Mass amateurization
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
For more information listen to the excellent podcast episode of “how I built this” featuring jimmy wales. [0]
[0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...
Articles that require intervention do mostly regress to the lowest common denominator. Only minimal content on different perspectives because it would inflame more bickering. I think a system that just slows down contribution and forces people to settle emotions would be more effective. Because moderation intervention will not be accepted by many people if it doesn't cater to their point of view.
As for institutions to regulate content, the negative outweighs the positive on most cases. Wikipedia is successful because of its lack of central authority.
The early strategy to just flag an article as controversial was the best way in my opinion. Because it informs the reader.
It informs the reader that someone thinks the information is controversial.
Well, whoopty-shit. Some people think evolution is a myth. Some people think the existence of trans people is a myth. Some people think the existence of disease-causing bacteria is a myth. Those topics are all, therefore, controversial, in that someone would flag the article for being such simply because it presented the reality-based view on those subjects as being real.
If there's one thing the history of all humanity teaches us, it's that there are people willing to screech idiocy at reality until they fall down dead; they're wrong, they can be shown to be wrong, but they'll never admit they're wrong so trying to compromise with them is futile.
That's why Wikipedia's NPOV policy is biased in favor of the scientific consensus, and why tags based on bullshit and nothing aren't allowed to stay on articles.
These "idiots" as you call them are just not relevant. Their main advantage is not their ideas that have difficulties on their own. It is the animosity from people humping their legs that many other people avert their eyes in shame.
The encyclopedia is dead and community resources are evidently the future. Fact checking has become a bit more important but I don't see the advantage in creating any authority that will fail at some point again.
My criticism wasn't directed at articles about evolution, it was directed at political hot-button topics, which are notoriously bad on Wikipedia. To which degree that is the fault of users or moderators, I cannot say. Doesn't matter, because reading them isn't that much important anyway.
It's a double edged sword.
Health has specific laws to deal with digital storage, it’s not inconceivable to admit that it needs extra protection on social platforms too.
This is one of the most dangerous phrases I've read in a long time.
I'm of the belief that legislation is not something to be entered into lightly and should generally be considered a last resort if better solutions don't exist.
The gig economy works because these costs are ignored. How many Uber drivers have commercial insurance? If they don't have commercial insurance, does their insurance company cover the damages (including medical bills of passengers) in the case of an accident while the vehicle is in commercial use?
Or, what is the Air BnB host's personal liability in the case that Air BnB requires hosts to refund bookings cancelled due to COVID? A hotel is a corporation, as an Air-BnB host do you have similar limitation on personal financial liability?
The gig economy is supply-and-demand combined with dodging regulatory costs.
Which is great until you run into the situation the regulation is designed to protect against.
i'd even go so far as to argue law to be the least "technical" profession (in the sense of having specialized knowledge) of those options--you mainly need to know how to construct a good argument and deconstruct bad ones (most law education seems to be learning a canon of past cases and rationales so you'd be better prepared for that. and writing a lot.).
To me it sounds like an entire profession created a monopoly on what they are doing to artificially keep out "amateurs".
Representatives in matters of disputes would always have a purpose but only a codified law with its complexities would create lawyers.
They like doctors also occupy the "high stakes license" version. Combined with incompetence of council as a reason for appeal it is easy to see why the state and others would have a valid interest in quality standards.
Small stakes courts are often still done lawyerless for instance.
lawyerly technical skills, as i see it, is the different ways of constructing, destructing, and rebutting arguments, along with presentational skills (verbal and written) and related strategies. so i see filling out forms and drawing up contracts as a form of argumentation--in that case, the preemption of common and likely future arguments. so then, lawyerly technical skills are relatively enumerable.
on the other hand, law has a vast corpus of knowledge (e.g., precedent) that no one person can master in a lifetime.
in contrast, the technical skills to imagine and create physical (and virtual) objects, or to understand and modify biological systems, are vast and relatively innumerable (as is what's known and unknown in those realms).
that's not to say anything about the intelligence or creativity of practitioners of any of these professions, as they all benefit from those qualities.
So maybe not benign consequences as much as perceived risk. The problem is, my perception of risk is not always accurate.
Not yet!
> amateurization is correlated with benign consequences for being wrong
Not that simple I think. it's correlated with either (1) as you say, not so bad consequences for being wrong, (2) being able to quickly check/measure both an individual's actual skill and the possible consequence of their decision before implementing thee, or (3) "rollback"/undo-ability - if something wrong happens, there's a relatively cheap way to undo the consequences and try again a different thing.
You can't easily measure skills in medicine or law (you can't create simple and fast tests/exams yet for such areas). You can't really simulate either by running a mental experiment or by running some software the consequences of decisions in medicine or law. You can try but it will fail horribly most of the time. And there's no "undo" after someone dies or stays wrongly in jail for X years.
I think that, paradoxically, as fields get more technical and precise, they will become more open to amateurization, because skills will be easily assessable and outcomes predicatable before deploying a scenario in the real world.
Of course, this will happen concurrently with AI/ML-replacing humans in these areas, so the amateurization if it will ever have time to happen will probably be a footnote in history, dwarfed by the bigger story of mostly getting humans out-of-the-loop...
But the humans that will remain in the loop will likely be more and more expert-generalists, eg. the "platinum level" version of "amateurs"!
What about self taught people, don't they count as "amateur" in some way?
I believe it's mostly to allow experienced paralegals and law enforcement a path to lawyerhood, not to allow the broader masses of citizens into the profession.
On the other hand, it's relatively easy to learn a slice of health care or law enough to be able to give advice. As for engineering... try combinations including the word "redneck" on youtube search and enjoy yourself.
A huge number of the people who program things like their raspberry pi or open source projects are amateur programmers. Or all the students and dabblers.
Same goes for engineering in general, if you spend any amount of time in a rural area you'll stumble on some amateur engineering genius.
It’s a benefit to a hosting & streaming platform, like YouTube, if the content is amateur, commodity and mass produced, since they dominate the complement (the infrastructure to host, serve and administer traffic to it).
It’s great for automakers if roads are cheap and ubiquitous.
Even as someone who mostly consumes this kind of content rather than creating it, I feel I benefit massively from this complex of buisnesses and tools. The web is a vibrant and encouraging place so long as you look past some of its worst festering piles of madness.
People seem to misstake being an amateur with being subpar which would be far from the truth.
Famous tennis player Björn Borg won 5 Wimbledon as an amateur for example since being paid at that time would've been forbidden.
Is someone who makes a hundred bucks a month streaming on Twitch a professional gamer? What about someone starting their own architecture business, which is currently unprofitable? Is the shop assistant who does all the cake decoration a professional cake decorator, despite having many other duties? Do state regulation and professional bodies come into it, and if so what happens in jobs without professional bodies? Is an accountant who works 2 days a week and is a stay-at-home parent 3 days a week different from a dancer who works 4 months a year as a dancer, and 8 months a year as a shop assistant?
> There is no institutional hierarchy in mass amateurization. There is only an informal group of collaborators working to solve a problem. Due to mass amateurization, amateurs are able to collaborate without the interference from the inherent obstacles associated with institutions. These obstacles include the costs that an institution incurs while educating, training, directing, coaching, advising, and organizing its members.
Likewise, the amount of music on Youtube is boundless, because everyone with a Mac has a sound studio, for free. makeing the amount of revenue each person is potentially worth...less.
This isn't good or bad, it just is. There's 10,000 people making Hundreds instead of 10 or 100 people making millions.