I have to confess, the first time I heard about Wikipedia I was skeptical that such a thing could thrive. However this article pits institutions against the idea of “mass amateurization” when in fact I think the major reason Wikipedia has succeeded is because of institutions and process put in place to keep the community moderated and in check.
For more information listen to the excellent podcast episode of “how I built this” featuring jimmy wales. [0]
I don't think "mass amateurization" and "institutions" are opposed. Traditionally you needed major institutional support to set up, say, a TV channel; today you can get a YouTube channel for free. If you start a YouTube channel and it gets successful you can certainly set up institutions and processes to keep it successful, but those things aren't necessary to get started.
And of course Youtube itself is an institution. There was an article here about a library built in Minecraft by volunteers to bypass censorship, but Microsoft is an institution. As you say these are not opposed, they are just different relationships between creators and distributors.
I think I disagree. The reason Wikipedia worked is because of random contributors interested in sharing the knowledge. The classic form on the other hand is getting less engagement as you see with encyclopedias. You need moderation on charged topics and the results aren't that impressive. Sure, there might be vandals, but they focus on the buzzing topics, for which Wikipedia might not be the correct platform.
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.
> 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.
History tells me that authority creates facts far more often than scientific consensus and reality better conforms. We certainly had different teachers.
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.
Random guys on YouTube have saved me at least a dozen trips to the car repair shop; but there's all that noise I gotta sift through. Good luck and Godspeed sorting through all the quackery if you ever come down with a rare health issue. There are so many junior-whatevers that flat out shouldn't be putting out content for anyone anywhere; much less the internet.
Overanxious patients coming into hospital thinking they have some horrendous terminal disease because they googled their symptoms is a well known phenomena.
Maybe some topics should simply be legislated away as incompatible with “youtubery”: health and history, imho. Forbidding those would remove 90% of the problematic content (quacks, antivaxx, holocaust deniers, truthers etc).
Health has specific laws to deal with digital storage, it’s not inconceivable to admit that it needs extra protection on social platforms too.
Germany and Italy have had bans on specific material since 1946 and the sky has not fallen. I understand the concern, but the ban doesn’t need to cover all media, only the ones that are extremely accessible. A bit like pornography is forbidden on mainstream tv during the day, but you can still buy it freely elsewhere at all times.
It's not about the specifics about your comment. It's a concern based on using the words "simply" and "legislated" in the same sentence.
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.
I do not disagree! My “simply” was just indicating a resigned acceptance that there isn’t a technological solution, so we might as well reach for good ol’ fashioned political instruments - with all the complexity those entail.
It arguably still counts as amateurized though not because of the participants but because it does away with the hierarchy and credibility. Nobody really cares if the software writer is a Harvard or MIT professor in full academic dress or it was written in their mom's basement by a guy not wearing pants.
Some activities lend themselves well to amateurization. It's hard to imagine a world where people need a professional license to write computer programs or publish articles. Not all professions are this accessible though. Perhaps amateurization is correlated with benign consequences for being wrong. We don't see amateur engineers, doctors, lawyers...
This is the exact point that I believe is understated. The gig economy is pure supply-and-demand. Customers are saying that they do not need a professional hotel or taxi service. The historic prestige of these services is predicated on the fact that before the internet there was no better way to connect customers and service providers. If there was a tier below Economy on planes, people would use it. This is because there will always be a portion of the population (maybe even a majority) who strictly only care about the service rendered and the outcome achieved.
Well, there are factors like health and safety risk in these industries.
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.
When it comes to ventilators, you'll have to be really careful about infection risk and particulates. Making an air pump should be relatively easy, but making things medical grade is more complicated. I think that's the main difference between amateur and expert, between homemade and professional. Explains the price difference as well.
amateur engineers are abundant across garages in the US. everyone is an amateur doctor, especially parents and any caregiver. and you can certainly represent yourself in court without a lawyer.
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.).
Law is just as technical as the others. Most law isn't really about constructing or deconstructing arguments, it's about filling out pages and pages of very boring but very necessary documentation. Lawyers are often just in the business of contracts and other such formulaic (but technical) stuff. Trial law, or similar, is also as much about following rules as anything else. Anyone can construct an argument, and a lot of people can construct better arguments than a lawyer, but almost nobody can do it in the way that's necessary for it to actually work.
I suspect it is backwards including the source of the doctrines. Precedent while it may have a function in consistency is just gussied up rationalizations essentially.
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.
i worded that poorly (see, that's why i'm not a lawyer! =). i was intending to differentiate (breadth of) skills versus knowledge.
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.
I'm not aware of any country in which somebody self-taught (i.e. without graduating from university and being a member of chamber afterwards) can legally practice medicine or law.
I believe that's only a couple of states though, and you still have to demonstrate legal experience.
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.
Yeah sorry I'm in the IT field, which is probably an "easy" one, but it is hard in my mind and with internet to think it cannot (or shouldn't) be possible with any field
I think you got the professions backwards :) You just can't be an "amateur programmer" - it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you're employable in the field. Probably something like a year of sustained work. Sure, you can learn light scripting in a week, but learning curve gets a lot steeper at some point.
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.
Of course you can be an amateur programmer, amateur means you're practicing something but not in a professional manner (i.e. unpaid).
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.
You don't need to be "employable in the field" to be an amateur programmer. And plenty of people learn to program in their spare time to a level where they would be employable. Often while they're still in school.
> We don't see amateur engineers, doctors, lawyers...
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"!
This is my favorite thing to come from the Internet. A lot of my entertainment comes from YouTube channels or podcasts whose audiences are way too small for them to be viable on TV or radio.
This kind of reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s business principle “commoditize your complement.”
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.
It occurs to me that there is a whole supply chain of these companies for youtubers and podcasters. Firstly, the content creator uses one (or many) of a selection of traditional and web-based tools to produce content not possible three decades ago, then youtube, or a syndication service, gets your content in the right places, there it is discovered by users, the content creator is then rewarded with ad revenue, subscribers through patreon, or through sales of merch through yet another platform.
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.
The video creators should do the same and commod their comps! Don’t stick to YouTube. Distribute wide. Reuse parts of your udemy course on vimeo. Brand yourself and build a list of followers by email, Twitter etc.
In common use, the way 'professional' is used seems to vary heavily.
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?
I wonder if Mass Amateurization (Swype fail, tap tap tap) has furthered the obsolescence of terms like "citizen science," (the term may no longer be as special as it once was, since it happens all the time thanks to Amateurization) or made those terms more relevant (can we somehow improve on Amateurization with an eye to the strengths of existing citizen science community institutions?). Either way, one of its strengths seems to be helping science & tech when institutions may otherwise lack resources:
> 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.
When everybody can do the thing, the thing becomes less valuable...Case in point: We watch RV content on Youtube. There's a half dozen publishers with truly compelling content, and 100 more with polished video, trying to self-support their RV hobby through Youtube.
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.
I thought crowd wisdom had more of an "exploratory value" to it in that the discovered obviously knew about it first but the discoverer was the one who got credited.
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...