Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, this is what I always have trouble with because I always say I’m a pathological optimist. That’s part of why Wikipedia exists as it is, because I just think we can find a way, and it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine. But the things that I would say that we focus on and think a lot about are, really, it’s about community health. How do we make sure that the community is happy, productive, not full of trolls, thoughtful, kind, all of those great Wikipedia values? Which are like all communities, all groups of people. We have a certain set of values that we aspire to, and we live up to them to a lesser or greater extent on a day-to-day basis. How do we make sure that we are still mostly doing, already, things that we’re mostly getting right, knowing that it can’t be perfect? Financially, I feel like we’re okay. The fundraisers do very well. We’re very conservative with money, so I think that, as an immediate threat or an obvious threat, not so much. Although technology shifts, and so, will the technology move people to voice assistance where they don’t actually come to Wikipedia, but they just get the information from us and end up not donating money? That’s a possibility. Obviously, there are other potential threats, but I feel confident that we can defeat them. But as I say, I’m a pathological optimist. There’s a lot of noise these days about repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, without which Wikipedia couldn’t exist. It’s completely impossible. I can talk more about that. I can talk for an hour about that if we wanted to. But because we’ve got some noise around that, not only from the right — Donald Trump has been tweeting all caps, “REPEAL SECTION 230.” I’m not sure he even knows what it is — but from the left as well because people are concerned about the power of the big tech companies, and they wonder if Section 230 has something to do with that, and so on and so forth. So, I think that is under threat, and I think that that is a serious threat to anything that’s open on the internet. There’s something called Conquest’s Second Law, which I believe is itself on Wikipedia [nope]. It suggests that all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing over time evolve to become more left-wing. We’ve seen this with the Ford Foundation, Pew Foundation, Rockefeller. Do you think Conquest’s Second Law is essentially correct? I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so, although . . . I don’t know. [laughs] I have no idea. I think we definitely have organizations that I wouldn’t say you could easily categorize in contemporary terms as either left- or right-wing, I’m thinking in particular of the Catholic Church, which has maintained quite steady certain values and ideas for a very, very long period of time, with minimal shift over time. If you try to characterize religion as either right- or left-wing, typically, in the US, you would tend to say right-wing, but if you look at the current pope and certain elements of the church’s positions, you would say they’re pretty left-wing in other ways. I don’t think they easily fit into that, but the broader point is, can an organization maintain an explicit set of values over a very long period of time that is neither left- nor right-wing in its nature? I think so. Certainly, it seems possible to me.…

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