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Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View/Flavius Vanillus (view source)
Revision as of 12:50, 19 August 2008
, 12:50, 19 August 2008→In which Flavius gets banned
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Flavius_vanillus '''FLAVIUS IS BANNED''']
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Flavius_vanillus '''FLAVIUS IS BANNED''']
== Reincarnations ==
==Point of Clarification Regarding the Previous Editorship of this Article==
I'm the person that once posted as Flavius Vanillus. I haven't looked at the NLP article in many months let alone edited it. Contrary to the unsubstantiated view being self-righteously promoted by FT2 I and Headley Down are two distinct people. I actually "met" Headley Down when (s)he introduced him/herself on My Page when I opened the Flavius Vanillus account. Furthermore, I do not and did not belong to any sceptics forum or society. There was/is no anti-NLP cabal. I've ''never'' posted to Wikipedia using two co-existent online identities. Certainly, Headley Down used many sock puppets -- and I discovered this only just before the "authorities" did so via my own stylistic comparisons (you can find my early discussion page posts where I raise my suspicion about Headley Down). I did correspond with Headley Down just as I corresponded with Comaze (to validate my identity I'll remind Scott (Comaze) that in a private email I directed him to an error in the 'Contact Us' mark-up on his business site). We exchanged references and discussed our frustrations but there was no conspiracy. I feel compelled to post because FT2 is indulging in conspiratorial fantasy and is negating the value of mine and Headley Down's contributions to the article. My editing style was conservative in that I didn't commit anything to the article unless I could substantiate it. I was also ready to discard those edits when I could see that some of them comprised OR. For the record I'm a male IT professional based in Australia, Headley Down is/was a PhD student from Hong Kong. An IP address check would have shown that I am not Headley Down. Although I am posting through a private proxy at the moment I never did so when I was editing the article. A mod. can verify that as Flavius I consistently edited from an well-known Australian ISP address block. Instead of due dilligence FT2 merely assumed that there was only one person presenting an NLP-critical view. Excluding Headley Downes socks there were at least four people at one point presenting an NLP-critical view. I've noticed also that FT2 is automatically accusing ''everyone'' that offers a critical view of being Headley Down. I've no intention of editing the NLP article (even though I could easily do so with the abundance of closed/private HTTP proxy servers around the world) and I ask only that this post remain in the discussion page to offset the self-righteous propaganda that FT2 has been spreading.
On reflection it was a case of "too many cooks" and this did not serve the interests of producing a good article. The problem now is that in the absence of any critical opinion (or its relgation to the sidelines) the article risks becoming a promotional "puff piece" for the NLP industry. I'm not offering myself as the antidote nor am I campaigning for the return of Headley Down. That notwithstanding both I and Headley and his/her many personas helped to "keep the bastards honest" (to quote the late Don Chipp). In my view Comaze and GregA were the best of the pro-NLP editors even though I feel that their commercial interests in NLP are skewing some of their views (but this is normal, we all have biases). Having Comaze and GregA edit the article doesn't alarm me. In my experience both had some understanding and appreciation of the notion of evidence and were quite clear thinkers. I don't feel I can extend the same assessment to FT2. FT2 carries an idelogical stench whereever (s)he seems to go in "Wikipedia World". There is a clear advocacy and promotion in FT2s edits. Furthermore, the promotion and advocacy is unsophisticated and lazy in the sense that it is apparently exlusively based on Google. FT2's edits are replete with unsubstantiated opinion -- the "NLP and Science" article is a particularly egregious example of this tendency, it is a mass of unsubstantiated verbiage.
This is statement of the obvious (I know) but you'll only achieve stability in the article if it succeeds in carefully treading the tight-rope of neutrality. I can now see we did push too hard on some issues (eg. NLP and magick) and this was counter-productive and wasteful of time and energy. However, the pro-NLP editors were no less culpable in different ways. There was (and remains) a tendency to present disguised forms of the ''argument from ignorance'', i.e. there is no scientific evidence against hypothesis ''H'' so we'll act as if there evidence for ''H'' else we'll argue that the conventional concept of evidence is irrelevant. This brings me to the other persistent problem about "epistemology". Grinder's idiosyncratic conception of "epistemology" should be presented as just that, namely Grinders view. Also if Grinder has an an argument to support his take on "epistemology" then it should be referenced. If he has no such argument in defence of his "epistemology" then that too should be stated. The notion that a hypothesis can be epistemologically "promoted" by arguing that it originated from a proto-science, that it is a "model", that it is a "pragmatic model" that can't be wrong or right or that is based on a pardigm shift is mere sophistry.
[[User:64.46.47.242|64.46.47.242]] 04:22, 16 December 2006 (UTC) The editor formerly known an Flavius ;-)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Neuro-linguistic_programming&diff=94646652&oldid=94631169]
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