User:Greg L

I’m working on an expanded exposition on fuzzballs here at Exposition: Fuzzballs (string theory)

This exposition is a work in progress. Please don’t let the fact that it resides in a sandbox in user-space deter you from contributing. If you have good reason to believe you are an SME on an aspect of fuzzball theory and desire to improve this exposition meaningfully, you are more than welcome to make edits to it. If you are anticipating a substantial change, please discuss it first on its talk page, which I have set to automatically watch and alert me if you post there.

Below are a few of the images and animations I made for the exposition. I also devoted a significant amount of time over the years to email exchanges with Ph. D.s who wrote some of the original scientific papers to help me translate arcane scientific works into an encyclopedic treatment directed to a general-interest readership (albeit an advanced readership that takes a keen interest in the subject matter).

Rather than link to poorly written articles—say, to a tangential topic on Einstein’s theories—I covered important tangential topics in the exposition. The result is a book-like treatise on the broad subject to ensure readers benefit from proper and accurate facts with far far fewer errors, fewer omissions, and without over-reliance on Wikipedia’s signature (and overused) Click to Learn & Return©™® where even simple one-word terms, like obscure specialty lingo with a high likelihood of being unfamiliar to the target readership, is mentioned with a link that users must click and spend time reading a whole new article in lieu of a pithy and imminently helpful parenthetical explaining what the specialty term means.

This expanded exposition is predicated on Wikipedia: Ignore all rules, which is official Wikipedia policy, and states:

Most any long-term wikipedian knows that Wikipedia’s science-related articles are generally an abysmal mess across the entire project. The root cause of this is Wikipedia’s “anyone may edit”-manner of participation combined with the fact that the general public poorly understands science. Consequently, many who are contributing here are writing sheer nonsense. Clearly, a collaborative writing venue where a 7th-grader can contribute without so much as creating an account is just asking for trouble. Nowhere but on Wikipedia would such an arrangement be considered sensible. I’ve long contacted the original Ph. D.s who wrote the original scientific articles on which various articles were based. When I told them I was a wikipedian and what I was doing, one of them wrote back, “You’re doing what?!? Why would you author on a venue where some kid could undo everything??” I recall that he didn’t mince words and rhetorically questioned my cognition with the “R-word.”

It is generally far too easy on Wikipedia for those at the “Peak of Mt. Stupid” in the Dunning–Kruger graph to wade into a Wikipedia article, get over their heads, and muck things up. The result is often unnecessary wikidrama where an experienced and wise wikipedian will just *sigh*, disengage, and perhaps play some soothing music like ‘Artic Water’. The nucleus of the effect holds as follows:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is ubiquitous worldwide because it is an innate aspect of natural human behavior that affects everyone at all stages of life, up to engineers and scientists nearing retirement. There’s even a version of the Dunning-Kruger graph for engineering projects showing how whole groups of engineers can get over their heads, fail to deliver, and their project gets canceled.

The confluence of these shortcomings in the basic wikipedian system resulted in a loss of confidence by the general public insofar as the usefulness of Wikipedia, which no doubt underlies the inexorable decline in visitors over the years, as evidenced by this Pageview Analysis. I anticipate that powerful artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will contribute to further declines in Wikipedia’s visitation rates because of AI’s ability to provide focused, pointed, and concise answers that are typically superior to Wikipedia’s lead sections. Many of Wikipedia’s leads have become grossly bloated due to years of drive-by-shootings by random contributors willing to devote at most only five minutes to the project and don’t have a basic grasp of proper grammar (not that I’m the best grammarian in the world).

Wikipedians must improve articles’ leads so they provide quick and informative TL;DRs that don’t require users to engage in Click-to-Learn & Return to understand basics, such as an obscure unit symbol like “kBq” without so much as the courtesy of introducing the unit of measure using plain-speak (the becquerel, or kilobecquerel in this case). Wikipedia is currently flooded with contributors who, flushed with an epiphany over the power of unit symbols, believe they somehow make our articles extra-sciencey by writing in the lead of an article—without introductory explanation,

Prose that doesn’t clearly, efficiently, and quickly communicate to the target readership or that calls attention to itself for any reason is poor prose for an encyclopedia directed to a general-interest readership. Another example of poor prose is as follows:

Marilyn vos Savant (228 I.Q.) used that trick—I vaguely recall it was in a Sunday Parade magazine insert in the newspaper in the ’90s—while making an entirely different point; she sailed right on past the sanctimony of the tactic. It doesn’t take the I.Q. of Marilyn vos Savant to conjure sentences that induce (*!*) neuron interrupts and force readers to double back and re-read the sentence to ensure they correctly parsed it. Such practices amount to a combination of,

1. Virtue signaling (the expression of a conspicuous, self-righteous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character), and,
2. Pretending they are helping society evolve in a way the author desires by tacitly using prose in an “Oh… didn’t-cha know??” fashion because the author correctly anticipated most readers would form a mental picture that the head of neurosurgery would be male and the secretary female. You know: “Shame! BAD reader! Learn to form no expectations based upon life experiences and instead be superior, good, and smart-smart, just like me!”

Both #1 and #2, above, are poor motivations and unnecessarily call attention to the prose, unnecessarily call attention to the author, and distract from the mission, which is to communicate and teach on the subject at hand. No part of the purpose of any encyclopedia entails giving glancing lectures to readers about how they have neanderthal-like morals and must evolve. Volunteer contributors to Wikipedia must eschew the sanctimonious pipe dream that engaging in the tacit promotion of social fads through the use of distracting prose like the above example somehow improves the human condition and makes Earth a better place to inhabit.

A final note: Aggravating the above mess, particularly on science-related articles, is Wikipedia’s policies place a premium on citing secondary RSs. That often ends up being free-to-read science-related websites. One problem when citing reliable secondary sources after an error has existed on Wikipedia for a while is the purportedly “reliable” secondary source might actually have acquired its information from Wikipedia and is just parroting what we have here! I’ve seen this occur many times over the years. Such situations create a self-perpetuating vicious circle of misinformation that can only be broken by tracking down the original scientific papers and citing the papers in a way that points wikipedians to the relevant page in the paper and quotes the salient passage; we have to make it easy for other wikipedians. Of course, wading through and parsing scientific papers is not for the faint of heart and generally requires at least an advanced amateur who understands the subject matter rather well to determine the true facts. Wisely, Wikipedia’s WP:SCHOLARSHIP advises, “When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised.”

Enjoy! –Greg

Five Great Minds:


A great inventor, a great observer, a great thinker, a great engineer, and a great experimentalist.