User:DGG

I cannot tell whether or not something is notable by the WP:GNG

People who use WP expect when they look for an article, to find something.

I do not attempt to convert my opponents--I aim at converting their audience.

Princeton Talk, Oct.13, 2010 )and see

Open access note: Varmus original proposal, NIH 1999

Essays:

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My real name is David Goodman, and I would have used it from the beginning if I had understood WP better.

Everything here--every issue we discuss-- has its counterparts. What we do here is a sort of laboratory, where we can explore the implications of issues which are not limited to here. BLP is the obvious example, along with questions of the nature of truth and the reliability of evidence. The degree to which we can trust our judgment and our senses. The extent our biases are perpetuated by the way we teach, the nature of social control. The liberty we allow to other people to do what we think wrong, the relative weights of individual freedom to be bizarre and responsibility to a social projects, the role of personal feelings and trust as compared to abstract rules. Whether to obey social rules we think evil, whether to reflect social taboos, whether to judge motive or result. And the foundations and purposes of civil and criminal law, & the purposes of punishment. The specific WP issues related to all these will occur to you--I have specific things in mind for every one. Many advocates of extreme free speech in the outside world are in favor of a restrictive POV here. Many who are libertarians of various sorts in the outside world are much less so here. Many who are proponents of radical change are much less so here. We justify our witch hunts by the need to appear squeaky-clean to a potentially unfriendly world.

I have great discomfort with deleting work by banned editors only to rewrite it: I do not want to use to some extent someone else's work without credit--even if it was a troll. I would not have come to rewriting the article usually except for the gap left when it was deleted, and I would have to induce amnesia to forget what was there previously. I know this is not a simple problem with no real solution. Fortunately our examples are trivial. There are RW examples that are not the least trivial, besides the syphilis studies we all know about: The best atlas of human anatomy in the late 40s was prepared by a Nazi physician using drawings of what he knew were slides made from brain tissue of people killed in a concentration camp, and he is even recorded as having explained to the commandant the sort of specimen and method of preservation he wanted, so people were killed on purpose to make it. There has since been consensus to remove the atlas from libraries. (The slides themselves have been recovered, and buried properly, tho some of them are probably still in existence, because one brain can give thousands of thin sections.) In the USA in the 1950s, the question of what amino acids in proteins were essential for human growth was investigated by feeding human infants diets chemically prepared to be lacking in various amino acids, to see which ones stunted their growth unless they were added back. (The stunting from such starvation is permanent.) The compiler of the standard reference work in the late 50s decided to not cite these studies, even though there was no equivalent source of information, and no real prospect of another way to get it, and I don't think they have been cited since, As I said, our problems are not so consequential. They're self-protective, rather than immoral. I don't know that important as it is to protect WP, they rise to the same status.

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