And now for something different.....
Anybody else use duckduckgo.com search engine to avoid "filter bubbling"? If nothing else, I do seem to get different results than Google - which tends to turn up Wikipedia first and then mostly the same things over and over .
Thank you for this and reminds me that I have been meaning to share this little bit from my 'intuitive' astrologer buddy - concerning Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. When you read the below keep in mind it is excerpted from an astrologer's assessment -
"Jimmy Wales - no, no, before you say this guy is more evil than Bill Gates ever was, you have to give him a chance. He’s a small town boy who got dazzled by the bright lights and doesn’t know how far out of his league he’s gotten.
"Yes he’s an atheist and a libertarian, a fan of Ayn Rand who hates astrology and believes he’s 'rational', but give him a break. Huntsville, Alabama, his home town, was just another small place until the military came in 1941. Missile development started in 1950. NASA arrived in 1960. James came along in 1966. Huntsville is now a tech-savvy engineering town with a metropolitan population over 400,000.
"The city as a whole is still too new to have diversified very much from its technological base. My [...] records, which go back 20 years and comprise some 52,000 transactions, suggest the city, by comparison to others of its size, remains intellectually undeveloped. Huntsville’s own
Wiki page is much overdeveloped. (
There are a number of bicycle routes in the city. As in every city in the US.)
"So let’s give James Wales, now residing in London with his third wife, the astrology reading he’s too provincial to give himself. Astrologers, bless our fake souls, work cheap. An hour spent with one would be entertainment. Jimmy could score points telling his friends about it. Tell everyone,
I knew they were phony. I went to one and he proved it. He’d be the talk of London for a week. Jimbo does astro. And survives! Heck. The London astrology community might never recover. He could be striking a blow for
SCIENCE!
[...]
"Quantifying knowledge, objectifying it, turning it into a solid object, is what encyclopedias do.
The knowledge of the world in a fine set of 30 hardcover volumes,
over 40,000 in-depth articles, a total of 18,251 pages, for only $695.00 USD, plus shipping. Wales, who seems to have been
de facto home schooled until the 8th grade, poured over a set. [...] Wales is instinctive and [...] considers hi knowledge to be his personal possession. While Wales may have lost control of Wiki, Mars-Jupiter conjunct in Cancer in the 3rd is the definition of an
edit war. Which have plagued Wiki from the start and are now in danger of destroying it. Wiki is Wales. Wales is Wiki. It is in his chart.
"When Wales looks at his encyclopedia, he judges, or
values, the
wrong things for the
wrong reasons, but Jupiter in Cancer encourages him to continue doing exactly that.
"Instead of being the neutral purveyor of knowledge, Wiki has instead become a defender of what it believes to be absolute right and the enemy of what it holds to be absolute wrong. This is the secret to all encyclopedias, but Wiki has done a particularly bad job of it, as they have given the game away. The Encyclopedia Britannica is just as hostile to astrology as Wiki, but far fewer people refer to it.
"Judgement of this sort is in conflict with the second of Wiki’s '
Five Pillars:
Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view: We strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone. We avoid advocacy and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them. In some areas there may be just one well-recognized point of view; in others, we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context rather than as 'the truth' or 'the best view'. '
"WHY is Wiki itself not aware of this? Look again at the chart of its founder, Jimmy Wales. Wales keeps his feelings and emotions to himself. It might never have occurred to him that this is unusual, though it perhaps annoys him that others may be excessively emotional at times. Without him ever quite understanding why. There is a sense of 'I am smarter than you think I am,' 'I don’t talk about these things,' that
I don’t have to, that knowledge is a fixed thing, that authorities are to be taken at their word and not questioned, not challenged, that change should be avoided if at all possible and that if or when new information, new ideas are necessary, he, Wales, will know instinctively how to bring it about.
"Wiki in fact strives for perfect articles, not because it wants perfection
per se, which would be Virgo, but because it wants and values
permanence, which is fixed Taurus. Among the criteria, a
featured article, Wiki’s very best work, will be '
Well-researched: it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature. Claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources and are supported by in-line citations where appropriate. . .'
" 'Stable: it is not subject to ongoing edit wars and its content does not change significantly from day to day . . .'
"These rules are, of course, absurd. Knowledge is like sunlight, it is dynamic, it is ever changing, it is never the same from moment to moment. While printed ink-on-paper has obvious limitations, it is an encyclopedic flaw to have only
one article on any given subject. Think carefully about this. When I come to you every week with these stories, you know that I am but one of many. When I cite books for reference, I am doing so in the hopes that you will build a library of books, partly as a ready reference, but primarily that you might learn, as I have learned, to consult Alan Leo on Tuesday, Alan Oken on Wednesday, Carter and Robson on weekends, etc.
There is no one right author.
"An encyclopedia that has only one article on, say, astrology, then, even if the article was well-done, it would still be
just one article. It would be inferior to the many competing resources which I have at my fingertips. Precisely because no one article can be definitive, all individual articles are inherently misleading. All 4,415,852 English language Wikis.
"The underlying reason for ceaseless edit wars is that many articles need to be more than one. This is not a matter of differing points of view. Only articles built from the ground up, as fully-formed expressions of their authors, can be definitive, but even then, only on their own (absolute) terms. Which is the definition of a
search engine. Which is to say that Wiki, by its very existence, cheapened the web. The variety of expression that had been building on-line has now largely disappeared, replaced by Wiki’s uniform error.
"This is the underlying problem of treating knowledge as a
commodity, rather than as
living entities. A true on-line encyclopedia would have multiple articles on many subjects. Authors would have the freedom to write as they please, to be influenced by some and not others. Authors could pick and choose from existing articles, adding their own experience and insights as they saw fit. The resulting enterprise would be a vast creative endeavor, rather than the thankless straight-jacket that Wiki has become. Readers would have the free will to pick the best according to their own criteria.
EVENTUALLY winners and losers would emerge, but they would emerge
in context. Just as the “greatest hits of the ’60’s, ’70’s and ’80’s” emerged. Not because record execs said this or that group was good, but because
the people were given the right to choose for themselves. It is this freedom which Wiki lacks.
"I expect Wiki will counter, that “scientific standards must be upheld,” but upheld by who and for what reason, exactly? Here is a
partial list of subjects Wiki has tagged as pseudo: Examples of pseudoscience concepts, proposed as scientific when they are not scientific, include: acupuncture, alchemy, ancient astronauts, applied kinesiology, astrology, Ayurvedic medicine, biorhythms, cellular memory, cold fusion, craniometry, creation science, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s engram theory, enneagrams, eugenics, extrasensory perception (ESP), facilitated communication, graphology, homeopathy, intelligent design, iridology, kundalini, Lysenkoism, metoposcopy, N-rays, naturopathy, orgone energy, paranormal plant perception, phrenology, physiognomy, qi, New Age psycho-therapies (e.g., rebirthing therapy), reflexology, remote viewing, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), reiki, Rolfing, therapeutic touch, and the revised history of the solar system proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky.
"The full list includes the
entire Chinese culture.
"When we gave Enlightenment Science the right to rule over us, we expected they would be fair and comprehensive. Instead, Science, especially as led by Wiki, is increasingly a polarizing agent. We must believe in evolution, we must not believe in creationism, we must not only believe in global warming, we must believe that mankind is at fault and that we are all going to die. The evolution/creationist debate is exactly identical to the number of angels that can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin. It is of no worth to anyone, while global warming, lacking
astro-meteorology for context, is a naked power grab.
"If science, like the Church before it, cannot govern us effectively, if it condemns entire cultures, as the Church condemned Islam and science has condemned China, we must replace it. Sanity, not to mention world peace, demands it.
"Aristotle is the first choice, but
Aristotelian physics is but a subset of astrology.
Astrology, functioning as a language, knows all and describes all. Impartially. It gives the observer the tools to
judge for himself. It empowers the masses. It has traditionally been condemned for this reason alone. All other excuses are phony. [...] Astrology will replace “science” before the middle of this century. The current astrological revival, which has only the
12th Century Translators as a precedent, has assured it. It was those translators who gave us the Renaissance. The Greeks are just that powerful.
"I have done the charts of a number of 'savants', men (all of them, I think) who claimed to be intelligent. Without exception, they were intelligent not because of static planets-in-the-third (or 9th) house, but because of stressful aspects, squares or oppositions, that made their world inherently un- stable, thus requiring them to ceaselessly adapt to it. Jimmy Wales lacks these aspects. To Jimmy Wales, knowledge is something that can be harvested, processed, put in cans and sold in a supermarket. He and the staff he has assembled fundamentally misunderstand the very nature of knowledge. A few years ago I heard that Google was considering buying Wiki. Would have made Wales rich many times over, but as Wiki has devolved over time, I doubt any sensible person wants anything to do with it." - David Roell
LINK:
Astrology Books at The Astrology Center of America
