The Oil Drum

Super G (and the other Admins):

Thank you for your Herculean efforts in initiating, maintaining and upgrading TOD.

As to enabling editing, I appreciate the opportunity to correct typos or add updates, as I did for a recent post. I understand the concern of commentors that if the comment to which they are replying is changed, their comment may be affected. In this is perhaps an opportunity. If a replied to comment is changed, is it possible to notify the commenter in some fashion so that they might respond, such as by revising or removing the comment? Several options could appear, from the poster of the original comment setting a flag for the system to notify the replier to the replier setting a flag to be notified or not if the comment is edited. If a poster abuses editing, perhaps the privilege could be removed by the moderators.

IMO, to accomplish appropriate shifts in worldviews and paradigms a critical need is to increase the value of our information flow across all disciplines and all dimensions (geography, scale, time, cultures). If used appropriately, editing improves information, as anyone who has published a paper or read a poorly edited book knows. Information has gone from a scarce resource, held by a few lucky enough to be near a library containing carefully selected and vetted (anonymous peer review prior to publication) resources, to an almost overwhelming resource of widely varying value, available to almost anyone anywhere almost anytime. IMO anything that increases the value of this information stream is a good thing. Now we are needing an almost entirely new set of skills (to most of us, anyway) to both locate the relevant evidence or information and to evaluate its strength, discovering the wheat among the chaff.

Change comes hard to us humans, particularly once we are set in our ways and probably for evolutionary reasons, whether it is our society's exploitation of low-cost energy in the face of its future scarcity or participating usefully in TOD. To have survived and to survive, we have to balance our acceptance of with our resistance to change, both individually and collectively. Some change too quickly and others not quickly enough. The diffusion of innovation is a studied phenomenon - wiki1 , wiki2 as are change management, paradigm shifts, worldviews and perhaps consilience or unity of knowledge. How do we escape the limitations imposed by our inherent cognitive biases? To paraphrase Einstein, we have to adopt a higher level of thinking than that which got us into this situation and we must understand the complexity before we can simplify; to do otherwise is to error.

What actions trigger these cognitive biases (list) or enhance their negative effects? Over the long run, triggering these most likely doesn't move us forward, on this list or elsewhere.

[Update - and a spell checker / grammar checker would be nice. :-)
Also, it appears that any departure from a page, including to check commentor's info, removes all the {new] flags.]