Maintaining a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is very important. The related concept is No Original Research (NOR). To express your contention in Wikipedia terms, you’re concerned that choosing “persuasion pattern labels” violates NOR, which in turn violates NPOV.
My thoughts:
Annotations are precisely that; they’re purely suggestions about the meaning of the quotes. They don’t actually alter the quotes, so the downside is bounded. To make a strange thought experiment, consider what would happen if the Chinese Government purely inserted tags on web content, rather than filtered web content. It’s not as damaging. You could perhaps even argue it could be less biased than purely unfiltered content, because it would expose the Chinese Government’s agenda.
Selecting “persuasion pattern labels” is within the acceptable bounds of NOR. Most of the labels have very specific meanings. The important question is whether a decent sized community can reach consensus on the assigning of labels. Let’s take the Less Wrong community. I would expect in most cases we’d rapidly reach consensus. Sure, there would be vigorous debate at times, but that’s no different than for Wikipedia. There’s always going to be people who will cry NPOV foul; that’s unavoidable. They can make the Conservopedia version of TakeOnIt and have all the tags have a religious focus rather than a logical one.
There needs to be guidelines for Persuasion Pattern Labels. The existing set of labels reek of the brainstorming phase. Some will be removed and I’ve obviously gone overboard with pejorative language. When these are cleaned up, I doubt there will be a serious issue with anyone labeling the Singularity with the “Religious” label. Sure, there will be a few poorly chosen labels, but so long as there’s many more well chosen than poorly chosen labels, it’s worth labeling.
P.S. Some people have suggested the term “pitch” instead of “woo”. This certainly seems to solve some of the complaints people have had about the name.
Maintaining a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is very important. The related concept is No Original Research (NOR). To express your contention in Wikipedia terms, you’re concerned that choosing “persuasion pattern labels” violates NOR, which in turn violates NPOV.
My thoughts:
Annotations are precisely that; they’re purely suggestions about the meaning of the quotes. They don’t actually alter the quotes, so the downside is bounded. To make a strange thought experiment, consider what would happen if the Chinese Government purely inserted tags on web content, rather than filtered web content. It’s not as damaging. You could perhaps even argue it could be less biased than purely unfiltered content, because it would expose the Chinese Government’s agenda.
Selecting “persuasion pattern labels” is within the acceptable bounds of NOR. Most of the labels have very specific meanings. The important question is whether a decent sized community can reach consensus on the assigning of labels. Let’s take the Less Wrong community. I would expect in most cases we’d rapidly reach consensus. Sure, there would be vigorous debate at times, but that’s no different than for Wikipedia. There’s always going to be people who will cry NPOV foul; that’s unavoidable. They can make the Conservopedia version of TakeOnIt and have all the tags have a religious focus rather than a logical one.
There needs to be guidelines for Persuasion Pattern Labels. The existing set of labels reek of the brainstorming phase. Some will be removed and I’ve obviously gone overboard with pejorative language. When these are cleaned up, I doubt there will be a serious issue with anyone labeling the Singularity with the “Religious” label. Sure, there will be a few poorly chosen labels, but so long as there’s many more well chosen than poorly chosen labels, it’s worth labeling.
P.S. Some people have suggested the term “pitch” instead of “woo”. This certainly seems to solve some of the complaints people have had about the name.
“Pitch” is much better. I had no idea what the “woo” link meant when I first saw it.