 | This is aWikipediauser page. This is not an article. If you find this page on any site other thanWikipedia, you are viewing amirror site, which may be outdated, unaffiliated, untrustworthy. The real page is located athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AndreJustAndre. |
 | Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit Yes, even you. No special expertise or education required. |
Welcome to my Wikipedia user page, est. 2003.
On Wikipedia anyone, even a kid, or a random person on the street, or in a library, can help write or contribute to (including gnomes, even little gnomes help) the corpus of human knowledge.Be bold! I was a kid myself when I started editing the encylopedia, and gaining community trust through advanced permissions, and I learned a lot through the years I spent with the system and process. The community is an evolving place, and a lot has changed since then. What hasn't changed is the radicalad hoc simplicity of the wiki model and culture of getting shit done without red tape, or obstacles to quick change.Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy although it does haveincreasingly inaccurately named functionaries that I was once one of.
You can edit this user page right now. If you do, please make it useful, or funny, or both. On Wikipedia,vandalism isn't allowed and will be quickly reverted, though particularly funny vandalism may have some form of immortality, seeWP:BJAODN. I'm giving you permission to beWP:BOLD and edit my user page right now, but I will probablyrevert you if I don't agree with your changes. Well, unless you actually make this page better by adding insightful information, wikilinks, references, or fixing mistakes.Wikipedia is a work in progress.Red wikilinks (meaning both new articles, and new users) are welcome! I'm not precious or particular, and I'm here to learn and listen.
Wikipedia is an experiment in decentralized decision-making byWP:CONSENSUS and it doesn't work perfectly, butit's better than all the other options that we know of.Wikipedia is not a democracy, nor should it ideally bedemocratic (orparliamentary or constitutional...), but you can use your voice of reason to help discuss when disputes arise, and may the most logical and reasoned ideas that reflect the5 pillars of Wikipedia carry the day. We do base all of our content onverifiable,reliable 3rd party material. So no propaganda sources allowed for use on political articles. That has the binding power of consensus.
Reliability of Wikipedia: Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia and general reference work. It helpsGoogle provide good search results. It is a greatnonprofiteducational resource. You should consider donating your time and/or money because it can be very rewarding. Seethe donation page orWikipedia:Community portal.
 | Articles generally requiresignificant coverage inreliable sources We need multiple sources that discuss the topic directly and in detail. Not: passing mentions, directory listings, or any old thing that happens to have the topic's name in it. |
What should we include? How about everything? OK, not literally everything. But since we have articles on (nearly) every commercially-releasedvideo game, everysitcom, everyTV show... to say nothing of everymonarch ofEngland,France,Rome, etc... if some topic or item seems worthy of considering for inclusion, andif it has significant coverage in published reliable sources... very likely, it is worthy of coverage here. It is probably worthy of some discussion, at least!
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you can edit here!
I was known as and signed as just "Andre" for many years. In retrospect, why didn't I have anacuté accént? I knew how to make one forPokémon. My pronouns are he/him, but I don't care if you want to use neutral pronouns or words. "Guys" is a gender neutral term IMHO.
I started editing Wikipedia after reading an article about wikis in a computer magazine obtained fromBarnes & Noble. My first edit wasList of dragons. My first creation wasMicrosoft Agent. I was active onIRC and joined the conversation onfreenode, learning how torevert vandalism. I became anadmin in 2004. I was nominated bynode_ue and passed unopposed with 20 supports, wow, it's been a while huh? I had 1800 edits at the time. I was also very interested inGentoo Linux, writingQBASIC, primitiveJavaScript,HTML, andTI-BASIC at the time. One of the cool things was making a user page layout or a signatureCSS tag and seeing new users copy my "work."
I later became amediator, abureaucrat in 2007, IRC op, meta-admin, sometime writer of thoughts that have later become those shorthand policy shortcuts:WP:RIG,WP:DAQ. As a bureaucrat, Irenamed over 1000 people andpromoted over 20 administrators. I closed onebureaucrat discussion and participated in several. I've also nominated4 admins though they are long since inactive now, and blocked almost 100 people. Because MEDCOM was prominently advertised and my name was alphabetically high up, I would often get pinged by strange random new or anonymous editors withweird disputes. My page was alsovandalized somewhat often, which was a kind of badge of honor or a rite of passage back then. 276(!) (which is 6.6centijimbos) people are watching this page. Because I've been around for a while and was a known quantity, I was even once used as abaseline for a successfulsockpuppet investigation. Also, I forgot about this, but check this out:Burma or Myanmar? I've createdover 5400 pages across namespaces on Wikipedia, somehow, and at least92 real mainspace articles, with over 47,000 live edits (~10% deleted), and deleted over 700 pages as an admin. I am currently Wikipediannumber 2700 by edit count and7390 by article count. I'm running about a 70-80% accuracy indeletion discussions with over 700 AFDs participated in.
Believe it or not, in 20 years of editing, 2022 is mymost active year in terms of raw edit count (tho, I never used to use Twinkle)! On really less than half of that, 3-4 high months. I've always felt the pull of editing in the summer, like a good book on thechaise longue[1], rich in intrigue and the trembling of anticipation. Wikipedia maxes thedopamine drip for thehyperverbal.[1] My summer vacations from school, I rarely attendedsummer camp, I instead spent the summers playing on the computer and swimming laps in a wooded pool. Now as ageriatric Millennial who gets paid to manage software development, I can feel the fall feeling and pretty soon I will go intohibernation or havereal life to contend with. But in the meantime I've gone on a spree cleaning up my old articles and wading deep into the belly of the beast, it proves that it'snever too late to learn to play the piano.
I got to meet and make a lot of online friends, I'm not the greatest at keeping in touch with people, but feel free to reach out and rekindle the magic any time.
 | I am also onDiscord and onLibera Chat. |
Wikipedia works because it's fundamentally founded on the principle and value system ofagile software development. This is also how many otheropen source andfree software projects operate.Wikitext has a lot of similarity with program code. That's whydiffing andversion control work so well. These are the tools and workflows that were developed for use withgit,Apache Subversion,concurrent versions system etc. Wikipedia is more semantic than a normal corpus of documents. It goes beyondhypertext due to the richtemplating, different kinds of nesting logic,redirection,namespacing,forking,branching, etc.
 | Wikipedia rules are principles, not laws. Policies and guidelines exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles. They are not intended to provide an exact or complete definition of the principles in all circumstances. They must be understood in context, using some common sense and discretion. |
Because Wikipedia'sculture is largely borne out of theengineering andscience/social sciences world, it has inherited a strong cultural emphasis oncorrectness, exactness, and adherence to the letter of rules. However because Wikipedia is acountercultural exercise that inherited the earlyInternetSilicon ValleyCalifornia ideology oflibertarianism combined with theUC Berkeley,Steve Jobs-on-acidAtari in the1970s,hippieEric Schmidt-at-Burning Manutopian earnestness,surrealism, humor,gestalt, art, music, pervaded the early, freewheeling days of Wikipedia. There wereBomis babes[2]. There were some unusual characters pretending to be something they weren't. There were hucksters,scam artists, and also some brilliant and very unique contributors. It wasn't pure and it definitely wasn't stuffy. It may have been kind ofcorrupt, plucky, but it meant well, and you must have somenuance when judging the early project. Constraints may inspirecreativity, but creativity needs chaos, space and is connected toanarchy - when you tighten the screws and put on abusiness suit, theinnovators often move on. Still, the community has always had leading lights ofcompassion,peace, andfriendliness to newcomers. It has generally tried to avoid being punitive when addressing abuse and concerns. In fact the community has given a massively long leash to some extremely pernicious, dangerous contributors at times. Other times the community has been quite harsh and aggressive on certain transgressions. What I want to talk about is something different:pedantry.
Pedantry is about outcomes vs. outputs. Sometimes it's important to be exact. Like incooking orchemistry (which are the same thing). Sometimes it's important to be able toabstract things to a high degree, like inphysics,linguistics andcomputer science. Abstraction is the process or property of isolating a mess to be able to reason meaningfully and operate on a subject or object.Encapsulation is the ability to compartmentalize or insulate the exceptions to apply a map (seemap-territory relation). When you consider pedantry harmful, you're eliminating the rough edges, addingofframps andslack into the system. It's a form ofpracticalcyberneticelasticity. It's useful to have aflexible structure because it bends, and not breaks.
Discretion is discretion for a reason. It's not a misuse of the system. It is not required to find a way to make the exception fit the letter of the rule. That's why it's an exception. The important thing is a good, common sense outcome. If you can shortcut the proceedings and all the ceremony, and achieve an outcome that improves the project, that is preferable to following the process for the same, let alone a worse outcome. Pedants are oftenGaming the system, scrupulously cultivating constraints to trap up the works,Wikilawyering, often achieving a worse outcome with more fuss. They may acknowledge that a better outcome could exist, but their hands are tied by following the rule. Thankfully, creators of living systems knew about politics andsystem-gamers, that's why they designedelastic clauses likeWP:IAR.
This same phenomenon infestsgovernments,corporations, online projects, you name it. Rule-followers who don't understand how to cut throughred tape andget shit done. Pedants often wring hands on the idea that they should avoid any possible appearance of impropriety or inconclusivity. They are more concerned with making sure the outcome is defensible, documenting apaper trail for ass-covering, not that it be swift.Justice delayed can be justice denied at times. We owedue process and swiftness to the project and its contributors. It's better to deliver the value quickly. There are a lot ofrevolving doors - outcomes that can be reversed. If we're at 80%, it's usually good enough to pull the trigger, relying oninstinct, becausepolitics is an art, not ascience, for the most part. So don't worry so much and trust your instincts.
This was something that the old breed ofWP:ROUGE [sic] admins did reflexively, sometimes pissing people off or getting into hot water, but we traded some accuracy for speed. This is now a legacy model, and prospective/current admins will likely be sanctioned or blocked or otherwise ostracized for defending or mimicking the cowboyism and the perceived battleground mentality of the olden days. The project has changed, but perhaps somewhat to its detriment in some ways. So consider this at your own risk! I am no longer an admin and I won't be. But it is instructive to make sure we do not allow stultifyingbureaucracy to gum up the works. Gatekeeping is dangerous, as is process adherence, losing the spirit. Projects grow and flourish when they have a spark of creativity,which necessitates some freewheelingness.IT HAS TO BE FUN! AND A LITTLE CRAZY!WP:OGTW#10WP:TROUT or else your project slowly dries up as all the zany vibes are squeezed out of it. The process is negotiable and it's a means to an end, not the end-in-itself.
So next time someone, purposefully or accidentally, ignores a rule and closes/does something that seems uncontroversial, as I was wont to do in my heyday, to occasional great consternation, which I do regret, but I digress... ask yourself, next time that happens, or anything else that seems like admins shortcutting the ceremony and going rogue, would the outcome have been different if a different uninvolved closer had closed it? Or are you just harping on the rules and not focusing on whetheranyone was harmed? Wikipedia is pragmatic and preventative, not punitive, so injury must be substantiated by evidence toward outcomes. (PLEASE NOTE this is not excusing mistakes I made myself, or asking for forgiveness, or the slate to be wiped clean on the times when I jumped the gun and in doing so, created more fuss than necessary, or did something else that broke the rules in a way that actually did cause harm however small OR large.) Next time it happens, ask yourself if you're more concerned with the APPEARANCE of propriety and process-following-correctness, or about the IMPACT that the decisions are making (good or bad). I'm not looking to reconsider my own actions or a referendum on that. I'm looking to make an abstract, philosophical point as I often do, which might itself feel pedantic, but it's NOT! It's about big ideas. Wiki is not a court of law, and we are not lawyers or lawmakers. Very few of the things we do here are about life and death. We have to be here to build an encyclopedia.Move fast and break things. Learn by doing. Fail, learn, and fail again.Be bold!
 | AvoidWP:BIKESHEDding Don't get hung up on trifling details. |
TLDR: Lighten up, focus on theprinciples andvalues, not the specific process. If you're notWP:AGF and having fun, you're doing it wrong. It's OK to learn by making mistakes. Don't create a punitive or a pedantic environment. Wikipedia should encourage breaking the rules, or short circuiting a bureaucratic process, in the interest of expediency, lightening the load, and empowering good users with broad discretion and the ability to act instinctively. That doesn't mean a green light to do whatever all the time. It means you should focus on whether anyone or anything was harmed, and whether outcomes improved the project and peoples' lives. It also means we need not give infinite chances to obvious bad actors.
WP:BESTNP The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.80/20 rule,pareto principle. Good enough is good enough, ship it, iterate, and move on. What'sthe simplest thing that can possibly work.Don't solve a problem that you don't have yet. Wikipedia isworse is better.
 | The egg came first Fish evolved beforechickens, fish lay eggs, chicken lay eggs, therefore theegg evolved before the chicken.Q.E.D. |
Chicken-egg problems are resolveable inductively: assume the simplest thing you're trying to prove/accomplish, and test your hypothesis. A contradiction (failure) proves the null hypothesis. The egg came before the chicken in world history. Seethe article.
This is a practical proof of the value ofiterative development.Any sufficiently complex system evolved from a simpler system. Who isJohn Gall?
Other questions? The glass is neitherhalf-full norhalf-empty, it's100% full with both air and water/milk. The glass is both 50% full of milk, and 50% full of air, it's both 50% empty of air, and 50% empty of milk. In many cases, thefalse dichotomy of ourbinarybicameral minds and realities, lead us to ignore the both/neither option. Most of the time, reality is actually ahypercube/tesseract with asuperposition of states, i.e. 4, and not 2 options (A, B, not-AB, AB).Sometimes reality is just reality and not a bias.
What it means is that your machinery that you use to read the universe are faulty, and you're assembling a partial picture with pieces. (See:reality tunnel,Marshall McLuhan,medium is the message,map-territory relation) Those pieces are logic, and evidence. You need to follow those places and not go back when you encountercognitive dissonance,conditioning,fear,insanity,irrationality, etc. It is not a given that everything is going to bebinary andsymmetrical. 2 is a powerful number, that's very true, but the world is complex. Some things come in 3s, 5s, 9s, and 43s. See alsoprime numbers,Riemann conjecture,P vs NP In fact the universe is not locally real.
Consider aspherical cow. In reality, nothing is perfectly round. Our minds apply an approximation. We also tend to round things to base 10. It's not a coincidence that we have 5 digits on each hand and foot. In fact some properties ofbase 12 are mathematically interesting in this universe, and perhapspolydactyly might have been more common at some point in the past. Another example is 2pi, when it's really half-tau. It'shubris to claim that science is done, theStandard Model is complete, and there is nothing more to heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy, Horatio.
Emergent properties are phenomena that extrapolate frominitial conditions.Flocking is one, orswarm intelligence. Another way to think of it is that complex behavior can emerge from simpler automata like thegame of life orLangton's ant. So when we construct our iterative and incremental realities, if we introduce error, like a false dichotomy or a sorting or forcing function, that error will be amplified in the final result. It also means that small things like a pebble into a pond, can introduce aripple effect orbutterfly effect. Or how a lot of AI is racist. Like thetail wagging the dog, it can move the mountain with sufficient leverage. It is observed that 30% of aschool of fish can start to break a certain way, and then the rest of the school may yet end up going that way.
History is a combination of macro-forces and microscalegreat person theory. The world is a lot smaller than you think, and we all do make a difference in thebody politic and thezeitgeist.Culture isn't a single thing, it's an aggreggate of many small processes, like agarden or ayogurt. You need toplant a seed or get asourdough starter. There can beculture jamming, andviral memes that hijack the system and createcults. There are also virtuous ideas that create a new philosophical school of thought or anartistic movement. It's built on mimicry, inspiration, andgreat artists steal (no copyvios please though!) There's a reason why nobody really knows who createdMediterranean cuisine. It's a greatsalad bowl/melting pot/amalgam ofsyncretism and virtuous theft or borrowing going back millennia. Same thing with asprachbund andloanwords.
Baby steps are the only way to accomplish large things. It's said thatRome wasn't built in a day, but the corollary to that is that each neighborhood of Rome wasn't built in a day, nor was each individual domicile. Each marble brick laid in the homes of Rome had to bemined from aquarry that wasn't built in a day. As an miner knows, you need to extend the shaft carefully, testing along the way with acanary, and quickly retreat (rollback/revert) when you have a bad indicator. You need toread the room andtaste the soup (see:Rands in Repose). We stand on theshoulders of giants. It'sturtles all the way down. All abstractions are to some extentleaky abstractions, and all code hides a hack somewhere: fromTCP/IP to theVon Neumann architecture. Everything on some level is duct-taped together.
Theglobal computer network is a messy place. There are issues. Many people are good, trustworthy, and some aresociopaths orutility monsters who effectively manipulate the system. Most people are good people with some flaws who occasionally mess up or do bad things. Naively, Wikipedia is set up to be easily vulnerable to well poisoning, copyright violation, self promotional paid editing or COI editing,sockpuppetry,meatpuppetry,Wikibullying, other forms ofLong term abuse. There's also an extremely longWP:ROPE forFresh starts,Right to vanish, or general 2nd chances granted by the community. The community can occasionally be capricious and it is sensitive tomob mentality. Also, many of the desires and behaviors of the community evolved organically over time, and norms shift as rigor and structure replace values and principles, with lessons, learnings, and complexByzantine apparatus. This can sometimes serve to scare away, or discourage well-meaning newcomers who don't have a tough hide or a thick skin to navigate complexity. It can also produce bad results. The community may penalize or call out well-meaning people for political or toe-over-the-line technicalities [not talking about myself, I had feet over several lines at one point]. It can also occasionally overlook bad actors and allow the system to fall prey to their mistakes, such as the many cases of editors who have bulk addedbad information,copyright violations, non-notable stuff, insidious POV pushing or misrepresented sources.
Brigading is a known phenomenon and a major problem.Asynchronous warfare andunilateral disarmament are a problem. It takes truly dynamic, patient, and thoughtful behavior to counter the stacked deck: by which I mean, honest, good people, don't cheat, and bad people do, which gives them a kind ofiterated prisoner's dilemma advantage, that's why some people thinknice guys finish last. They'rewrong of course - toughreciprocal altruism (seetit-for-tat), or maybe we could call itstrong opinions, weakly held, can be a very effectivegame theoretic strategy.Institutions,mechanisms, andfeedback loops are necessary. I've been on the other side briefly, and I can say wearen'tit feels like we ARE doing an adequate swell job of giving good editors the help they need to deal with bad actions.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the patience of well-meaning people here and there, who are willing to do extremely frustratingargumentation for free, doesn'tscale when you're dealing with the infinite patience of a 13-year old guzzling caffeine and ready to rumble. Also, many of the people willing to do the frustrating argumentation are going to be folks who aren't acting with the best interest of the project at heart. So we need to design a system that rewards acting with good interest, and which can accurately locate and dispense with mistakes or bad-faith edits. The system is a lot better at doing this than it was in the early days, but there seem to be fewer well-meaning contributors who aren'tjaded orburnt out.
There's a well-known phenomenon that when you ask someone to sign up for something, even something free and beneficial, if you make them fill out a bunch of forms, and work with uncooperative people at theDMV or the post office or theIRS to get it done, they might just give up and do something else. So those who are left are the ones who have unusual traits.The odds are good, but the goods are odd.The Cynic's Guide (WP:CGTW) #18
Wikipedia relies onWP:AGF to work. It also relies that the good people speak up, rather than succumb to fear of saying the wrong thing. Being bold, and also providingpsychological safety rather than punishing dissent. That's why it works when it does work: the power of a robust debate in the public square. Solutions like theblockchain address the trustless nature of online transactions. I wrote in 2018this set of thoughts about a hash-based system to defeat sockpuppetry. There are other schemes we could devise. We need better tools because I would say that the existing tools are hit-or-miss, and there is plenty of evidence for that.
One of the most important tools we have to keep the project working well is thesocial norm. If we norm intellectual hygiene:skepticism,logic,rationality, avoidingfallacious reasoning, we create a self-correcting, robust tool to make smarter decisions. The point of logical debate is to come to the root of an idea.
That doesn't mean we're debating for sport.Wikipedia:Don't come down like a ton of bricks, don'tWP:TEXTWALL, don'tWP:BLUDGEON, but also don't throw these terms around willy nilly in accusation either. Sometimes truly complex topics need to be worked around and examined. Eventually, you need todisagree and commit, butstrong opinions weakly held means making a clear, crisp, sharp position and not awishy-washy one. Humor and civility are important too, and one must soften one's blows in context. After all, this is conversing with another human being, so have empathy.
Nonetheless, we should not spare the sharp clarity of intellect, and that meanslogic. Some people prefer to use the term "discussion" than "debate," but then many people mistake a discussion for a "vote" or a "request for comment" being a simple question and answer loop. So let's not forget that when a point is in "dispute," you are now debating that point, whether you wish to use a pugnacious connotation or a more collaborative one. I prefer to think of robust debate as a civil, and respectful activity, but remember to check for understanding and do not belabor.
Debating a point means refuting the central point and offering specific evidence, and arguments. Evidence and arguments can be well-formed, or they can be faulty. An argument is constructed via a graph of premises, much like adecision tree or anabstract syntax tree ordiagramming sentences. It's not incivil to attack an argument, even aggressively, so long as we stay in the realm of the abstract,don't repeat yourself, and remember to respond consciously to feedback by listening. Wiki is not a courtroom or a parliamentary chamber. Still, there is value in the common rules of evidence and common logical fallacies.
Wikipedia is not a legal system. We're all volunteers, there are no judges (exceptWP:ARBCOM), there are no juries (except the consensus of our peers), there are no sentences (except blocks and bans), but we do construct articles using admitted evidence, almost like the testimony of witnesses and affidavit or deposition statements of sorts, we do qualify experts, and cross-examine and impeach or discredit other arguments. Wikipedia is indeed a social system which contains rules, norms, practices, processes, values, principles, and the construction of narratives and arguments to advance positions. Wikipedia can also occasionally be an adversarial setting or a setting in which one encounters asynchronous information and spin, POV pushers, filibustering, sophistry, play-acting,sealioning, or garden variety ignorance and irrationality. The rules of legal evidence are a baseline of civil code and civil procedure, andcivility is key to what we do here. Keeping a cool head and avoiding ad hominem, by focusing on the content and the arguments, can be difficult, but I have found that the rules of evidence offer a lot of clarity and interesting parallels. It's notwikilawyering orgaming the system to know the principles of civil social thought that may be generalizable, and apply them to logic and rational discourse and inquiry.
| p | q | F0 | NOR1 | ↚2 | ¬p3 | ↛4 | ¬q5 | XOR6 | NAND7 | AND8 | XNOR9 | q10 | →11 | p12 | ←13 | OR14 | T15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T | T | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | T | T | T | T | T | T | T | T |
| T | F | F | F | F | F | T | T | T | T | F | F | F | F | T | T | T | T |
| F | T | F | F | T | T | F | F | T | T | F | F | T | T | F | F | T | T |
| F | F | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T |
| Com | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||||
| Assoc | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||||
| Adj | F0 | NOR1 | ↛4 | ¬q5 | ↚2 | ¬p3 | XOR6 | NAND7 | AND8 | XNOR9 | p12 | ←13 | q10 | →11 | OR14 | T15 | |
| Neg | T15 | OR14 | ←13 | p12 | →11 | q10 | XNOR9 | AND8 | NAND7 | XOR6 | ¬q5 | ↛4 | ¬p3 | ↚2 | NOR1 | F0 | |
| Dual | T15 | NAND7 | →11 | ¬p3 | ←13 | ¬q5 | XNOR9 | NOR1 | OR14 | XOR6 | q10 | ↚2 | p12 | ↛4 | AND8 | F0 | |
| L id | F | F | T | T | T,F | T | F | ||||||||||
| R id | F | F | T | T | T,F | T | F | ||||||||||
where
The four combinations of input values for p, q, are read by row from the table above.The output function for each p, q combination, can be read, by row, from the table.
Key:
The following table is oriented by column, rather than by row. There are four columns rather than four rows, to display the four combinations of p, q, as input.
p: T T F F
q: T F T F
There are 16 rows in this key, one row for each binary function of the two binary variables, p, q. For example, in row 2 of this Key, the value ofConverse nonimplication ('') is solely T, for the column denoted by the unique combination p=F, q=T; while in row 2, the value of that '' operation is F for the three remaining columns of p, q. The output row for is thus
2: F F T F
and the 16-row key is
| operator | Operation name | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | (F F F F)(p, q) | ⊥ | false,Opq | Contradiction |
| 1 | (F F F T)(p, q) | NOR | p ↓q,Xpq | Logical NOR |
| 2 | (F F T F)(p, q) | ↚ | p ↚q,Mpq | Converse nonimplication |
| 3 | (F F T T)(p, q) | ¬p,~p | ¬p,Np,Fpq | Negation |
| 4 | (F T F F)(p, q) | ↛ | p ↛q,Lpq | Material nonimplication |
| 5 | (F T F T)(p, q) | ¬q,~q | ¬q,Nq,Gpq | Negation |
| 6 | (F T T F)(p, q) | XOR | p ⊕q,Jpq | Exclusive disjunction |
| 7 | (F T T T)(p, q) | NAND | p ↑q,Dpq | Logical NAND |
| 8 | (T F F F)(p, q) | AND | p ∧q,Kpq | Logical conjunction |
| 9 | (T F F T)(p, q) | XNOR | pIf and only ifq,Epq | Logical biconditional |
| 10 | (T F T F)(p, q) | q | q,Hpq | Projection function |
| 11 | (T F T T)(p, q) | p →q | ifp thenq,Cpq | Material implication |
| 12 | (T T F F)(p, q) | p | p,Ipq | Projection function |
| 13 | (T T F T)(p, q) | p ←q | p ifq,Bpq | Converse implication |
| 14 | (T T T F)(p, q) | OR | p ∨q,Apq | Logical disjunction |
| 15 | (T T T T)(p, q) | ⊤ | true,Vpq | Tautology |
| P | Q | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T | T | T | T | F | T | T | T |
| T | F | F | T | T | F | F | F |
| F | T | F | T | T | F | T | F |
| F | F | F | F | F | T | T | T |
| P | Q | ||||||
| P => P => T | Q => Q => T | AND | OR | XOR | XNOR | conditional | biconditional"if-and-only-if" |
We are 2-dimensional minds in a 4-dimensional world. We're really not 3D, we might think we are, but we are pretty much 2D. Once we add that 3rd dimension things start to go awry in the human mind.
Humans have 2 hands, 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 feet, 2 ventricles, 2 tonsils, 2 nostrils, 2 eyes, 2 ears, and 2 brains. We tend to want to model things as a spectrum where black starts here |----> and then there's an indeterminate blob of gray, and then white is here <----|. In reality, it's 4 quadrants with four different kinds of blurry gray, one for each different kind of combination. WE tend to want to think in terms of easy opposites, good guys and bad guys, up and down, left and right, in and out, etc. And even that 4-quadrant map is a simplification. You know your model is broken when you plot it in a way that isn't cohesive: you're imposing aCartesiandualism again, but now it's 2^2 instead of your old 2. And try to refine that sooner and pretty soon you realize it's 8, then 16 and 32 and you are in aninfinite regress once again. Theslippery slope is a fallacy, but it's also an observation ofZeno's paradox. We must remember that some paradoxes are true, but they are oversimplified from the size of the universe one level up.
The2-party system isn't just a fact of American politics, the system is unconsciously engineered through the emergent behavior of its inhabitants. And while other countries with a parliamentary system think they have it better, which they do in some respects, we still tend toward bipolarization with the coalition governing party and itsloyal opposition. Not because a factional political system is inherently binary, but our minds tend to binariness unless we consciously grasp the illusion and work to model it more accurately. Many people are very bad at this. And not to get into sex and gender politics, but there is an inherent binary there, which is also illusory, but a natural product of the system produced emergently by the inhabitants. We tend to want to map one to 1, and one to 0, and there's a gross biological reason as to why. (READ: This iscriticizing and not endorsing any negative view you might think this is espousing. Sex and gender are literally false binaries since we haveasexual,hermaphrodite,intersex, people at a minimum. That's a biological fact. I am a male and notnonbinary but I try to avoid binary illusions to describe the universe.) Nevermind that you also do have -1, .5, .85, .23, etc. Our minds want to do black & white they know and we can't be surprised, because it's so common and really inevitable. However, it can be consciously corrected for if the error is understood.
There aren't two equal and opposite universes, though. There's only one universe (or multiverse if you wish) and we don't havealternative facts. One of the toughest things for many people to do cognitively is to appreciate the power ofparadox. It is sometimes very important to understand that there do exist, in our reality, states where 2 things seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time. It's also hard for us to remember that there areimaginary numbers. This inability to grasp our conditions is a property ofGodel's incompleteness theorem (see:Godel, Escher, Bach). We're inside the system so we sometimes forget that the total resolution of our microscale world is suspended when we view it from our perspective. If we could somehow exit the universe and view it from the outside, there would not be aSchrödinger wave equation just cranking away in the corner of the screen like a tickingFPS counter.God does not play dice with the universe. But, he might be playingDungeons & Dragons. See:double slit experiment
I always liked the idea of Wikipedia administrator rights being an "sysop bit," meaning flipping a 0 to a 1 to indicate theboolean true value of a few extra tabs. This is a version ofWP:NBD. The difference between a normal user and one with a bit is just 1. It's not a crown of gold or swords or thorns, it's simply enabling a feature toggle. On many online communities, moderators are referred to as such to imply that they are in the administration or in charge of making some decisions as impartial judges (similar, is the word arbitrator). Wikipedia has for a very long time preferred to call the admin role being a janitor, the job of keeping the place clean, wielders of a mop, looking to simply help with housekeeping tasks. However, don't forget the obsession with cleanliness and keeping out the riff raff can be just as dangerous and classist as more authoritarian and hierarchical interpretations of order. Hygiene has been closely associated with the development of eugenics and fascism - that's a very extreme case, but hanging out as a Wikipedia sysop on the drama boards has a way of putting you in touch with the fringe elements of intellectual internet society, such as nationalists, apologists, conspiracists, and all manner of civil POV pushers. It can be quite educational but it can also give you a very skewed and sideways view of the world. Just like if you get your news from Twitter or Facebook, you're viewing reality through agravitational lens, and the pull pulls around different bodies at different rates. Wikipedia is not biased but because there still exists a reality police, a reality based community that ensures aconsensus reality. The role of the admin should involve a short leash for trolls and a long leash for productive discourse (see:Wikipedia:Product, process, policy) Intellectual hygiene is important and the lack of it can be corrosive. A wikipedia admin is doing a customer service job - bouncing off of people and rendering judgment to ensure the trains continue to run on time. The role of the policy is keeping the placefunctional, but it's still a messy place. It is a form of social engineering moreso than a janitorial task. By which I mean being amanager. How to herd the cats? The best way of course is to make ahoneypot andlet them come to you. The point of it being a "bit" is that anyone can volunteer and learn the skills of management and leadership. It's not about power and it's not about lording it over people, it's about responsibility.
It seems to be a given that a lot of people feel like they know many things, some of which they actually know, some of which they only think they know. Of the things that people think they know but do not know, that could fall into things that are categorically false, things that are partially true, things that are mostly untrue, or things that are relatively true except for some amount of strict precision. Wikipedia doesn't care what you know - it only is interested in aggregating the source material. Which means that commonly held and reported, but erroneous knowledge that exists in 2022 and is corrected in 2048, is objectively wrong today, but still must be encoded in Wikipedia even if you know it's wrong. Science is an evolutionary process and Wikipedia is merely one reflection of the broader macrocosm. But a person in 2022 thinks they know several things that turn out to be categorically false, yet still must be considered verifiable in 2022.
Wikipedia is also necessarily an imprecise source. What that means is that when you summarize something, you may reduce its truth value by lacking precision. And that is a process of modelling an abstraction and constructing a narrative, a necessary and important process ofdistillation and re-cognization, of reforming into a coherent and cohesive and digestible, formatted, data serialization that the human brain can process.
LittleWikipedia:Wikignomes are extremely important to the project working and should not be understated in importance. It is by the sheer force of many little gnomes that Wikipedia works. It can't be outsourced to AI.
See my2018 statement here
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