How the ’60s Counterculture Is Still Driving the Tech Revolution | Hacker News Reader

How the ’60s Counterculture Is Still Driving the Tech Revolution

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31 pointsadampludwig18 comments

> “Wikipedia is written by a whole bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But it turns out that collectively, a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about know more than one person who spent their lifetime researching it.”

This immediately brought to mind this article: http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out. I mean it vividly popped into my brain because of the utter nonsense of this claim.

It doesn't turn out that an army of ignorants knows more than an expert. What turns out is that free trumps paid, and (perhaps surprisingly) can muster an enormous army of manpower, which in turn leads to a comprehensiveness that is unattainable by a traditional monetary business model. I mean you don't need to look very far to find factual inaccuracies and indeed slander on Wikipedia that can not be fixed because the rules are not oriented towards truth. So to draw the vacuous conclusion that Wikipedia won because its articles were better than Britannica belies a sort of willful ignorance about how the world works.

That's not say doing an end run around overly comfortable gatekeepers isn't a good thing in general, but man what a braindead quote.

There's a lot of evidence that Wikipedia's articles are actually better than Britannica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compar...

Britannica articles aren't written by "one person who spent their lifetime researching" that topic.

Actually, they often are. But Wikipedia articles are written by dozens or even hundreds of people who spent a significant part of their lives researching the topic. Individually none of those people can match that Britannica expert's experience, but collectively they dwarf him.

Britannica's expert model also risks some pretty biased and incomplete articles, depending on the expert chosen. There's a relationship between being prominent in a field and being willing and able to write a comprehensive, neutral overview of the field, but it's not quite the same thing, and some top researchers are very bad at the latter.

Who uses Britannica after grade school? Only idiots. But people still take Wikipedia seriously after grade school. That's what's insidious about it.

The difference being in my mind that I won't turn to an article in Britannica and find it randomly defaced, or deliberately seeded with biased information. Wikipedia is awesome, but gotta use it as a jumping off point to find references to "real" sources for anything that _must_ be right.

>What turns out is that free trumps paid, and (perhaps surprisingly) can muster an enormous army of manpower, which in turn leads to a comprehensiveness that is unattainable by a traditional monetary business model

I think of this as similar to how knowledge is freely shared in a coffeehouse. You hear a conversation, chip in your insight if you have any. You do it because talking involves little effort, and you want to share your knowledge. That might be due to a variety of reasons; from trying to prove someone wrong, to a general feeling of wanting to display knowledge.

Whatever it is, it has clearly extended to Wikipedia, and Im glad for it

You do it because talking involves little effort, and you want to share your knowledge. That might be due to a variety of reasons; from trying to prove someone wrong, to a general feeling of wanting to display knowledge.

But none of those motivations require that you be, in fact, correct.

I've lost track of the times people overheard me discussing something with someone and piped in to tell me the virtues of homeopathy or how GMOs are a plot to destroy the food supply or that there's no actual proof of evolution.

I'm most skeptical of people who are least skeptical of their own knowledge and how they acquired it. Yet it seems those are the people most likely to offer an opinion.

If you (rightly) skeptical of my claims go find a newspaper and read the letters to the editor. These are people sufficiently convinced of their rightness that they took the time to send a letter or an E-mail.

The intersection of tech culture (and notably Silicon Valley) and 60s counterculture is a fascinating topic.

The best book on the subject is, in my opinion, "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff [0]. It's a fantastic book, although it requires the reader to already have some knowledge of the people and historical events, as it is not meant to be a computer history primer.

But yeah, it's a great book, and a lot of stuff in there might surprise some readers. For instance, I learned that there was LSD research happening a few blocks away from where I used to live in Menlo Park :)

Timothy Leary also has an interesting essay in Laurel's "Art of Human Computer Interface Design" anthology[1] about what he believes are the intersections of computing as a human tool and psychedelics.

When you start to look into it, you'll realize that the tech industry and California's friendly attitude towards psychedelics have always somewhat gone hand in hand- and people who are not familiar with California's atypical culture might be surprised to know that some of the engineers and designers behind their favorite products share a few things in common with the ol' Timothy.

Queue the necessary: "There are two major products that come from Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Human-Computer-Interface-Desig...

Were any of the creators/contributors to BSD UNIX acid-trippers? Honest question

Given the number of contributors[1], it's hard for me to imagine the answer being "no".

[1] http://www.netbsd.org/people/CSRG-contrib.html

Along the same lines, I found "From counterculture to cyber culture" [0] to be a fascinating read

[0] http://www.amazon.fr/From-Counterculture-Cyberculture-Stewar...

  "...'Is the bottom getting out of poverty?' Going from
  next-to-nothing to twice that is so much huger than going
  from being a one-billionaire to a two-billionaire," Brand
  said. And, thanks to the sharing and social revolution,
  "that’s going on like mad now."

I can't subscribe that this notion is happening. Really, I think the opposite is happening. With the evaporation of the middle class in the USA and personal anecdotal experiences I think the above statement is false. If there is any evidence or arguments to support the claim that the social revolution is decreasing poverty I'd really be interested in hearing them.

To that, I'd also like the to see sources and arguments that the crowds are truly wiser than an expert.

> the crowds are truly wiser than an expert.

it depends on whose opinion one asks - crowd's or an expert's :)

I don't think the editor who picked the title actually read the article.

"Indeed, he noted, his maxim applies as well to mankind’s Biblical first act of insubordination in the Garden of Eden as it does to the 1960s counterculture that was the progenitor of the personal computer."

A better title would take into effect something like one dude says all innovation requires disrespect (LOL) and if thats the case are social media startups sufficiently insubordinate to be disrespectful enough to be our only source of modern innovation. Or something like that. Its a long complicated argument (and mostly wrong) so its going to be difficult to create a short linkbait headline.

For something that covers so many distinct topics, its pretty well written.

I have yet to see a Wikipedia article that's better written than a traditional encyclopedia entry. You can praise Wikipedia for the breadth of its knowledge, certainly, but the depth?

That very much depends on the subject, for instance popular culture is covered very well on Wikipedia with little delay.

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