User talk:Markworthen/sandbox/Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology

Paper contents

It Began with Adrianne
What Is Wikipedia?
Related Literature
The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
The Politics of Wikipedia
Learning from Feminist Epistemologies
Feminist Lessons
Knowledge Is Situated
Process Orientation
Wikipedia’s Five Pillars Reimagined
1. Wikipedia Is an Encyclopedic Process
2. Wikipedia Is Written by an Objective Community
3. The Integrity of Wikipedia Is a Function of the Size and Breadth of Its Community
4. Editors Should be Epistemically and Discursively Responsible
5. Wikipedia Is Norm-driven (Rather than Rule-governed)
6. Responses from the Wikipedia Communities
What Might Wikipedia Become?

User:Talpedia and User:Markworthen, to perhaps make it easier to talk about the paper's contents, here's a numbered list of the sections in the paper. (Please ping me any time you want my attention – other than WT:MED, I don't reliably check any specific page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing: Great idea! Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 07:17, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Talpedia: You articulate valid concerns on the draft page - in fact, you describe concerns I had but did not know how to express. Along those lines, I would have liked to see some concrete examples in the Menking & Rosenberg article to help me understand the highly abstract concepts better. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 07:15, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The bit on the page about some of it being too simple if you put it in plain language was my reaction to "8. Knowledge is Situated", which I think could be fairly summarized as "It's not physically possible for one human to know everything. This means that people who aren't you know things that you don't know".

I think that "9. Process Orientation" disagrees with our old Wikipedia:Product, process, policy principle. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:42, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On "knowledge is situated" I think there's also the effect that people will understand things *in certain ways* or *through certain lenses* in addition to having the knowledge necessary to understand something in a particular. Kind of like. Schema (psychology). I'm not sure what a good example of this is. An example that springs to mind is the safety mindset that is part of medicine (exmplified by "I'm just trying to keep you safe - when you completely violate someone's freedom", versus the personal growth argument that is part of Virtue ethics. Other examples would be analogy to important personal narrative to understand a situation versus a more reductionist approach that you might use in philosophy or maths. I guess this is sort of the same as "knowing everything", because if you know enough you could in theory pick the appropriate lens or schema with which to see a situation. But I think it's a little closer to "human's can't hold lots of complicated opinions at the same time". Talpedia (talk) 03:24, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting point about "product, process, policy". I guess the mindset of the piece is "process, policy, product" - create the correct process to create the product. Talpedia (talk) 03:32, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I was thinking of an example of this today when I went for my walk. I thought a good example was thinking about what stood out to me in a paper was important (and why this was the case). Speciially this paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.11.008

PTSD is more linked with anger than anxiety. "Laboratory studies have also shown that the most common emotional reaction to exposure to trauma cues among those with PTSD involves anger rather than anxiety or other emotions". This jumped out me because it hits my "doctors are liars" suspicion, the traditional framing of PTSD is anxiety, and I'm suspicious this is the case because "anger in victims is not something I can sympathize with" and "anger is bad". So people have chosen to reframe anger as anxiety in PTSD. I imagine other readers would interpret this as "researchers were mistaken".

"Specifically, trauma exposure and PTSD can produce biases (e.g., hostile attributional bias) and deficits in social information processing that place individuals at risk for aggression". So the thing that massively jumps out at me is "deficits in social information processing" because this represents the medicalization of anger, and the attribution of a social process to "cognitive impairment".

The general concern about *aggression* rather than *anger* seems very interesting to me (because there's this behaviour I have noticed where people's response to "I am angry" is "Let's work out how to stop you being aggressive" rather than "let's work out why you are angry and deal with that"). This conflation of anger with aggression pervades the paper, and this sentence massively springs out at me "Although anger can be considered a prelude to aggression, and anger statistically mediates the effects of PTSD on aggression [5], not all who are angry will become aggressive [6]."

I probably read this paper quite differntly from most people with an interested in psychology and might notice things that others will not or a few reasons. Specifically because: I found myself angry - probably as a result of PTSD - following being run over on the pavement by a medical doctor who confabulated medical excuses for falling asleep and driving onto a pedestrian crossing outside a school, while having no problems with anger managment. I felt the entire response of the medical system was 'You are angry because you are wrong - we must prevent the consequences of anger so you must acknowledge that you are wrong and replace judgment with empathy and compliance'. My theoretical bias (which does not have an evidence base) is that PTSD = "Moral injury" and that the correct treatment modality for some cases would focus on *moral judgment*, *modification social contract* and the validation of this moral judgment, rather than the current modality of anger managment - which seems to be the be-all and end-all of anger; but I suspect that biases within the *medical* community have and will prevent the adoption of this mindset (it's noticeable to me that what I would view as the 'correct' understanding of the situation only starts to show up within the treatment of veterans - and perhaps some other 'hero' groups).

Anyway - this might be off topic. But I think it might be an informative example of how "situation affects interpretation", and how particular distinctions between concepts and points within an article are highly significant to me - because they are consistent with what I consider to be errors in a theoretical model driven by biases and social factors, while for other people these distinctions might be invisible and of mere passing interest. Of course lots of the things I have said would be considered OR if included in an article - and I consider them to be a speculative theoretical model rather than truth. What I hope would show up in any editing is the *precision* of summary of facts related to this theoretical model. So for example the distinction between anger and aggression is huge for me, as is the distinction between anxiety and anger, but for others this might not be the case. I imagine as a psychologist User:Markworthen viewpoint might be very different to mine and I think the role of individual versus person responsible for the safety of others might feed into this. Talpedia (talk) 02:39, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Talpedia: I did not respond earlier, but I should have because I actually agree wholeheartedly with your analysis. Btw, I really like your writing - you're able to explain difficult (abstract) concepts in an understandable way. And you're writing rather quickly (as opposed to working on an academic paper over the course of weeks or months.) Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 15:46, 23 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Markworthen: No issue at all. I thought I might be engaging in a little "trauma dumping" after writing this :); the danger of writing about personal experience! Thanks for the compliments I hope you're right! I'm trying to move into doing a little more writing for my work at the moment. Should be able to look at your updates at the weekend outside coffee shop in the sunshine! Talpedia (talk) 16:11, 23 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Me too re: more writing for work, a bit less on Wikipedia. I value integrating the personal with the analytical. Very much so. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 16:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]