Questioning Authority • Evaluating Wikipedia Articles, NYT • The Learning Network Options

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Questioning Authority • Evaluating Wikipedia Articles

New York Times • The Learning Network
If Wikipedia is a collaborative project open to all, why are fewer than 15 percent of the site's …

[Jon Awbrey]

I would not say that Hambouz and Epstein-Ojalvo have done a terrible job with this lesson plan. It is especially admirable that they refer students and teachers to alternative resources for learning about and actually building wiki environments.

But there is much to be criticized in their way of inviting students and teachers to engage in critical thinking about the stories that we read in the media, including Wikipedia and The New York Times.

First off, thinking critically is better described as “questioning assumptions” than it is as “questioning authority”. After all, “authority” is a very ambiguous word. It can mean that the person speaking “knows what he or she is talking about”, that is, has a lot of experience with the subject at hand. Or it can mean that a person has the power to compel specific actions on our parts. Either way, there is a lot to think about in the heat of the moment before we question that authority, especially if “questioning” is interpreted as ignoring or failing to give due cognizance, as opposed to simply inquiring into.

So what are some of the assumptions — in the way of assumptions, not always stated outright — that we need to question as we read the several stories and lesson plans at hand?

— Jon Awbrey • February 4, 2011 (9:48 am) Link

[Milton Roe]

First off, thinking critically is better described as “questioning assumptions” than it is as “questioning authority”. After all, “authority” is a very ambiguous word. It can mean that the person speaking “knows what he or she is talking about”, that is, has a lot of experience with the subject at hand. Or it can mean that a person has the power to compel specific actions on our parts. Either way, there is a lot to think about in the heat of the moment before we question that authority, especially if “questioning” is interpreted as ignoring or failing to give due cognizance, as opposed to simply inquiring into.
— Jon Awbrey

Very, very good, and a point we've made here on WR plenty of times. The difference in the two types of "authority" is rarely discussed in pop culture, because we use the same word for both types, but the authority-of-expertise (Gary Kasparov is an authority on chess) is not at all the same thing as the authority the grows from the barrel of a gun.

And actually, there's a type of authority that comes from ownership, but it breaks down into authority over your body and your chattle property, which is quite different from your (limited) authority to tell people what they can do inside "your" house or upon "your" land, unless they'd like to be told to leave. Tha "authority" over real-property turns out to be more closely related to the "authority-of-force" than the other type, even in "democratic" societies. The ultimate reason being that ownership of land is impossible to define except by force, while ownership of chattle property or one's own body can be enforced by deception, trickery and (ultimately) by flight, even if one is outgunned. Real property, being "tacked down" is stuck needing a purely political and communal solution. And that tends to involve force, since (as I've commented) nobody has really come up with anything better.

When 60 Minutes asks Assange if he has "a problem with authority" he should have asked what type they meant. Perhaps he did (he said he was a libertarian, but not an anarchist) but that's a long conversation. Non anarchist libertarians seek to minimize the authority-of-force in the world, but recognize that it can't be made to disappear. Steve Croft has probably never even thought about it much.