A SlimVirgin Close Encounter, ...of the first kind Options

[TabulaRasa]

If you followed a link on O-Smear to get here, please be sure to read this topic for some more recent commentary on this whole situation. Thanks!

UPDATE: We'd also like to apologize for the fact that the topic referenced earlier was the wrong one, and was, indeed, a dead link until just recently. The topics are referenced by number, and the admin adding this note (who has since been severely punished) originally typed "8623" instead of "8263." (The link was dead until the new number came up and was taken by an RSS-fed media topic.) OOPS! Normally we're more careful than that... sorry! Anyway, the purpose of linking to the other topic was simply to help keep people up-to-date on what we're discussing, and the gist of that was that Wordbomb is not "Joey," at least not according to our IP data, analysis of posting patterns, writing style, attitude, known history on Wikipedia, and just-plain common sense. Sorry about that too, but it's our story and we're sticking to it.

Also, putting notes like this in threads that are linked to by other sites is hardly "unprecedented." Half the time we delete such threads completely, just to piss people off... we're just like that! In this case, we simply want to make it clear that while Wordbomb is generally well-tolerated here, and Gary Weiss is generally disliked, that doesn't mean we have any real desire to get in the middle of their little feud, or whatever it is. Most of us are only concerned with how it plays out on Wikipedia, not elsewhere. That's our "purview," you see. (The site is actually called "Wikipedia Review," not "The Gary and Judd Review"...)

Anyway, thanks! We hope you enjoy the site!

The Management, Apr. 17, 2007

Antisocialmedia.net has found the actual person who might be partly responsible for Linda Mack's slow descent into SlimVirginity. If the story weren't so unbelieveable I'd discount it, but trust me: you can't make this stuff up.

The first half of the post is mostly a rehash of things we've read here, but the second half is where Slim comes in and that's what you really need to read. If it's all true, then SlimVirgin mythology has just taken a huge step forward. It's at http://www.antisocialmedia.net

[Jonny Cache]

Myself, I swear by Maxwell's Razor:

Don't abduct a demon as a hostage to entropy.

But never mind that now.

For the rest of this discussion, and those to follow, let me introduce a form of brevity that stores a bit of wit for me:

• STIB (s) = State Transition Indexed By (s), where s is a character string.
• Let X be the state space of a database, for example, the state of a wiki.
• A state transition t is a transformation of X, a mapping of type t : X -> X.

My own experience confirms the gist of what Tabula Rasa says, as my first encounters with the set of Wikipedia state transitions indexed by the string "SlimVirgin", in symbols, the set {t : X -> X | t = STIB ("SlimVirgin")} were quite benign, but for reasons that remain beyond my ken, though a subject of so far futile speculation, they radically altered all of a sudden when I began to work on the WP:NOR policy page.

But assigning too much causality to single individuals is a prediction of a well-known theory in psychology, the theory of "Fundamental Attribution Bias" (FAB), and falling into that error has the effect of causing us to ignore the role of the rest of the population that winks at these acts. I mean, you can't blame the leader for the stupidity of those who follow. Okay, thare are leaders who slash education funding, so I guess that's an exception to the rule.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 1st October 2006, 6:04pm

[Somey]

Myself, I swear by Maxwell's Razor: Don't abduct a demon as a hostage to entropy. But never mind that now.

Good, because I have absolutely no clue as to what that means...

But assigning too much causality to single individuals is a prediction of a well-known theory in psychology, the theory of "Fundamental Attribution Bias" (FAB), and falling into that error has the effect of causing us to ignore the role of the rest of the population that winks at these acts.

Agreed! And to some extent, I've advocated all along that we focus less on Slimmy, salacious as all this is. When you think about it, the fact that in another thread we're chiding Larry Sanger, and to some extent the rest of the Faithful, for "blaming it all on Lir" while we're over here doing practically the same thing with SlimVirgin could very well look rather untoward to an outsider, sincere though it may be.

The other point I've sometimes tried to make, probably unsuccessfully, is that even if you can get rid of the worst of the worst, somebody else (presumably User:Cyde, in this scenario) just becomes the worst of the worst to take that person's place... And then you get rid of that person, and someone else comes along, ad infinitum. That isn't to say that every society has to have its bad guys, but the fact is, every society does have its bad guys. And it's easy to spend too much time going after the bad guys, to the point where you don't spend enough time trying to figure out why there are so many of them.