Seth’s blog

Speaking of Wikipedia, the LA Times has an interesting article today about what happened when Jimmy Wales — the founder — posted a one-sentence article about a butcher shop on the outskirts of Cape Town. It was deleted quickly — not important enough — but then a big debate ensued. The Times piece turned to the bigger issue:

Perhaps the granddaddy of all the Wikipedia debates is the question of which information deserves to be included, and which doesn’t. So-called Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful — why not include it? Deletionists, meanwhile, believe that because not all articles are created equal, judicious pruning increases the overall quality of Wikipedia’s information and strengthens its reputation. An encyclopedia, they say, is not just a dumping ground for facts.

While the people who run craigslist try hard to figure out what users want and how to give it to them — starting with the assumption that they themselves do not know — the people who run Wikipedia play God, at least by comparison. In this debate, both sides are playing God. As Aaron Swartz said, it isn’t wise. Jane Jacobs tells a story about a Pennsylvania Girl Scout troop. They were snobs; they made it hard for new members to join (the Wikipedian attitude that Aaron criticized). The girls who couldn’t get in formed their own troop. Several years later the new troop was thriving; the old troop was dying.

At Language Log, Mark Liberman has an excellent discussion of a new paper that reports a correlation between voice pitch and number of children for men in a hunter-gatherer population. Men with deeper voices had more children. This portion of Liberman’s post surprised me:

This particular form of sexual dimorphism is apparently not shared with our relatives the chimps and gorillas, so it must have evolved during the same period that human speech and language did. Therefore, starting at some point during the last five million years or so, there must have been a selective advantage for male hominins with lower voices. And according to the featured study (C.L. Apicella, D.R. Feinberg, F.W. Marlowe, “Voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers”, Biology Letters, published online 9/25/2007), evidence of this selective advantage can still be found today.

I agree with all of this. The puzzle is that the effect remains. Five million years is a long time; shouldn’t the dimorphism have gotten larger and larger until an equilibrium was reached, and then stayed at that equilibrium? Once equilibrium is reached it will be the average voice pitch that is most successful.

I can think of several possible answers.

1. The correlation is due to random variation. Because lots of surveys have shown that women prefer men with deeper voices, this is less plausible.

2. Evolution is still happening on this dimension. That is, equilibrium hasn’t yet been reached.

3. This particular tribe was pushed away from equilibrium for an extended time — that is, for a long time higher-pitched men’s voices were more advantageous than usual. Whatever caused that has disappeared so this group is moving back toward equilibrium.

4. It’s about signalling. The voice-pitch variation observed in populations is mostly due not to genetic variation but to early environment (say, testosterone in the womb) and is correlated with something less visible that makes a difference in the reproductive success of one’s children.

I imagine the authors of the paper favor #4. When the full text is available for free, I’ll find out and post again.

On the SLD forums, a member named Del posted this:

Roughly a month ago, I got tired of the oil. I was fighting to take it and something about one of them was causing an allergic reaction (dermatitis), so I switched to noseclipped oatmeal with brown rice protein. I haven’t noticed any change in my appetite suppression (read, still ridiculously good) and my weight loss has maintained at the usual rate of 3lbs or so per week. I’m really enjoying it and I have that nice full feeling as well.

So in the interest of sharing, that’s:
1/2 c. quick cook oatmeal
2T. brown rice or egg white protein
1 c of water
Cook in microwave for 2 minutes, let sit for one minute. Consume noseclipped morning and night.

In conventional nutritional terms, oil and the oatmeal mixture are very different. One is all fat, the other has almost no fat. Yet they have had the same effect on her weight. The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet predicts this but few if any other theories do. For example, if you believe in low-carb diets, you would predict that the oil (no carbs) would cause weight loss more easily than the oatmeal mixture (which has plenty of carbs).

I recently asked Aaron Swartz, who has written about Wikipedia and run for its board of directors, what he thought was wrong with it. Three big things, he said:

1. Failure to value new contributors. A small number of insiders are dismissive of and treat poorly newcomers who contribute. For example, their contributions are deleted without explanation. The insiders see the newcomers as a source of trouble rather than strength.

2. Disorganized and underfunded. It took someone Aaron knows two years to make a deal with Wikipedia. The finances are in bad shape.

3. Lack of vision. Wikipedia could be improved in many ways but actual improvements are rare.

He used to see Wikipedia as just a wonderful thing, he said; now he sees it as a wonderful thing that is falling way short of what it could be.

You seem to be saying someone could come along and start a better open-source encyclopedia, I said. That’s unlikely, he said, Wikipedia is so big.

Who does it better? A similar but vastly better-run website is craigslist, he said. A chart of page view rank and number of employees shows Yahoo at #1 with 10,000 employees, TimeWarner at #2 with 90,000, Google at #3 with 10,000, and so on. Craigslist is #7 with 23 employees.

Addendum: Wikipedia, with very few employees, would of course also rank very high on such a chart; this is the magic of both Wikipedia and craigslist and why it makes sense to compare them. The craigslist link I gave, to a Wall Street Journal article, suggests that craigslist values contributors much more than Wikipedia. Here is what happened at a Wikipedia board of directors meeting that Aaron attended a few years ago:

One presentation was by a usability expert who told us about a study done on how hard people found it to add a photo to a Wikipedia page. The discussion after the presentation turned into a debate over whether Wikipedia should be easy to to use. Some suggested that confused users should just add their contributions in the wrong way and a more experienced users would come along to clean their contributions up. Others questioned whether confused users should be allowed to edit the site at all — were their contributions even valuable?

On issues I care about, college presidents have a terrible record. After Margot O’Toole accused Imanishi-Kari of scientific misconduct, David Baltimore — later president of Rockefeller University and Caltech — stood by as O’Toole’s career was ruined. Both O’Toole and Imanishi-Kari were in Baltimore’s lab. I’m sure O’Toole was right; ink and digit analyses made it clear that Imanishi-Kari’s data was fake. The current Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, when he was head of the University of Toronto, stood by as a job offer to the psychiatrist David Healy was withdrawn because Healy had criticized drug companies. President of Reed College Colin Diver failed to grasp that what he strongly objected being done to him was what Reed professors did to their students every day. Axel Meisen, President of Memorial University, has allowed his university’s lawyers to defend the indefensible: Memorial failed to protect the nurse who tried to stop Ranjit Chandra. Henry Bienen, President of Northwestern University, allowed Lynn Conway and Deidre McCloskey to use the power of his university to punish Michael Bailey for saying something that Conway and McCloskey didn’t like.

I might have given Columbia University President Lee Bollinger credit for supporting free speech when the President of Iran spoke there a few days ago. But I won’t, because here is how Bollinger introduced him:

[long self-congratulation] . . . Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad. . . [long no-stone-unturned condemnation] . . . Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. . . . Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? . . . You held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. . . . When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments . . . I close with this comment frankly and in all candor, Mr. President. I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. . . . your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university president.

Ugh. Ahmadinejad objected:

In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person . . . to be a speaker, we actually respect [the audience] by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given . . . to provide vaccination.

Bollinger did not understand that freedom of speech means nothing unless you listen to those allowed to speak.

Addendum: Bollinger, a former Law School professor, teaches a class on freedom of speech. At the next meeting of this class, shortly after the remarks I quote above, “the students erupted in cheers.”