User:Ed Poor

I was one of the first people to contribute regularly to Wikipedia, and was for several years one of its "top 200 contributors". I've served as a Mediator, an Admin, and a Bureaucrat. But when Wikipedians stopped being as interested in unbiased descriptions of controversies as I am, I took a gamble and lost: I tried to force the issue and wound up being forced out.

I find Wikipedia a useful resource, but it's not very well-written and is often inaccurate. Almost every time I dip into its pages, I find something that urgently needs fixing. It's gotten to be a waste of time, and I've largely given up. I edit here mostly so that my account isn't closed. :-)

For eight years, I have aimed at nothing here other than an unbiased and reliably sourced encyclopedia. Even when I have a definite opinion on a topic which is at odds with the majority opinion of other contributors, I have never pushed for an article to endorse my own viewpoint or condemn theirs. Rather, I have worked to make the article describe all relevant viewpoints fairly.

"The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect."

 Ya need to wake up and smell the fresh air
 and hear the seagulls calling
   and the surf rushing to the shore;
 feel the sand beneath your toes and more.

 Ever questing for that perfect balance
   between wave and board
 Swimming out eager for a thrill
   and riding happy homeward.

Factoids

Can homosexuals change?

• Press releases from both NGLTF and HRC sought to undermine Spitzer's credibility by connecting him polticially to right-wing groups that had backed the ex-gay movement. The Advocate - Jun 19, 2001

Peer review

• Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner's report of the first vaccination against smallpox.

[1] Equal opportunity and Gender norming:

• Because of women's reduced physical capabilities, readiness standards are called into question because standards have been lowered to accommodate women and equalize opportunity (Norman, 1997). [2]

Unit cohesion:

• “Cohesion is the relationship that develops in a unit or group where (1) members share common values and experiences; (2) individuals in the group conform to group norms and behavior in order to ensure group survival and goals; (3) members lose their personal identity in favor of a group identity; (4) members focus on group activities and goals; (5) unit members become totally dependent on each other for the completion of their mission or survival; and (6) group members must meet all standards of performance and behavior in order not to threaten group survival.” [3]

James Webb on gender differences:

• As Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin observe in The Psychology of Sex of Differences, man's greater aggressiveness "is one of the best established, and most pervasive of all psychological sex differences." [4]

The plebe system:

• ... the plebe system. It was harsh and cruel. It was designed to produce a man who would be able to be an effective leader in combat, to endure prisoner-of-war camps, to fight this country's wars with skill and tenacity. And it is all but gone. [5]

David Horowitz:

• The worst crimes of our century have been committed by crusades to eradicate injustice, stamp out politically incorrect attitudes, and reconstruct human nature.

Authority of the IPCC:

• Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph: "the IPCC report, which is still widely touted as the most authoritative single document on global warming."

Robert L. Park on science and the scientific method:

• ... the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists.
• Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness.

Climategate:

1. Ross McKitrick: The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates, and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it leads. Understanding the Climategate Inquiries - Ross McKitrick, Ph.D
2. Chris Horner wrote, "The e-mails detail organized efforts to subvert and violate transparency laws ... in order to keep the public misinformed about the state of climate science"
3. Jay Ambrose wrote:
   • Another scientist whose name had been abused in the e-mails, Hans von Storch, is quoted in another piece as saying of the e-mail writers that they "violated a fundamental principle of science" in trying to keep collected information from getting out, and that they "play science as a power game."

Scientific skepticism:

• The science that is typically written up in history books is the science of great discoveries and great theories. But there is an equally important part of science that is not glamorous; the science of the skeptic. An important part of science is the requirement that new discoveries be able to be replicated by other researchers before they are accepted. This helps prevent false theories from being widely accepted. This requirement for replication and the refusal to accept a new discovery until it is possible to replicate it can easily be interpreted by naive commentators as "reactionary".

Racism:

• ... many liberals’ charges of racism aren’t only false — they’re lies intended to intimidate us

One child law in China:

• The one child law means musicians have no siblings and are spoiled by their parents.

Cultural assimilation:

• Diane Ravitch "... too, emphasized a common culture but one that incorporated the contributions of all racial and ethnic groups so that they can believe in their full membership in America’s past, present, and future. She envisioned elimination of allegiance to any specific racial and/or ethnic group, with emphasis instead on our common humanity, our shared national identity, and our individual accomplishments.
• Assimilationists seek elimination of cultural differences through loss of one’s distinctive traits that are replaced by the language, values, and other attributes of mainstream Americans.

Race, and also government aid programs to reduce poverty:

• Edward C. Banfield published a book in 1968 that made a simple and well-documented case that the problems played out in ghetto neighborhoods were a consequence of concentrated lower-class populations. Race was not the critical issue, he said. The black poor, Banfield suggested, were no different from other (white) lower-class Americans: they had no fondness for work, no strong family ties, an easy acceptance of criminal behavior, no brief for schooling, and no future perspective. Banfield argued that even well-pruned government programs could not undo the harm caused by class differences. For this sin, Banfield was effectively banished from one campus after another, his books vandalized, his lectures shouted down, and his sponsors threatened.

Multiculturalism:

• In 1915, Horace Kallen used the metaphor of a symphony orchestra to portray the strength through diversity of U.S. society. Just as different groups of instruments each play their separate parts of the musical score but together produce beautiful music of blends and contrasts, so, too, he said, do the various populations within pluralist America

Prejudice:

• William James wrote, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

Evolution:

• "Colin Patterson (1933-1998) was the Senior Principal Scientific Officer in the Paleontology Department of British Museum of Natural History in London, from 1962-1993."
• "Colin Patterson was employed in the palaeontology Department of The Natural History Museum in London from 1962 until 1993. He held an individual merit appointment beginning in 1974. Although retired at the age of sixty, he continued to work daily in the Museum until his sudden death in 1998."

Pseudoscience: "Pseudoscience, which involves passionate belief with no evidence, is often the result of convictions based on religion or politics."

Voodoo Science:

• "scientists, many of whom have impressive credentials, who craft arguments deliberately intended to deceive or confuse."

Scientific claims:

• The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't.

Relativity

Relativity and relativism:

• '... the physical anomalies that led to relativity can be explained without it. For example, the famous equation "E = mc2" was derived using relativity theory. But later Einstein re-derived it, this time without relativity.'

• Atomic clocks do slow down when they move through the gravitational field. But the slowing of clocks and the slowing of time are very different things. GPS has "relativistic" corrections to keep its clocks synchronized. But those corrections depart significantly from Einstein's theory. They refer clock motion not to the observer but to an absolute reference frame, centered on the Earth.

• Relativity and relativism arose at about the same time, and the scientific claims surely bolstered the cultural applications. Now there is skepticism about both.

GPS: "... because the satellites are constantly moving relative to observers on the Earth, effects predicted by the Special and General theories of Relativity must be taken into account to achieve the desired 20-30 nanosecond accuracy."

• "Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day ..."
• "A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day."

• In detail: "The engineers who designed the GPS system included these relativistic effects when they designed and deployed the system. For example, to counteract the General Relativistic effect once on orbit, they slowed down the ticking frequency of the atomic clocks before they were launched so that once they were in their proper orbit stations their clocks would appear to tick at the correct rate as compared to the reference atomic clocks at the GPS ground stations. Further, each GPS receiver has built into it a microcomputer that (among other things) performs the necessary relativistic calculations when determining the user's location."

Other

Intuition (Amar Bose):

• Bose says that his best ideas usually come to him in a flash. "These innovations are not the result of rational thought; it's an intuitive idea." Popular Science Dec 2004

Whole note: The most basic note is called the whole note because ... it lasts a whole measure [in common time].

"... the oppressed blacks on the Southern plantations identified with the Israelites in Egypt."

"... Black slaves in the South identified with Moses and the Israelites enslaved in Egypt..."

Feminism aims at returning society to an idealized primitive matriarchy.

North Koreans "suffer from an incredible blackout of knowledge about the outside world. The control on the population exceeds anything the world has seen to date."

More about me

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This user has been on Wikipedia for 22 years, 11 months and 9 days.