by which users could indicate a preference for getting the alternative version instead of the Wikipedia version when an alternative version is available.
A mechanism for doing this exists already, although it is not endorsed by Wikipedia’s administrators. See wikinfo.org, which encourages importing existing Wikipedia articles and rewriting them to suit various “sympathetic points of view” (SPOV).
Citizendium does the same, but focuses on stricter expert oversight and editorial review rather than a different neutrality policy.
The recent FSF transition from the GNU FDL to CC-by-sa for large public wikis had the side effect of considerably enlarging the corpus of Wikipedia-compatible content, which also indirectly lowers exit costs from wikipedia.org.
ETA replying to PhilGoetz: This comment might have been modded down because it doesn’t directly address the issue of publishing alternate content “on Wikipedia’s servers”. As an Internet landlord, the Wikimedia Foundation would not look favorably to such proposals. However, since large public wikis tend to share the same Wikipedia-derived naming conventions, this does not affect switching costs in practice. In fact, it is good for resilience if content versions are hosted by multiple competing groups.
If re-use were made as easy as posible, there would be an API that competitors could subscribe to to get real-time notification every time an entry in Wikipedia changes.
As a longtime contributor, I have absolutely no problem with considering Eliezer to be king of this place. Not saying that everyone here should accept this “king” concept without qualms, but once accepted, it does cut away a lot of the mind-killing political bullshit. Yay monarchy as long as it’s benevolent!
The internet has a different track record with “tyranny” or “dictatorship” than the real world. I’m concerned that internet people will generalize from this experience, and form opinions like “It sometimes works” of unchecked tyranny or dictatorships even in national governments.
The internet makes makes it very easy to switch to a different site or project. This possibility forms the “checks and balances” that are historically necessary for national governments to be moderately benevolent.
Yay checks and balances!
The conventional term for what you are describing is low exit costs.
And yes, exit costs are much lower for a participant in a group blog than they are for a citizen of a country, which greatly reduces the need for formal checks and balances.
Exit costs for example were atypically low for citizens of the early U.S. when there was still a Western frontier. Once the frontier closed (and once agriculture, fur trapping and mining no longer provided a good living relative to other occupations for a large fraction of the U.S. population) the formerly very libertarian U.S. became steadily more socialistic.
The governance of Wikipedia, for example, would probably be improved in my humble opinion if they did away with the elections to the board of directors and made it as easy as possible for individuals and groups to re-use Wikipedia’s content in competing encyclopedias.
What Wikipedia does now (or rather did several years ago the last time I checked) is to make publically available a snapshot of Wikipedia made every few months. If re-use were made as easy as posible, there would be an API that competitors could subscribe to to get real-time notification every time an entry in Wikipedia changes. Although Wikipedia probably still has a recent changes page, the way it is now, if a competitor tried to scrape it, Wikipedia’s administration would probably block their IP address, which of course increases exit costs. And alternative way for Wikipedia’s administration to lower exit costs would be a mechanism by which prospective editors who disagree with Wikipedia’s policies and editorial decisions can publish on Wikipedia’s servers their own version of (some) Wikipedia entries and by which users could indicate a preference for getting the alternative version instead of the Wikipedia version when an alternative version is available.
A mechanism for doing this exists already, although it is not endorsed by Wikipedia’s administrators. See wikinfo.org, which encourages importing existing Wikipedia articles and rewriting them to suit various “sympathetic points of view” (SPOV).
Citizendium does the same, but focuses on stricter expert oversight and editorial review rather than a different neutrality policy.
The recent FSF transition from the GNU FDL to CC-by-sa for large public wikis had the side effect of considerably enlarging the corpus of Wikipedia-compatible content, which also indirectly lowers exit costs from wikipedia.org.
ETA replying to PhilGoetz: This comment might have been modded down because it doesn’t directly address the issue of publishing alternate content “on Wikipedia’s servers”. As an Internet landlord, the Wikimedia Foundation would not look favorably to such proposals. However, since large public wikis tend to share the same Wikipedia-derived naming conventions, this does not affect switching costs in practice. In fact, it is good for resilience if content versions are hosted by multiple competing groups.
I think it’s inappropriate for someone to have voted this comment down without explaining why, as it appears to be simply a statement of facts.
Like the watchlist?
E-steading..
I prefer ‘Tyrant’.
I prefer “the Chuck Norris of thinking”.
“Grand Poobah” and “Supreme Mugwump” work, but I’ve always gone by “Fearless Leader”.
How about “Defender of the Non-Faith”?
We’re all just guests in his cornfield.
Or to take an open source term, “Benevolent Dictator for Life”.