Recognizing the Symptoms of Wikipedic Attention Distortion Disorder (WADD)

I've decided that the diagnoses of several observers — if memory serves, Alienus, Alison, Dan Tobias, Pwok, and Rochelle, just in recent weeks — may be all too poignantly apt. So let me give a name to the local habituation — I couldn't decide if the first "D" should indicate Deficit, Degeneration, or Derangement, so I settled on a middling term for the nonce.

The principal symptom of WADD that comes to my attention at this time is the all but interminable recounting of cases with no indication of a disposition to draw a conclusion or to make a larger inference, much less act on the data, details, or devils recounted.

But I constantly struggle with that affliction myself — ∑times a day or three off for rest and reflection can do wonders — so I leave you for a while to examine your own cases.

Jonny

Informing others of past misdeeds, even if they've been covered before, can be helpful to readers. Though I wish some people could get a bit tighter on the actual facts before they post. Every wild or silly claim made here is a step backwards for all posters to this board, and a positive for WP's defenders.

And some of the comments which badly de-rail threads, particularly some of the recent discussions which have descended into badly ill-informed ponderings about sexual abuse or feminism, are a real turn off.

Most of us as are guilty, and most of us should probably count to 100 before we post. Or just not post at all in many cases. I probably shouldn't have posted this.

An empirical reasoner, which I kicking and screaming became somewhere between my 30th and 40th years, will not dispute the critical importance of concrete data. It would be nice if all facts came to us with rock solid certainty, but the hard fact is that we all begin from guesses, hints, and hunches and we have to slave away as long as it takes to refine that massive sludge of pitchblende down to that nugget of radiant truth.

Wikipedia's claim to Transparency is one of the BIGGEST LIES in its entire arsenal of lies — and this means that it will take a salvo of court orders before the Public gains a modicum of certainty about many questions of Public interest.

In the meantime, each of has to fall back on personal experience, each bit of which may be hard enough data to the person whose hard knock it was, but no bit of it will be as compelling to the person who was not actually hit in the face with it.

But nothing about the importance of concrete cases subtracts from the importance of being able to draw provisional conclusions, to make decisions, and to act on the basis of ones best current information.

One of the things that we are constantly having to make decisions about is what sort of additional data is worth gathering:

1. What kinds of data are critical, or decisively important to go after next?
2. What kinds of data are largely redundant — "gilding the lily", as they say?

It is important to sift the difference betwen these two kinds of data — the experience that we need more of and the experience that we could just as well do without — because experience is expensive in terms of effort, pain, and time, if not in other kinds of capital.

Jonny

Resurrecting this thread as it pertains rather pointedly to our renewed inquiry into inquiry.

Jon Awbrey