User talk:Madcoverboy

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Contents 1 List of NU Buildings 2 Intelligence and professional development 3 Intelligence and professional development 4 Elderly Instruments 5 MIT article 6 University rankings in lead 7 images and the Commons

[edit] List of NU Buildings

Hey, I wrote a few responses to your to-do list on the talk page. Just thought you'd like to know. Paradoxsociety (review) 20:45, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Intelligence and professional development

Let us assume that the article were on transesterification in organic chemistry, or the design of a communications networking protocol, or on isomorphisms in group theory, or on the mode of action of penicillin. Should these topics be in a "generalist encyclopedia" at all, because they require substantial prerequisite knowledge to discuss in any meaningful way?

I've largely given up on Wikipedia, and its contradictions. Write something with a flowing, active-voice style, and people complain it's a "how-to". Write something that seems to be "encyclopedic", and there are complaints that it's dry and not accessible to generalists.

Actually, I do appreciate that you recognize that it is not possible to provide sources for a great deal of material in intelligence. Still, I am also very tired of the general hostility to expertise and the rules against original synthesis, which, with a topic like this, either are going to be broken or the subject will be even more impenetrable.

At this point, I doubt I will make any further contributions to the general (i.e., not country-specific) intelligence articles here. If there was more of a critical mass of people to work collaboratively, it might be different, but the people I know with subject matter knowledge are reluctant to discuss these issues in this venue. I know that I have reached my endurance of comments about a subject "not being accessible." Let's put it this way -- I have a great deal of medical background, the sometimes subtle reasoning for diagnosis and treatment also tending to generate complaints of jargon. Avoid jargon and you get dangerous oversimplifications such as in mass media, direct-to-consumer drug advertising. My housemates tell me that I should not watch advertisements for prescription drugs, because a knowledge of pharmacology brings an increase of blood pressure.

So, if you think you can make it general and not lose content and nuance, be my guest. Recently, I've realized that if everything I ever wrote here was made a Featured Article, it would not make one iota of difference to me. I look at the "encyclopedic writing style" that is demanded, and I realize that my professional writing -- which variously can be comedy or highly specialized -- cannot risk shifting into the apparently preferred Wikipedia style.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:43, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Intelligence and professional development

Let us assume that the article were on transesterification in organic chemistry, or the design of a communications networking protocol, or on isomorphisms in group theory, or on the mode of action of penicillin. Should these topics be in a "generalist encyclopedia" at all, because they require substantial prerequisite knowledge to discuss in any meaningful way?

I've largely given up on Wikipedia, and its contradictions. Write something with a flowing, active-voice style, and people complain it's a "how-to". Write something that seems to be "encyclopedic", and there are complaints that it's dry and not accessible to generalists.

Actually, I do appreciate that you recognize that it is not possible to provide sources for a great deal of material in intelligence. Still, I am also very tired of the general hostility to expertise and the rules against original synthesis, which, with a topic like this, either are going to be broken or the subject will be even more impenetrable.

At this point, I doubt I will make any further contributions to the general (i.e., not country-specific) intelligence articles here. If there was more of a critical mass of people to work collaboratively, it might be different, but the people I know with subject matter knowledge are reluctant to discuss these issues in this venue. I know that I have reached my endurance of comments about a subject "not being accessible." Let's put it this way -- I have a great deal of medical background, the sometimes subtle reasoning for diagnosis and treatment also tending to generate complaints of jargon. Avoid jargon and you get dangerous oversimplifications such as in mass media, direct-to-consumer drug advertising. My housemates tell me that I should not watch advertisements for prescription drugs, because a knowledge of pharmacology brings an increase of blood pressure.

So, if you think you can make it general and not lose content and nuance, be my guest. Recently, I've realized that if everything I ever wrote here was made a Featured Article, it would not make one iota of difference to me. I look at the "encyclopedic writing style" that is demanded, and I realize that my professional writing -- which variously can be comedy or highly specialized -- cannot risk shifting into the apparently preferred Wikipedia style.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:43, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Possibly without realizing it, your point on treating intelligence differently than activities less practical to anthropomorphize goes exactly to some of the problems in reducing the topic for the arbitrary generalist -- as opposed to the one who knows a lack of knowledge and is willing to do the preparation. Let me approach that indirectly. First, there is a hackneyed but true saying in military affairs: "Amateurs talk tactics, dilettantes talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics," coupled with a British saying that most people believe it takes much experience to command a warship, but any fool can command a regiment.

One of the more common problems with effective intelligence might, indeed, be related to trying to make it more anthropomorphic and accessible to "the common man". There was no accident in both the reason I discuss failures in different parts of the cycle, very early in the article, and why a number of readers complained about those, equating them with a "blame the CIA" attitude -- when the CIA deliberately was not used in any example. No, the more illustrative cases are things such as Stalin refusing to accept things that didn't fit his preconceptions, or the U.S. establishment being so concerned about source security (and service parochialism) that the admittedly limited war warnings were not in the hands of Pacific Theater commanders in December 1941. In the article, I deliberately avoided current events, but, here, I will mention that Dick Cheney's assumptions about what intelligence on Iraq "ought" to prove led to creating Feith's Office of Special Plans to bypass the regular analytic process.

I don't know if you've looked at the article cognitive traps for intelligence analysis, as well as some of the quantitative decision science being used in real-world intelligence analysis. Ironically, some students in an intelligence curriculum were given class assignments to write things for Wikipedia, and objected when I commented that the specific methods they were describing, Heuer's pioneering work in the 1970s and the work of one textbook author being flogged by their professor, were not representative of current work in decision science. I got a huffy response that Analysis of competing hypotheses was neither formalized nor quantitative, yet I was able to produce a half-dozen or so peer-reviewed open-literature enhancements, in about an hour. Unfortunately or not, each of those enhancements required some background in fields such as statistical inference or formal logic.

If I've learned much about my own ability to learn, a key lesson is that subjects may have their own prerequisites, their own criteria of natural selection. When I was in high school, I was doing an honors project in biochemistry. It had to do with the competitive inhibition of an enzyme, and that mechanism,in general, is described by what are called the Michaelis-Menten equations. To make heads or tails of those equations, one needs at least a reading, if not a derivation, knowledge of partial differential equations. Since I was too callow a youth to understand that I did not have the mathematical background for such a subject, I spent hours at a library, picking up individual concepts from math, until I had that reading knowledge. Alas, the material wasn't accessible to generalists, but I did not feel insulted by it.

Some refer to discipline-specific knowledge as exclusionary jargon. In other cases, however, it is artificial language introduced to force precise definitions to be understood, and constrain the discussion. It takes wisdom to know which is which, but, again, one of my areas of endeavor has been the decision process in clinical medicine. Contrary to the assumptions of many laymen, understanding material meant for clinicians is less a matter of vocabulary than it is of both a theoretical background, and a "high-context" means of communications in which what is not said is as important as what is said.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:01, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Elderly Instruments

Hi there, I just wanted to drop a note to say that I'm taking your concerns about the article seriously. I don't have the resources today to investigate fixes (and I'm not sure it's wise to do so in the midst of all the vandalism the main page attracts) but I'd like to compile a worklist for future discussion. If you are interested, please let me know. --Laser brain (talk) 14:53, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] MIT article

Hi. Thanks for your good work on the MIT article. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 13:15, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] University rankings in lead

Just don't do it. They shouldn't be there. Focus instead on summarizing the rest of the article which should contain history, campus, organization, enrollments, research activity, athletics, arts, and alumni. Madcoverboy (talk) 15:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Frankly, I think rankings are a perfectly fine thing to include in the lead. Like it or not, the U.S. News rankings play a role in the world of American higher education and can be a useful bit of information to include, especially in the lead. Yes, it's fine to be in-depth in a Rankings section, but merely including it in the lead is not necessarily equivalent to boosterism (certainly not any more so than including athletics championships). Esrever ^(klaT) 15:43, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

So what is "highly selective"? Is it 10% admissions rate? 20%? Does it imply a threshold for an average SAT score? Does it actually mean that tuition and financial aid are structured in a way to "select" only those students most able to afford it? It's the epitome of a weasel word and should never be used in the lead of an encyclopedia article, regardless of its prevalence in the practice of admissions or university administrivia.

Rankings are not useful at all and should never be in a lead. Space in the lead is too precious for summarizing everything about the history, campus, organization, enrollments, research activity, and alumni to waste sentences expounding on one magazine's problematic and POV formulation of an unquantifiable concept of prestige or quality. Madcoverboy (talk) 16:01, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

FWIW, I tend to agree with Madcoverboy that rankings generally don't need to be in the lead. A cited Rankings section should suffice. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 16:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

This is summarized from my talk page: Sorry, while we encourage people to be bold, your actions go against consensus. As I wrote on the USC talk page (and other editors on other pages you've touched), you have been using your personal dislike of the US News rankings as reason to remove the mention out of various articles despite the fact that its been well established as acceptable practice. In fact, you should have noticed that UC Riverside and Duke were both Featured Articles, which show what this community considers to be exemplary. Rankings are considered acceptable in any college and university article as long as they are presented in a reasonable manner and cited. The list of articles you've touched include many of the nation's top schools. Unsurprisingly, your edits were already being reverted by custodians of those other articles. If you want to change Wikipedia policy, please be patient and go through the proper route. Starting at the College and Universities Wikiproject would be a good start. --Bobak (talk) 16:47, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] images and the Commons

Completely unrelated to any other discussions, I've noticed that you've uploaded a lot of great images, especially of Northwestern's campus. It's great that you've done that, especially considering that you've chosen to do so with a free license. Have you considered uploading future images directly to the Wikimedia Commons? Doing so makes those images available to all Wikimedia projects, not just the English Wikipedia. Not sure if anyone's mentioned it before or not. You might also consider moving some of your existing images over to Commons, too. Cheers! Esrever ^(klaT) 18:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)