[Poor Richard]

The "TERMINOLOGY" and "DEFINITION OF REALITY" pages on the CoR website are missing some important terms, definitions and/or issues:

fact
evidence
rules of evidence
finding of fact
proof
standard of proof
peer review
verification
epistemology
quality control (of knowledge)
database (of knowledge) maintenance

The verification and maintenance of the "Tree of Knowledge" is an important body of knowledge, standards and practice in itself.

THE CoR SHOULD WEIGH IN ON THESE ISSUES EVEN IF IT DOES NOT INTEND TO SERVE
AS AN ARBITER OF FACT ITSELF.

Richard

[Ocelot]

Poor Richard, on Sep 21 2009, 09:40 PM, said:

The "TERMINOLOGY" and "DEFINITION OF REALITY" pages on the CoR website are missing some important terms, definitions and/or issues:

fact
evidence
rules of evidence
finding of fact
proof
standard of proof
peer review
verification
epistemology
quality control (of knowledge)
database (of knowledge) maintenance

The verification and maintenance of the "Tree of Knowledge" is an important body of knowledge, standards and practice in itself.

THE CoR SHOULD WEIGH IN ON THESE ISSUES EVEN IF IT DOES NOT INTEND TO SERVE
AS AN ARBITER OF FACT ITSELF.

Richard

Great I dea. Do it. I can't guarantee Marc'll put it on the wedbsite but there's a Wiki you could put it in.

I'll weigh with a few thoughts on each of these headings and if you can makle a coherent peice out of it all I'll put it on the web elsewhere.

fact

Knowledge which is accurate.


evidence

The means by which we try to ascertain if knowledge is indeed true.

rules of evidence

Not sure the relevence here - I'm only aware of this phrase as having a meaning in legal circles

finding of fact

Again tis appears to be a legal term


proof

a chain of logic reason and evidence which establishes fact.

standard of proof

Once more a purely legal term



peer review

More like it bakc on comfortable ground. The judgemnet of contempories in an academic field, a requirement before publicaltion in a high quality journal.

verification

e.g the repetition of experimentatal findings?

epistemology

the branch of philosphy concerned with the nature of knowledge.

quality control (of knowledge)

For me scientific skepticism acts a a filter for knowledge. Quality control is a great way of putting it. I allows us to evaluate the liklihood of knowledge being actual fact.


database (of knowledge) maintenance

I think this might be your own orginal idea here so I won't step on any toes.

[Poor Richard]

Ocelot, on Sep 22 2009, 10:15 AM, said:

Great I dea. Do it. I can't guarantee Marc'll put it on the wedbsite but there's a Wiki you could put it in.

I'll weigh with a few thoughts on each of these headings and if you can makle a coherent peice out of it all I'll put it on the web elsewhere.

I don't have enough expertise on these issues to write a wiki article about them or to write content for the Curch of Reality web site. I only know Marc has written a lot about the "tree of knowledge" without saying much on the question of who decides what belongs in its branches. Who decides what is true?

Quote

fact

Knowledge which is accurate.

Accuracy and certainty are relative, not absolute. Hence the terms "degree of accuracy" and "degree of certainty". Science struggles with these all the time. There may be tiny variations in the speed of light at very high energy. Do gravity waves exist? What is dark energy? Who is telling the truth about health care reform?

Quote

evidence

The means by which we try to ascertain if knowledge is indeed true.

rules of evidence

Not sure the relevence here - I'm only aware of this phrase as having a meaning in legal circles

finding of fact

Again tis appears to be a legal term


proof

a chain of logic reason and evidence which establishes fact.

standard of proof

Once more a purely legal term



peer review

More like it bakc on comfortable ground. The judgemnet of contempories in an academic field, a requirement before publicaltion in a high quality journal.

verification

e.g the repetition of experimentatal findings?

epistemology

the branch of philosphy concerned with the nature of knowledge.

quality control (of knowledge)

For me scientific skepticism acts a a filter for knowledge. Quality control is a great way of putting it. I allows us to evaluate the liklihood of knowledge being actual fact.


database (of knowledge) maintenance

I think this might be your own orginal idea here so I won't step on any toes.

The larger point I want to raise is that all these terms, definitions and issues are actually quite messy and controversial.

You mention your skepticism. Up to now science has operated on a basis something like caveat emptor. What would the latin be for "let the believer beware"?

Peer review is an imprecise and inconsistent process. Scientifc "authorities" come and go. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a good example. Scientists and policy makers argued for decades about the facts of climate change. They had to set up the IPCC as an effort to stop arguing in endless circles.

Are human beings capable of reaching any objective consensus about reality or is the human brain more about emotion, imagination, self gratification and personal versions of reality?

I am not an expert on these issues but it seems to me that the Wikipedia may be the bleeding edge of the frontier in information quality control. I would see a potential for important collaboration between the CoR "elders" and the wiki gurus.

Richard

[Ocelot]

Poor Richard, on Sep 25 2009, 03:15 AM, said:

I don't have enough expertise on these issues to write a wiki article about them or to write content for the Curch of Reality web site. I only know Marc has written a lot about the "tree of knowledge" without saying much on the question of who decides what belongs in its branches. Who decides what is true?

I think we should remind oursleves that no-one gets to decide something into truth. If I decided that oranges were square, they'd still be round and not square. The truth, reality, doesn't care what any of us decide. We can decide all we like but that in itself won't make any difference to reality which has already "decided" for itself.

I bleive it should go the other way round. What's real should cause our decisions. Our task is to find out what reality's decision is, and if a couple of us disgree with one another, only reality can be the final arbitter of what is true. The trouble is that Reality can sometimes play its cards close to its chest and the truth of the matter may not be unequivocal to us. In some instances it may even be that reality itself is undecided about a certain issue, e.g. what colour would invisible unicorns be if they weren't invisible? A former stalwart of these forums would have called this a BSQ.

So if Reality is being too coy to play final arbitter two people can quite understandibly have two contradictory beliefs. In this circumstance each of us must bear responsibility for our own beleifs.

I can't tell you what to think. I can tell you what I think and how I reached those conclusions. The latter being quite important to me. You see, often I can't do my own research and find out everything for myself so I find out what others think and how they reached their conclusions sometimes how they reaqched their conclusions helps explain why they reached different conclusions. I've even managed to collect a few methods of enquiry which seem to be particularly well regarded in certain circles such as the meta analysis of double blind randomised controlled trials in clinical matters or using decisions trees to understand matters of statistics.

Don't put yourself down or disrefard you own expertise. You've demonstrated an interest in reality and a desire to improve our discussions about it. That makes you perfectly qualified. Considering it's just you me and the spam bots for the time being, I don't see anyone more qualified, especially not to clearly explain your ideas. You are after all the worlds leading expert on what's going on in your head. To clear things up though I was taking about the Church of Reality Wiki rather than wikipedia.

I should come back and respond to the rest of your post but I have to skedaddle for now.

[Poor Richard]

Ocelot, on Sep 25 2009, 06:04 AM, said:

I think we should remind oursleves that no-one gets to decide something into truth. If I decided that oranges were square, they'd still be round and not square. The truth, reality, doesn't care what any of us decide. We can decide all we like but that in itself won't make any difference to reality which has already "decided" for itself.

I don't see much point to personifying reality. I am interested in what people decide and how and why they do.

Quote

So if Reality is being too coy to play final arbitter two people can quite understandibly have two contradictory beliefs. In this circumstance each of us must bear responsibility for our own beleifs.

I can't tell you what to think. I can tell you what I think and how I reached those conclusions. The latter being quite important to me. You see, often I can't do my own research and find out everything for myself so I find out what others think and how they reached their conclusions sometimes how they reaqched their conclusions helps explain why they reached different conclusions. I've even managed to collect a few methods of enquiry which seem to be particularly well regarded in certain circles such as the meta analysis of double blind randomised controlled trials in clinical matters or using decisions trees to understand matters of statistics.

Your chosen methods are all well and good. As a practical matter we all delegate many decisions about truth or validity to various kinds of proxies or "authorities". The bigger the "tree of knowledge" grows, the more necessary this becomes, and the more important it is for us to institutionalize much of the responsibility for information quality control. In fact, all life on earth is threatened by the problem of information quality control. How do we know we can trust any given bit of information? I think all questions of science and philosophy are now subsidiary to this.

Wikimedia Foundation, for one, has a huge vested interest in this, yet to date there are only a few college students working on one small corner of the problem at WikiTrust. I am suggesting that the CoR could take a leadership role (at least in spirit) in advocating research into information quality control.

Trust in information is the new "faith". For practical purposes it must be institutionalized by agents such as the Wiki Foundation or the IPCC, yet somehow we must avoid the problems of "blind faith" in authority of which religion is such a vivid example.

That is the kind of discussion I'm trying to provoke.

What is it that makes your prefered methods of judging information - peer review, clinical trials, etc. - better than Jim's religious beliefs? How do we take epistemology and scientific method and turn them into a science of "trust engineering"?

I think the fate of the world depends on our answers. Very few of us are even asking.


Richard

[Ocelot]

What I like about my methods is their reliability. I use the word reliable in the technical sense, meaning that a test which is 100% reliable will give the same answer each and every time no matter who performs it. This is of course a different thing from accurate and if I could simply see which method produced accurate results then that would of course be better. However as a monrealist I belive that any accurate method must necessarily be reliable as it doesn't matter who you are and what you believe, andaccurate measure of reality will still be the same. As such, consulting the revelations in your holy book cannot be an accurate way of determining the truth since different people with different holy books reach different conclusions. In fact the even different people consulting the bible will find mutually contradictory conclusions.

[Poor Richard]

Ocelot, on Oct 25 2009, 07:48 AM, said:

What I like about my methods is their reliability. [& etc.]

If I go to Wikipedia and read a statement of fact (the moon is x miles from earth, say), or watch a news report on TV, how do I know if I can trust it?

There is the validity of the original data (perhaps from a "reliable" lab, meta analysis, journal or eye witness, perhaps not), plus a whole chain of communication, "custody" or "provenance" of the data by the time I access it.

There is no ultimate global "paper of record", though a number of media claim some such title. We are still living in an information "caveat emptor" world. That has worked well enough in the past, but it doesn't work well enough any more. Competition among information merchants and an "invisible hand" is not enough to guarantee an enlightened population (citizens who understand their own true enlightened self interest). In the past, the harm humanity could inflict on itself and the world by acting in error was limited by the scale of the earth. Now there is little margin for error remaining.

There may be no solution to the problem of end-to-end information quality control, in which case the human species may unintentionally destroy itself along with much of the other life on earth.

To survive our own destructive capability we must come up with a technology/methodology by which a sufficient majority of humanity can quickly, affordably, and safely be persuaded of any important fact- particularly if it is an unpleasant or "inconvenient" one.

Your comments about meta studies and reproducible measurements, etc. are part of this question, but only a very small part. The larger question of end-to-end information quality control may include the need for a new institution, a "global institute of important facts and standards". We have the National Institute of Standards and the Congressional Accountability Office as primitive examples.

The CoR might want to take some position on these matters.

Richard