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Larry Sanger - Liberty and Freedom with Encyclopedic Information -
Larry Sanger is an internet project developer and co-founder of the Wikipedia. He's an advocate of freedom of access to encyclopedic information on the net; in particular his latest project Encyclosphere. Encyclosphere is designed to not be controlled by one entity-so Facebook, Twitter, etc can't block opposing views etc-it's more akin to the blogosphere. Larry explains is well in his video here. Pete A Turner and Jon Leon Guerrero's discussion moves fast and covers info discussed in past visits with Larry. He points out the problems with the centralized management of a single site and how this can be abused. |
Larry shares his thoughts on the problem of politicization of education and how this has made a generational gap between different generations and how a more advanced and alternative education could help close this gap.
Haiku
Encyclopedic
With data that is open
Freedom of knowledge
#internet #developer #Wikipedia #encyclopedia #teacher #education
#website #knowledge #information #generations #politicization
#episode #discussion
Similar episodes:
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Woody Williams
Join us in supporting Save the Brave by making a monthly donation.
Executive Producer/Intro/: Pete A. Turner
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev
Writer: Bojan Spasovski
Haiku
Encyclopedic
With data that is open
Freedom of knowledge
#internet #developer #Wikipedia #encyclopedia #teacher #education
#website #knowledge #information #generations #politicization
#episode #discussion
Similar episodes:
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Woody Williams
Join us in supporting Save the Brave by making a monthly donation.
Executive Producer/Intro/: Pete A. Turner
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev
Writer: Bojan Spasovski
Transcript
Pete Turner 0:00
Hey everybody, its Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the breakdowns show man, it is a great day today. I'm in lovely San Diego standing on the beach, literally, of the Mission Bay Hilton, not a paid sponsor, recording on my bulletproof podcast equipment, the rig is an H six zoom recorder. And sure sm 35 microphones. Hey, so our guest today is Larry Sanger, Larry is all about freedom of data and expression. He's the co founder of Wikipedia and frankly not that happy with the controlling siloed nature of the data on Wikipedia.
Hey everybody, its Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the breakdowns show man, it is a great day today. I'm in lovely San Diego standing on the beach, literally, of the Mission Bay Hilton, not a paid sponsor, recording on my bulletproof podcast equipment, the rig is an H six zoom recorder. And sure sm 35 microphones. Hey, so our guest today is Larry Sanger, Larry is all about freedom of data and expression. He's the co founder of Wikipedia and frankly not that happy with the controlling siloed nature of the data on Wikipedia.
Pete Turner 0:00
Hey everybody, its Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the breakdowns show man, it is a great day today. I'm in lovely San Diego standing on the beach, literally, of the Mission Bay Hilton, not a paid sponsor, recording on my bulletproof podcast equipment, the rig is an H six zoom recorder. And sure sm 35 microphones. Hey, so our guest today is Larry Sanger, Larry is all about freedom of data and expression. He's the co founder of Wikipedia and frankly not that happy with the controlling siloed nature of the data on Wikipedia. So he's created a new thing called the in cyclists sphere and john and i sit down with him and talk about how he wants to de silo encyclopedic data very similar to the blogosphere where you write something, someone writes an aggregator they gather up all that data and create their own encyclopedia. That's how you unlock our data that we create and take it out of the hands of corporations like ABC, which is Google, Facebook, etc. Twitter Now, of course, the charitable part, it's the end of the year if you're into charitable giving save the brave.org. That's my recommendation that is my charity. And you can easily go there by going to save the brave.org can click on that donate tab, and then he do a monthly or a one time or do both. It would be great. If you did we can help us support these veterans that have supported most of us. Hey, one other thing real quick to support the show. I mean, right now I I am so fortunate to have the show where it is and it's growing and it's growing because all of you do the things that you do so you buy the shirts, you do the sharing you eat connect with me and people see these conversations and they give the show a try. These things matter and, and really I appreciate all of you so much for that. Hey, I'll be quiet now. Larry Sanger here it comes enjoy. Lions rock productions.
Unknown Speaker 1:52
This is Jay Mohr.
Unknown Speaker 1:53
This is Jordan. Dexter from the offspring. Sebastian youngsters, Rick maronna
Unknown Speaker 1:58
Stewart Copeland
Gabby Reese 2:00
This is this goes back to Gabby Reese
Rob Bell 2:02
This is Rob Bell
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:03
This is Jon Leon Guerrero
Pete Turner 2:03
and this is Pete a Turner.
Larry Sanger 2:08
This is Larry Sanger. You're listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:13
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Pete Turner 2:19
Yeah, I've got Larry on the show today. He's been on several times. And Larry is a free speech advocate, and also an advocate for our own personal data. And he's also someone who's looking at how we store I guess I'm gonna take a stab at this, Larry, how we store his encyclopedic data and share it so that there's a more complete picture. And there's more, basically, the liberty and freedom in that approach. How did I do?
Larry Sanger 2:45
Pretty good, pretty good. I mean, there's a lot of ways in but yeah,
Pete Turner 2:49
yeah. And of course john is sitting into so I want to make sure well, actually, Jon, I'll just give you the first question and let you kind of fire us off.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:56
Well, okay, as someone who is advocating for a level playing field when it comes to the capturing of all that we create. And I've said this many times on the show, so I'm going to ask for your correction. But I heard a statistic that is probably old enough that it's different now. But that if you took the entire body of human creation, from the dawn of time to 1974, we are creating that now every 12 days, I think. And so in order to maintain some sort of lack of structure, so that we are all creating and not being filtered by some entity that will take on responsibility and the power of regulating what is created and what is stored for posterity. I think that's really what you're an advocate of and being an advocate of that, what are the big challenges that you run into all of the time when you have to explain to somebody that hey, this really means something?
Larry Sanger 3:53
I think at this points, I would have answered the question very differently in like two 2001 say but in 2019, the challenge is really passivity, you know, the system that we have dominated as it is by big tech is the one that we're going to have to live with from now on. And a lot of people just have never even really learned, especially younger people, I think, never really learned and fully appreciated that there is another way to organize the internet. That the it's pretty striking actually, that just in 10 years, the internet has been completely flipped on its head. 10 years ago, you could still talk about people who were late getting online, and now pretty much everybody who's going to be online is online and has been for many years. They have formulated their idea about what the internet is all about. Right? And a lot of those people never really understood, maybe they will want online when the internet was different basically and how they never really understood the whole idea of decentralized networks of owning your own data of having open protocols, basically. And I can explain they've that if you want the real, the real problem is getting people to understand that there are that the issues of freedom and privacy that they care about, are actually very intimately bound up with these other issues of, again, owning your own data and using open protocols and so forth.
Jon Leon Guerrero 5:41
So as we move forward, I mean, now is the time to nip this activity in the bud or to set us on the right course. And I appreciate you taking on that responsibility. Who are your allies in this fight?
Pete Turner 5:53
Hey, this is Dave Turner from the break it down Show checking in real quick to ask you this. JOHN Scott and I all support Save the brave with our time, our location, our effort and our money. Each month we give a small amount, do the same with us go to save the brave.org, click on the donate tab, pick an amount that you want to come out of each month, and they will handle all the rest. I stand behind these folks. Thank you so much. Let's get back to the show.
Jon Leon Guerrero 6:17
As we move forward, I mean, now is the time to nip this activity in the bud or to set us on the right course. And I appreciate you taking on that responsibility. Who are your allies in this fight?
Unknown Speaker 6:29
Um, well, actually, it's interesting. Whoever is basically most pissed off at Facebook and Twitter tend to be the people who gravitate to the knowledge standards Foundation, to the the idea of an encyclopedia network. Now there's a lot of people those a lot of those people out there basically just need to to explain what a different system would look like and they get pretty excited. And of course, I'm finding that Something like 80% of the people who are interested in the knowledge standards foundation are developers. And this isn't surprising to me, because programmers are the ones who understand these issues. Because, you know, they they know essentially how the digital network sausage is made, they understand that if basically you designed the system to be open event, it can't be shut down. And if it can't be dominated by any one player, and if you design a system that is closed, that inevitably it's going to be abused. So basically, it tends to be older developers. So a lot of middle aged guys actually.
Jon Leon Guerrero 7:49
Okay, Boomer.
Larry Sanger 7:54
I'm not old enough to be a boomer.
Pete Turner 7:55
Yeah, I'm told that doesn't matter. That's the best thing about this. Put down Yeah, as genomics guys, right, we're trying to figure these things out. So I was having an interesting conversation with some folks that are trying to figure out blockchain and the group is called blockchain for good. And they wanted to establish the ethics of blockchain. But ethics don't cooperate like that, you know, what you think is ethical today, maybe horribly unethical tomorrow or in context or in application? What is it about your experience, you know, 2025 3040 years into this game that's required to get that open nature to be comfortable and actually the path that that you're seeking, why do you have to be middle aged to understand this problem?
Unknown Speaker 8:41
What maybe another way to put the question is, what did I learn back in the 1990s? Yes, I just had an immediate experience of interacting with people via like using it. For example, a good example of a decentralized network. You could use lots of Different news reader software, you weren't stuck with any one particular newsreader. And it was well understood that the groups you know, anybody could start a group. There was no central management of the whole unit using that system. Not until Google took it over. Of course, that's that was kind of lame. Yeah, I mean, back in the 90s. When you interacted with people, you it was implicitly understood that it was either one on one as an email or like a private IRC chat, or it was out in open as in using that and in a lot of list serves to a certain extent, mailing lists, in other words, which use email. And the nice thing about this is that that you didn't have to ask for permission from anyone that was just understood the development of the tools they it was all done by basically volunteers. Volunteer develop And the developers were motivated, I think, partly, you know, just to advance their careers, but partly because, you know, there's a great deal of honor to be gotten among programmers, you know, if you can brag that you actually are the author of this tool that everybody uses. That's a big feather in your cap. And that's, that's how it worked. So, I mean, I'm just sort of you ask, what was it that we learned back in the 1990s? When I say this, it all sounds kind of like, sounds kind of boring, doesn't it? But ultimately, the 2019 reimplementation of this stuff isn't going to be that boring, because the technologies are so much more interesting, right? We're not just talking about email, and mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. And, you know, the basic pre JavaScript web, right? We're talking about all kinds of stuff. We're talking about a replacement for Wikipedia or something that would can include Wikipedia that enables a lot of other people to participate in. We're talking about completely decentralized social media systems. So and we're, we're sort of figuring that out. There's a lot of different players that are figuring out exactly how to do that now, gab, for example, has moved to the mastadon network that shoot has attempting to have a fully decentralized video hosting platform, which is pretty interesting, actually. Those are things that that we would barely have been able to conceive of back in the 1990s. But the principles ultimately should be the same.
Pete Turner 11:48
So the past 70 that you were talking about earlier, this is a big problem. I mean, we agree that Twitter's a place full of poisonous comments and thoughts. You're not on Twitter. anymore.
Larry Sanger 12:00
So I am I'm not on Facebook and
Pete Turner 12:03
Facebook anymore. My apologies my correction. So, but it's a place it's hard to, you know, like I put up a show and someone may jump in without ever listening to the show or commenting and all they have is something horrible to say, you know, call someone to name whatever. Yeah, that is the place we continue to go, what is a thing? a site like gab or mastadon? How do they build a big enough crowd so that the big players, the people that put things out want to be there in the first place?
Unknown Speaker 12:29
Yeah, that's a that's a hard question. Especially since there are so many people now who know the attractions of really big networks, right? So we understand how neat it can be to have like a few hundred friends and old high school friends and whatever contacting you out of the blue, trying to organize people to create such networks out of They de novo basically from nothing is difficult. A lot of the people who participate on mastodon, for example, are they tend to be techies of one sort or another. And then the people who go to gab or people who are really, really upset at the censorship that goes on on, especially Twitter, but that's not enough to actually organize a whole community around. I mean, the problem that we're trying to solve, I think, wasn't solved back in the 1980s and 90s. When these sorts of projects are these sorts of, of networks came into being in the first place. Because, you know, they didn't have to compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter. So I'm not I'm not 100% sure how we're going to get there. I mean, I think, I think ultimately, we're going to have to create a sort of artificial movement, a deliberate movement as a better word, to put it in. Like last summer, right? In June and July, I organized the social media strike. Right. I think you might have interviewed me around that time. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, you know, that was a good way to do it. And I didn't even try to get that much. I didn't try to get that much momentum for a lot of publicity or anything. But nevertheless, we did get dozens of articles just like, without any significant we didn't even do a press release. I think. For us, I think we didn't. Anyway, there's very little anyway, in the way of actually chasing down press. We could do that now though. And then I can easily imagine how we could have like a new tryout day or something. I talked about that last summer we we never did do it because I never had time. To busy with now. The psycho sphere project, right. So tell us about a psycho sphere then give us I mean, we've kind of covered some bad Background stuff and a lot of it's going to be talking about now, but talk about in sackless fear and why it's important. Okay, so the problem about information online in general, not only communication, but like news, communication among people in news, it's all centrally controlled. It's all in the hands of these giant corporations that have their interests, not yours, at heart. And it turns out that Wikipedia is has become another instance of the same, it would be wonderful, I think, if the world could go to a single place, and get all the different points of view fairly represented and so forth. That was the vision that we had for Wikipedia. Back in the day, and in the first five to 10 years Wikipedia made a reasonably credible effort at doing that, but especially especially In the last few years, it's just gotten worse and worse, in terms of the ability to get dissenting voices heard in the Wikipedia community, I think we can do a lot better. I think that we could have, instead of on the order of five, 6 million articles in Wikipedia, there could be hundreds of millions on the English Wikipedia. And instead of having one article which attempts fails, lately, at representing all points of view fairly, if you just actually have different articles written from different points of view, and then rate them, but of course, in order for that to work, you have to you can't have a single website to do it. Whenever there's a single website, there's going to be a single management there's going to be single editorial control. So what there has to be is a network, an old fashioned internet network. So there is no one in control. And the way that that articles are shared online is a lot like the way that articles blog posts are shared via the blogosphere. How via these protocols, or standards called RSS, really simple syndication, or the atom standard. And these enable bloggers to just share their blogs out into the ether of the of the Internet, and anybody can pick them up and read them using any sort of blog reader they want. And it's a pretty cool system. A lot of those a lot of aspects of the system. They're still very well supported. And you can still use it in the same way that you did in in 2005 when it was new. But yeah, it doesn't really matter that it's that it's not used in That way so much anymore. The principles are still in use. And this is why there isn't any single dominant blogging reader or farm out there. You've got all kinds you've got like WordPress and blogger and medium and blogspot, various others. That's the way it should be. So we think that there should be an cyclists fear where there is a blogosphere, there should be an in cyclists fear. So when Wikipedia publishes its articles, it shouldn't do that just via its website. It should put them out there in a feed, basically, and then at the same time, other media wiki encyclopedias like ballot pedia, for example. And, oh, there's a lot, right. They also could use the same sort of plugin for media wiki that's the software and publish feeds. And then you can imagine These things called aggregators, scooping up all of those feeds from all the different encyclopedias. And putting them all together into one giant. My original word for it was greater wiki, right? So it's it is the superset of all the encyclopedias in the world, we could have ratings for all of the articles. The ratings themselves could be syndicated in the same way using similar sorts of standards. Then people could create where there are blog readers there will be encyclopedia readers right. So basically, we're in the process of of developing the and psycho sphere on the the volunteer only knowledge standards Foundation, which we just got started. We've got over 800 people on the mailing list, just as of the last few weeks, we have several dozen like this actually up to over 80 people on the Slack channel, well over a dozen maybe a couple of dozen people just discussing things and working on different things. The actual standards for encyclopedias are now under development. I have talked to people, you know, sort of asking them to start working on scrapers and plugins for for things like Wikipedia and whatnot. So that that feed can be output and then people can build apps around around them. So So let me just leave my introduction with this little thought, open up an app or go to a website and type in a search. Like, I don't know, jihad, instead of getting one single article about Jihad from Wikipedia, you actually have a few dozen articles, and then imagine that there was a default ranking according to various ratings, but you could very quickly and easily change that so that you could look at the what the ranking is of those articles among Muslim moms or rate the rating among, you know, American liberals or American conservatives, or whatever you like to be very interesting to see and compare the top rated articles, according to the different groups, I think it'd actually be extremely enlightening. And I think that if this app came into existence, then
Unknown Speaker 21:21
that wouldn't make it possible for people to leap to the top of the rankings, simply by writing a better article that is that is more highly rated, according to some prominent subset of the rating public, so and that, that means a knowledge competition, the likes of which we've never seen. That makes me excited.
Jon Leon Guerrero 21:43
Yeah, that doesn't sound exciting, Larry, but do you think there's a danger in somebody being able to manipulate confirmation bias to earn a better ranking and then dominate rankings and how long do you think a curve like that lasts because I think we're Living in a curve somewhat like that, and a lot of ways, I think we're going to make it out of the other side. But what do you think is the curve for that?
Unknown Speaker 22:07
Well, first, let me try to understand what the objection or the question is. So so you're worried about people? What gaming the system somehow or?
Jon Leon Guerrero 22:18
Yeah, and, you know, we're speaking hypotheticals here. So I just want to get your thoughts on whether or not there is a danger in some say, you know, for instance, someone you know, 15 years ago, might have said, You know, I have really conservative points of view. I wish there were a media outlet out there that would, that would tell my side of the story a little more often. And now we have Fox News, whatever your thoughts are on fox news? Yeah. Some people would say, Boy, have they taken it to an extreme? How, how do you feel about somebody saying, Hey, you know what, I can just go look at all of the, you know, I can prioritize all of the articles out there by the ones that come down. And then shut everybody else out. Is there a danger there? And how long do you think that dangerous? Because I, if there is one, there's a duration before we get past it. And that's my my hopeful
Unknown Speaker 23:13
just having the network. First of all, there's lots of things to say about this. I'm just having the network available does not constrain how apps are written. So you can imagine, apps are written so that the user has no choice but to see a wide variety of different articles from different points of view. And who knows maybe the features of such an apple end up being so great that that's the one that everyone uses. And it's also possible that there will end up being like a conserva pedia and a liberal pedia. And these different competing resources become essentially their own walled gardens except that's the thing that's the interesting thing, isn't it? Because you can't call them An open network, a walled garden, you can't call a subset of an open network, a walled garden, you can select from it. But that's also true of the internet in general, right? So the mere having of tags that we could use to describe ourselves, doesn't constrain us in how we use the resource, or what sorts of apps are created for us. I can tell you how I would design a reader app if I ever wanted to do that. I don't know if I ever will, I probably shouldn't, because that would then be regarded as like the official and psycho sphere app, which, well, there never should be such a thing. But at any rate, I can give you some ideas. I mean, I wouldn't do that. I would, I would, as I was saying, before, I would I wouldn't force people to consider lots of different points of view, but I would nudge them to do so. The thing is also, right, that's not how it is. Now, if you go to you YouTube, for example, YouTube is so concerned that you are not that you're being exposed to other points of view on a subject, that for some articles, they will put a little notice at the bottom and say, this video is created by such and such. And here's the Wikipedia article about, or I think another sort of noticed basically just links to the Wikipedia article about the subject as sort of essential background reading. Because you know, this, the fool who is talking on the video, might not know what he's talking about. You see, this is different because what we're talking about here is an open network that makes it unusually easy to find different competing points of view. There's going to be pressures there will be pressures on people to among those who are trying to control the narrative to continue to do so and and those who never want to consider any other Alternative point of view, those people will go out of their way to avoid competing points of view. Absolutely. I don't see how we can solve that problem. We're actually
Jon Leon Guerrero 26:11
learned that they'll have to go out of their way.
Larry Sanger 26:13
Yeah. The point is that other points of view will be more easily available now.
Jon Leon Guerrero 26:20
Right? Right. Okay.
Pete Turner 26:22
So when you have these competing points of view people's feelings tend to get hurt at least these days.
Larry Sanger 26:29
True,
Pete Turner 26:30
right liberty is not just about my liberty and what I want to do what's what Larry wants to do with what john wants to do. And my ability to let you guys you know, obviously within reason but for the most part, let you do whatever it is that you want to do are saying, Hey, this is Pete a Turner from lions rock productions. We create podcasts around here and if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable, that's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown, show calm, let me help, I want to hear about it. Liberty is not just about my liberty and what I want to do with what Larry wants to do with what john wants to do. And my ability to let you guys you know, obviously, within reason, but for the most part, let you do whatever it is that you want to do or say, No, how do we develop more of that capacity socially, I mean, it's great to have this tool that comes out but if people are wanting to shoot each other in the face, because they can't take it, you know, so much for the tool.
Unknown Speaker 27:32
We certainly have been doing something wrong with our kids. And of the last 10 or 20 years with so many recent generations basically coming to graduated from high school, essentially, not wanting to offend anyone, and being much too easily offended. It's actually the first one that bothered me. I actually when I stopped teaching in 2000 Five, I was actually starting to see some of this, it's like people were a little too nice. They were not engaging with each other in, in the sort of robust way. It doesn't have to be rude or anything, but it has to be, it has to be pointed and robust. And they weren't. that bothered me, I think there's a few things that we could try to change. One is to get rid of this notion of of every point of view is valid, equally valid, and that, you know, that basically relativism, unless you unless you have one of the the disapproved points of view, in which case, you know, relativism apparently doesn't apply. All the others are it's like, you know, it's just a matter of, it's just a matter of taste. And it's so easy. For philosophers, most most PhD philosophers are just too busted with this tendency of their introductory students, intro philosophy students to fall back into this really lazy minded relativism. It's so easy to refute. I think that that would help a lot. Because then, you know, then you can't just say, Oh, well, you know, so and so has a different point of view from mine, but I guess that's okay. Because everybody has his own point of view. They're all equally valid. No, you don't want to say that. No, there is a truth about things. It's really important that we get it right, that actually makes the existence of a disagreement more noteworthy. And so that's one thing. And then of course, then the other thing is that, for whatever reason, you know, people do tend to regard if they record regard disagreements, as as insults, basically, especially when it's something that that they can't just say, well, that's just a different point of view. About and I think that ultimately comes down to the political, the politicization of, of education. I think basically the left has taken over for education at all levels. And they they have, to a certain extent, to very great extent actually made certain points of view, unthinkable. unspeakable. That's one of the biggest problems actually. And obviously, that that makes it difficult for us to, to debate those. So on the one hand, you've got this relativism that we've been living with actually for many decades now, probably since the 60s and on the other hand, more recently, we have been dealing with this absolutism about certain issues, right? So absolutism on one side, this incurious relativism on The other side for for issues that are optional, no room for debate and either for either kind of issue. So my my view is entirely different. And this is like how I teach my boys. I homeschool my two children. Also how I always taught my philosophy students as well. It's everything is up for grabs. Basically, you have to justify all of your views, even ones that everyone agrees with. rationality is the answer.
Jon Leon Guerrero 31:30
Well, I want our listeners to know that you taught philosophy at Ohio State at The Ohio State University. Yeah,
Larry Sanger 31:38
number one team and football lately. I usually don't care. But when the number one my short cheering Sure.
Jon Leon Guerrero 31:46
Yeah, that's true for many of us. You know, my my cousin Dan went to Ohio State he would wanted that whole exchange to been published so good. There you go. Damn. teaching this philosophy. It's similar to many that We've heard recently from guys like Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein and and I certainly agree with you, I mean, politically speaking, and the educational prohibition that has come onto certain subjects is one that we definitely want to avoid. But I think that as much as that sounds like a doomsday, you know, a doomsday point of view. It's not it's the opposite. It's an optimistic point of view. It's to say that humanity and our society and we can take it, like Pete said, it requires a thick skin and it sounds to me like you have some optimism about where do we go from here?
Unknown Speaker 32:37
Well, I'm cautiously optimistic. Let's put it that way. I see a lot of pushback lately, not just from my conservative friends, but also from my liberal ones. Not so much progressive. progressives have basically stop talking to me on Twitter. It's like I just don't hear from many more period. But everyone else is sort of starting to push back against orthodoxy. I guess that's a good sign that the fact indeed that that Jordan Peterson I liked Jordan Jordan Peterson quite a bit. The fact that a lot of people have have been responding positively to him. And what he is doing is for the most part, just philosophy. I think that's also a very good sign if there's so much to do, obviously, because you know, those of us who believe in free speech and an open society Free Thought of various kinds on different subjects, those of us who instinctively hates the idea of hate speech, or laws against hate speech, for example, we are right now decidedly in the minority or at least in the minority, have a loud voices campuses. And that bothers me a lot. And I'm not really sure if we're making a lot of headway in battling that. Ultimately, I, I think that what it's going to take to actually change that part of Western culture is a massive shock to the system, such as we might be seeing in the form of Donald Trump and, and the unmasking of media, which are increasingly just looking like propaganda, Oregon's I mean, maybe it will, it'll be a shock to the system that does it, but maybe it will be just people, individuals taking matters into their own hands like, Well, my family husband doing so we don't want to have to even think about what you know our children are going to be taught in school, or how well they're going to be taught, whether they're gonna To be, you know, allowed to, to have their own independent thoughts and so forth. Now we homeschool. Right? And there's a lot of people out there who feel the same way. Who would like to do it even if even if they can't, and they do have what's called after schooling, and take some responsibility increasing amounts of responsibility for their children. I've seen a number of comments along these lines lately that the way that the Gen Xers now who are you know, teaching, they're not school aged kids or college age, whatever the case might be. It's different. We invest more in our kids, and we're hopefully the generation that is now coming up, not the millennials, Millennials were raised by the baby boomers, but the next one after that word is that that they tend to be A little more conservative than previous younger generations, and that they are just more free thinking more interested in considering illicit thoughts. So I hope so,
Jon Leon Guerrero 36:15
you use the word elicit. But it's, you know, in its purest definition. I think it's an interesting world that you describe. I think right now, though, the folks like you who are very deliberately homeschooling for that purpose, are still outliers.
Larry Sanger 36:33
Yeah, that's for sure.
Jon Leon Guerrero 36:35
The pendulum as it swings, you know, I'm interested in tightening that pendulum swing so that it swings more frequently and tractor and maybe not so far to the extremes but allows for the exploration that happens with faster swings. How do you think of the process of turning you know your method and your approach to educating your kids to something that is more widely done? Often environment.
Unknown Speaker 37:01
Well, I can give you another specific idea that I've been kind of chomping at the bit to work on. I don't know if I ever will pick up probably, well, I wouldn't want to go to school, I wouldn't want to go to college these days, myself, I wouldn't want to go to almost anywhere, I certainly wouldn't want to go to my alma mater, Reed College, because I know that I would be indoctrinated even more than I was from 1986 to 1991. Similarly, I don't want my sons to go to a lot of those sorts of colleges. I'm inclined to actually try to start a movement to get people to study independently, together. Like I can imagine the following thing and I've written about this on my blog. I just keep coming back to this idea. I've been thinking about this since the 1990s. And since I was a grad student myself, just imagine a group of college students, college dade kids, college aged kids, and they all rent a big house, you know, it's got like half a dozen rooms. And they each pay $500 a month. And they hire a few grad students who come and hang out for a few hours every day to do different things, mostly what would be called academic advising, and maybe looking over papers and whatnot, giving feedback and then basically motivating them to study on their own. So those same students could attend lectures if they want to look at live lectures, or they could look at recorded lectures here in there. And then who knows they could organize themselves into different sorts of study groups, I think face to face is really important. And also, they could go and have tutorials, they could just pay I'm sure a significant portion. Possibly as many as half of faculty members would be happy to accept a certain amount of money from people not affiliated with the university, to who are undergoing this sort of like, independent study thing. And then just imagine that that information information about the about a course of study is, is actually managed by a sort of registrar service. And a somebody that you had been studying with whether that grad student or professor who's acting as a tutor can say, okay, yes, so and so studied this, these subjects from this time to that time and did the equivalent of an A or B or whatever, and, and basically compile information in this way. So there's different things that that a startup could do to make that possible and more attractive. And there have been a few startups that I've done somewhat similar things, but they've been a little bit too regimented. So they basically just become new kinds of universities. Maybe that is actually what's necessary. But I actually think that that going back to the old medieval system of education, where could have a really big impact? So to get back to your question, if you have even a relatively small minority of people studying in this way, and then speaking out about how they have studied the whole phenomenon, the whole idea of independent learning, and here, I don't mean necessarily studying all on your own as an independent scholar, but independent of universities, independently managed, managed by yourself, man with the help of maybe a few professionals. That idea will get out there. And I think that is another thing that that could happen, I think eventually will happen, I might make it happen. So we'll see.
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:00
You know what makes that happen, though more so than one of us or several of us trying to create that environment or perpetuate the advancement of that environment is that somebody with that style of education becomes enormously successful? No, you're right. But that's really all we need is for some heightened of industry to say, Well, of course, I'm dominating this industry. Here's how I was, you know, here's how I developed myself. Yeah, and how everybody else should and then that's how the bandwagon is created.
Unknown Speaker 41:33
Right? Well, I mean, we're already getting some of those effects, just just by the all of the success stories about about homeschooled college students, and early startup people, any number of startup people, I can't give you an examples because there's just a lot of little ones out there
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:50
You know, well, look at look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, all they had to do was drop out of Harvard.
Larry Sanger 41:56
Yeah.
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:58
So let's see.
Unknown Speaker 41:59
Yeah, it's So far I'm not see, I don't know how good of an education those guys got. Right? They they started learning, presumably something about about their fields, you know, tech and entrepreneurship. When they left college, I think a better example would be would be somebody who actually did get a substantive education and used it. So, yeah, again, I think there's some some startup people who have been homeschooled. Yeah, it's interesting.
Pete Turner 42:32
You were talking earlier, and it seemed like you were referring to your influence in like, how you've got to be careful on what projects you take on or what you attach your name to, because you know, of the whole Wikipedia impact. Can you talk a little bit more about how that does impact what projects you pursue because putting your name and attaching your your influence to something definitely has an impact?
Unknown Speaker 42:56
Oh, well, thank you for saying that. I don't know how much of an impact it has. But the reason that I care about that is is not because I think my name has an impact, it's that, that I don't want to water down whatever reputation I have. And I also think that that business can be a force for bad as well as good. And I want to be on the side of the good, basically. So the question is, how do I decide?
Pete Turner 43:27
Yeah, like, how do you weigh that out in your on your personal scale?
Larry Sanger 43:30
Yeah, right now, for example, I'm going to start looking for new gigs. And you know, there have been people who've been after me, the last, actually a lot in the last couple of years. And I've been offered literally dozens and dozens of times to be an advisor for different blockchain. companies and I accepted twice. I just have to start talking about ethics. Right, because that's all it really comes down to. It's like, I don't want to represent myself as an expert in something which it seems it seems I would have to do that someone wanted me to be an advisor. This is a long time ago, but about startup about pharmaceuticals. I was like, Why on earth? Do you want me to be an advisor for a pharmaceutical company? That doesn't even make sense? I have enough money. I'm not rich at all. I'm middle class, I live more or less paycheck to paycheck, or at least I don't have a lot of cushion. But I'm not worried. I'm very grateful to be able to say that I'm not worried. And that is absolutely fine with me being able to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about whether I've done something wrong by joining some sort of shady organization. You can't put a price on that. Right. So the real answer to your question ultimately is you know, why should you be honest? Well, actually actually answered that question, by the way, why be moral? I have a blog post up, its recent too. So go to Larry sanger.org. And yeah, just scroll down. And right now it is about like number eight. Yeah, I mean beyond. beyond that. I mean, if you're if you're asking like how do I decide what you know who to work with or what to put my reputation behind, it has to be something that I am, have some expertise, expertise in, also has to be, I have to be really convinced that the people who are behind it are both intelligent and competent, so that they can actually successfully carry off that idea, but maybe more importantly than that, even is that I think the idea is one worth pursuing. Basically, So like I turned down jobs with with Jason Calacanis twice, and I don't know why he was after me so much. Exactly. But I was working on other things at the time. And, you know, the opportunities that he were he was offering were were not as they didn't seem to be as important for purposes of changing the world for the better. Basically, that's what it's all about. I mean, there isn't anything else.
Pete Turner 46:31
Right? Yeah, changing the world for the
Jon Leon Guerrero 46:34
better. Well, I want to tell our listeners, Larry sanger.org, there's so much more there than article number eight. There's a ton of reading material. You guys should go through it. There's a lot there. To to see, including a much more thorough and complete explanation of the cycle of sphere works and why it's important. It's always interesting talking
Pete Turner 46:55
to you, Larry, because you're part philosopher, you're part Wikipedia founder. You know, this is, this is an incredible opportunity to see and hear from you on how you how you see the world playing out. I think our generation is sort of, if we're going to be unfair, the boomers came up and they did all the hippie stuff and, and and then they raised shitty ex hippie kids and, you know, but come on be nice. But the Gen X folks we've sorted it's kind of been like, Well, whatever, we're just going to work on our stuff. And I was locked out of my house every day when mom and dad had to go work. You know, I was a latchkey kid. That's the story, basically.
Larry Sanger 47:37
Yeah, me too.
Pete Turner 47:38
Yeah. And you know, when you are left up to your own devices, you find out new things and you discover stuff and you read content, your spare time because there's nothing else you can do. And you end up you end up starting a world famous, you know, internet encyclopedia, and I love this in the thing I wanted to say is, as I tell these stories, and we create all these things, having a resource to learn about whatever president it is, or whatever historical thing it is. And giving all those authors a slightly, you know, it allows you to de silo all that great work into something that really can give you a better idea of who Julius Caesar was or what IBM is, or, you know, any topic, you can have a multitude of variety of perspectives and get truly a better sense, because it turns out one person can't capture everything about something,
Unknown Speaker 48:29
right? No, absolutely. No. I mean, I've always been a huge fan of collaboration. And I think that it is very possible that the top ranked articles in the future in psycho sphere rankings will almost always be collaboratively written articles, but it will be different groups of collaborators. And no, I mean, they look we we huge appreciate having all of this information at our fingertips. But I don't think we realize what we're missing out on when that information is not really up to snuff, that it isn't as well written or as well sourced or as credible as it might be. And I think that that when we actually are able to surface what has a reasonable claim to be the best explanation of a certain topic, according to the experts on the subject, or according to to some algorithmically determined neutral article, I think we're going to see what we have been missing out on with Wikipedia, it's a lot a lot and not just not just in terms of quality, but also in terms of quantity. So one thing that they that the young guys that ever pedia sort of turned me on to which I didn't really realize before. I'd started thinking about it a lot and working with them on it is just the idea that there could be encyclopedia articles about a hell of a lot more things than then there are out there now like, I, my desktop background happens to have a bunch of sailboats on it. I can imagine people writing pages encyclopedia articles through might not write any other kinds of articles about their stuff, but to catalog to as a way of just saving the information out there. I can imagine millions of articles about sailboats out there, and it's just one of the one of the things that people do. And if there's, I mean, the information on some obscure sale sailboat might be worthless, or we'll see I guess, there will be studies done to see how, how good the information about obscure topics is if it's available and out there. It might turn out to be make life even easier, I suppose. I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah.
Jon Leon Guerrero 51:00
Well, I think our guest today has been Larry Sanger. And Larry would thank you not only for coming on the show and expressing your point of view, but I think in large part articulating a good chunk of ours as well, because I think your advantage at this moment in time is that you have a great firm grasp of what has happened with technology, historically speaking with a very sharp eye on the future
Pete Turner 51:27
of what can
Jon Leon Guerrero 51:28
happen, so that we maximize the potential of what we're capable of doing and what we're capable of capturing. And we really appreciate that and we appreciate your optimism and we appreciate your willingness to share.
Larry Sanger 51:43
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Hey everybody, its Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the breakdowns show man, it is a great day today. I'm in lovely San Diego standing on the beach, literally, of the Mission Bay Hilton, not a paid sponsor, recording on my bulletproof podcast equipment, the rig is an H six zoom recorder. And sure sm 35 microphones. Hey, so our guest today is Larry Sanger, Larry is all about freedom of data and expression. He's the co founder of Wikipedia and frankly not that happy with the controlling siloed nature of the data on Wikipedia. So he's created a new thing called the in cyclists sphere and john and i sit down with him and talk about how he wants to de silo encyclopedic data very similar to the blogosphere where you write something, someone writes an aggregator they gather up all that data and create their own encyclopedia. That's how you unlock our data that we create and take it out of the hands of corporations like ABC, which is Google, Facebook, etc. Twitter Now, of course, the charitable part, it's the end of the year if you're into charitable giving save the brave.org. That's my recommendation that is my charity. And you can easily go there by going to save the brave.org can click on that donate tab, and then he do a monthly or a one time or do both. It would be great. If you did we can help us support these veterans that have supported most of us. Hey, one other thing real quick to support the show. I mean, right now I I am so fortunate to have the show where it is and it's growing and it's growing because all of you do the things that you do so you buy the shirts, you do the sharing you eat connect with me and people see these conversations and they give the show a try. These things matter and, and really I appreciate all of you so much for that. Hey, I'll be quiet now. Larry Sanger here it comes enjoy. Lions rock productions.
Unknown Speaker 1:52
This is Jay Mohr.
Unknown Speaker 1:53
This is Jordan. Dexter from the offspring. Sebastian youngsters, Rick maronna
Unknown Speaker 1:58
Stewart Copeland
Gabby Reese 2:00
This is this goes back to Gabby Reese
Rob Bell 2:02
This is Rob Bell
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:03
This is Jon Leon Guerrero
Pete Turner 2:03
and this is Pete a Turner.
Larry Sanger 2:08
This is Larry Sanger. You're listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:13
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Pete Turner 2:19
Yeah, I've got Larry on the show today. He's been on several times. And Larry is a free speech advocate, and also an advocate for our own personal data. And he's also someone who's looking at how we store I guess I'm gonna take a stab at this, Larry, how we store his encyclopedic data and share it so that there's a more complete picture. And there's more, basically, the liberty and freedom in that approach. How did I do?
Larry Sanger 2:45
Pretty good, pretty good. I mean, there's a lot of ways in but yeah,
Pete Turner 2:49
yeah. And of course john is sitting into so I want to make sure well, actually, Jon, I'll just give you the first question and let you kind of fire us off.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:56
Well, okay, as someone who is advocating for a level playing field when it comes to the capturing of all that we create. And I've said this many times on the show, so I'm going to ask for your correction. But I heard a statistic that is probably old enough that it's different now. But that if you took the entire body of human creation, from the dawn of time to 1974, we are creating that now every 12 days, I think. And so in order to maintain some sort of lack of structure, so that we are all creating and not being filtered by some entity that will take on responsibility and the power of regulating what is created and what is stored for posterity. I think that's really what you're an advocate of and being an advocate of that, what are the big challenges that you run into all of the time when you have to explain to somebody that hey, this really means something?
Larry Sanger 3:53
I think at this points, I would have answered the question very differently in like two 2001 say but in 2019, the challenge is really passivity, you know, the system that we have dominated as it is by big tech is the one that we're going to have to live with from now on. And a lot of people just have never even really learned, especially younger people, I think, never really learned and fully appreciated that there is another way to organize the internet. That the it's pretty striking actually, that just in 10 years, the internet has been completely flipped on its head. 10 years ago, you could still talk about people who were late getting online, and now pretty much everybody who's going to be online is online and has been for many years. They have formulated their idea about what the internet is all about. Right? And a lot of those people never really understood, maybe they will want online when the internet was different basically and how they never really understood the whole idea of decentralized networks of owning your own data of having open protocols, basically. And I can explain they've that if you want the real, the real problem is getting people to understand that there are that the issues of freedom and privacy that they care about, are actually very intimately bound up with these other issues of, again, owning your own data and using open protocols and so forth.
Jon Leon Guerrero 5:41
So as we move forward, I mean, now is the time to nip this activity in the bud or to set us on the right course. And I appreciate you taking on that responsibility. Who are your allies in this fight?
Pete Turner 5:53
Hey, this is Dave Turner from the break it down Show checking in real quick to ask you this. JOHN Scott and I all support Save the brave with our time, our location, our effort and our money. Each month we give a small amount, do the same with us go to save the brave.org, click on the donate tab, pick an amount that you want to come out of each month, and they will handle all the rest. I stand behind these folks. Thank you so much. Let's get back to the show.
Jon Leon Guerrero 6:17
As we move forward, I mean, now is the time to nip this activity in the bud or to set us on the right course. And I appreciate you taking on that responsibility. Who are your allies in this fight?
Unknown Speaker 6:29
Um, well, actually, it's interesting. Whoever is basically most pissed off at Facebook and Twitter tend to be the people who gravitate to the knowledge standards Foundation, to the the idea of an encyclopedia network. Now there's a lot of people those a lot of those people out there basically just need to to explain what a different system would look like and they get pretty excited. And of course, I'm finding that Something like 80% of the people who are interested in the knowledge standards foundation are developers. And this isn't surprising to me, because programmers are the ones who understand these issues. Because, you know, they they know essentially how the digital network sausage is made, they understand that if basically you designed the system to be open event, it can't be shut down. And if it can't be dominated by any one player, and if you design a system that is closed, that inevitably it's going to be abused. So basically, it tends to be older developers. So a lot of middle aged guys actually.
Jon Leon Guerrero 7:49
Okay, Boomer.
Larry Sanger 7:54
I'm not old enough to be a boomer.
Pete Turner 7:55
Yeah, I'm told that doesn't matter. That's the best thing about this. Put down Yeah, as genomics guys, right, we're trying to figure these things out. So I was having an interesting conversation with some folks that are trying to figure out blockchain and the group is called blockchain for good. And they wanted to establish the ethics of blockchain. But ethics don't cooperate like that, you know, what you think is ethical today, maybe horribly unethical tomorrow or in context or in application? What is it about your experience, you know, 2025 3040 years into this game that's required to get that open nature to be comfortable and actually the path that that you're seeking, why do you have to be middle aged to understand this problem?
Unknown Speaker 8:41
What maybe another way to put the question is, what did I learn back in the 1990s? Yes, I just had an immediate experience of interacting with people via like using it. For example, a good example of a decentralized network. You could use lots of Different news reader software, you weren't stuck with any one particular newsreader. And it was well understood that the groups you know, anybody could start a group. There was no central management of the whole unit using that system. Not until Google took it over. Of course, that's that was kind of lame. Yeah, I mean, back in the 90s. When you interacted with people, you it was implicitly understood that it was either one on one as an email or like a private IRC chat, or it was out in open as in using that and in a lot of list serves to a certain extent, mailing lists, in other words, which use email. And the nice thing about this is that that you didn't have to ask for permission from anyone that was just understood the development of the tools they it was all done by basically volunteers. Volunteer develop And the developers were motivated, I think, partly, you know, just to advance their careers, but partly because, you know, there's a great deal of honor to be gotten among programmers, you know, if you can brag that you actually are the author of this tool that everybody uses. That's a big feather in your cap. And that's, that's how it worked. So, I mean, I'm just sort of you ask, what was it that we learned back in the 1990s? When I say this, it all sounds kind of like, sounds kind of boring, doesn't it? But ultimately, the 2019 reimplementation of this stuff isn't going to be that boring, because the technologies are so much more interesting, right? We're not just talking about email, and mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. And, you know, the basic pre JavaScript web, right? We're talking about all kinds of stuff. We're talking about a replacement for Wikipedia or something that would can include Wikipedia that enables a lot of other people to participate in. We're talking about completely decentralized social media systems. So and we're, we're sort of figuring that out. There's a lot of different players that are figuring out exactly how to do that now, gab, for example, has moved to the mastadon network that shoot has attempting to have a fully decentralized video hosting platform, which is pretty interesting, actually. Those are things that that we would barely have been able to conceive of back in the 1990s. But the principles ultimately should be the same.
Pete Turner 11:48
So the past 70 that you were talking about earlier, this is a big problem. I mean, we agree that Twitter's a place full of poisonous comments and thoughts. You're not on Twitter. anymore.
Larry Sanger 12:00
So I am I'm not on Facebook and
Pete Turner 12:03
Facebook anymore. My apologies my correction. So, but it's a place it's hard to, you know, like I put up a show and someone may jump in without ever listening to the show or commenting and all they have is something horrible to say, you know, call someone to name whatever. Yeah, that is the place we continue to go, what is a thing? a site like gab or mastadon? How do they build a big enough crowd so that the big players, the people that put things out want to be there in the first place?
Unknown Speaker 12:29
Yeah, that's a that's a hard question. Especially since there are so many people now who know the attractions of really big networks, right? So we understand how neat it can be to have like a few hundred friends and old high school friends and whatever contacting you out of the blue, trying to organize people to create such networks out of They de novo basically from nothing is difficult. A lot of the people who participate on mastodon, for example, are they tend to be techies of one sort or another. And then the people who go to gab or people who are really, really upset at the censorship that goes on on, especially Twitter, but that's not enough to actually organize a whole community around. I mean, the problem that we're trying to solve, I think, wasn't solved back in the 1980s and 90s. When these sorts of projects are these sorts of, of networks came into being in the first place. Because, you know, they didn't have to compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter. So I'm not I'm not 100% sure how we're going to get there. I mean, I think, I think ultimately, we're going to have to create a sort of artificial movement, a deliberate movement as a better word, to put it in. Like last summer, right? In June and July, I organized the social media strike. Right. I think you might have interviewed me around that time. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, you know, that was a good way to do it. And I didn't even try to get that much. I didn't try to get that much momentum for a lot of publicity or anything. But nevertheless, we did get dozens of articles just like, without any significant we didn't even do a press release. I think. For us, I think we didn't. Anyway, there's very little anyway, in the way of actually chasing down press. We could do that now though. And then I can easily imagine how we could have like a new tryout day or something. I talked about that last summer we we never did do it because I never had time. To busy with now. The psycho sphere project, right. So tell us about a psycho sphere then give us I mean, we've kind of covered some bad Background stuff and a lot of it's going to be talking about now, but talk about in sackless fear and why it's important. Okay, so the problem about information online in general, not only communication, but like news, communication among people in news, it's all centrally controlled. It's all in the hands of these giant corporations that have their interests, not yours, at heart. And it turns out that Wikipedia is has become another instance of the same, it would be wonderful, I think, if the world could go to a single place, and get all the different points of view fairly represented and so forth. That was the vision that we had for Wikipedia. Back in the day, and in the first five to 10 years Wikipedia made a reasonably credible effort at doing that, but especially especially In the last few years, it's just gotten worse and worse, in terms of the ability to get dissenting voices heard in the Wikipedia community, I think we can do a lot better. I think that we could have, instead of on the order of five, 6 million articles in Wikipedia, there could be hundreds of millions on the English Wikipedia. And instead of having one article which attempts fails, lately, at representing all points of view fairly, if you just actually have different articles written from different points of view, and then rate them, but of course, in order for that to work, you have to you can't have a single website to do it. Whenever there's a single website, there's going to be a single management there's going to be single editorial control. So what there has to be is a network, an old fashioned internet network. So there is no one in control. And the way that that articles are shared online is a lot like the way that articles blog posts are shared via the blogosphere. How via these protocols, or standards called RSS, really simple syndication, or the atom standard. And these enable bloggers to just share their blogs out into the ether of the of the Internet, and anybody can pick them up and read them using any sort of blog reader they want. And it's a pretty cool system. A lot of those a lot of aspects of the system. They're still very well supported. And you can still use it in the same way that you did in in 2005 when it was new. But yeah, it doesn't really matter that it's that it's not used in That way so much anymore. The principles are still in use. And this is why there isn't any single dominant blogging reader or farm out there. You've got all kinds you've got like WordPress and blogger and medium and blogspot, various others. That's the way it should be. So we think that there should be an cyclists fear where there is a blogosphere, there should be an in cyclists fear. So when Wikipedia publishes its articles, it shouldn't do that just via its website. It should put them out there in a feed, basically, and then at the same time, other media wiki encyclopedias like ballot pedia, for example. And, oh, there's a lot, right. They also could use the same sort of plugin for media wiki that's the software and publish feeds. And then you can imagine These things called aggregators, scooping up all of those feeds from all the different encyclopedias. And putting them all together into one giant. My original word for it was greater wiki, right? So it's it is the superset of all the encyclopedias in the world, we could have ratings for all of the articles. The ratings themselves could be syndicated in the same way using similar sorts of standards. Then people could create where there are blog readers there will be encyclopedia readers right. So basically, we're in the process of of developing the and psycho sphere on the the volunteer only knowledge standards Foundation, which we just got started. We've got over 800 people on the mailing list, just as of the last few weeks, we have several dozen like this actually up to over 80 people on the Slack channel, well over a dozen maybe a couple of dozen people just discussing things and working on different things. The actual standards for encyclopedias are now under development. I have talked to people, you know, sort of asking them to start working on scrapers and plugins for for things like Wikipedia and whatnot. So that that feed can be output and then people can build apps around around them. So So let me just leave my introduction with this little thought, open up an app or go to a website and type in a search. Like, I don't know, jihad, instead of getting one single article about Jihad from Wikipedia, you actually have a few dozen articles, and then imagine that there was a default ranking according to various ratings, but you could very quickly and easily change that so that you could look at the what the ranking is of those articles among Muslim moms or rate the rating among, you know, American liberals or American conservatives, or whatever you like to be very interesting to see and compare the top rated articles, according to the different groups, I think it'd actually be extremely enlightening. And I think that if this app came into existence, then
Unknown Speaker 21:21
that wouldn't make it possible for people to leap to the top of the rankings, simply by writing a better article that is that is more highly rated, according to some prominent subset of the rating public, so and that, that means a knowledge competition, the likes of which we've never seen. That makes me excited.
Jon Leon Guerrero 21:43
Yeah, that doesn't sound exciting, Larry, but do you think there's a danger in somebody being able to manipulate confirmation bias to earn a better ranking and then dominate rankings and how long do you think a curve like that lasts because I think we're Living in a curve somewhat like that, and a lot of ways, I think we're going to make it out of the other side. But what do you think is the curve for that?
Unknown Speaker 22:07
Well, first, let me try to understand what the objection or the question is. So so you're worried about people? What gaming the system somehow or?
Jon Leon Guerrero 22:18
Yeah, and, you know, we're speaking hypotheticals here. So I just want to get your thoughts on whether or not there is a danger in some say, you know, for instance, someone you know, 15 years ago, might have said, You know, I have really conservative points of view. I wish there were a media outlet out there that would, that would tell my side of the story a little more often. And now we have Fox News, whatever your thoughts are on fox news? Yeah. Some people would say, Boy, have they taken it to an extreme? How, how do you feel about somebody saying, Hey, you know what, I can just go look at all of the, you know, I can prioritize all of the articles out there by the ones that come down. And then shut everybody else out. Is there a danger there? And how long do you think that dangerous? Because I, if there is one, there's a duration before we get past it. And that's my my hopeful
Unknown Speaker 23:13
just having the network. First of all, there's lots of things to say about this. I'm just having the network available does not constrain how apps are written. So you can imagine, apps are written so that the user has no choice but to see a wide variety of different articles from different points of view. And who knows maybe the features of such an apple end up being so great that that's the one that everyone uses. And it's also possible that there will end up being like a conserva pedia and a liberal pedia. And these different competing resources become essentially their own walled gardens except that's the thing that's the interesting thing, isn't it? Because you can't call them An open network, a walled garden, you can't call a subset of an open network, a walled garden, you can select from it. But that's also true of the internet in general, right? So the mere having of tags that we could use to describe ourselves, doesn't constrain us in how we use the resource, or what sorts of apps are created for us. I can tell you how I would design a reader app if I ever wanted to do that. I don't know if I ever will, I probably shouldn't, because that would then be regarded as like the official and psycho sphere app, which, well, there never should be such a thing. But at any rate, I can give you some ideas. I mean, I wouldn't do that. I would, I would, as I was saying, before, I would I wouldn't force people to consider lots of different points of view, but I would nudge them to do so. The thing is also, right, that's not how it is. Now, if you go to you YouTube, for example, YouTube is so concerned that you are not that you're being exposed to other points of view on a subject, that for some articles, they will put a little notice at the bottom and say, this video is created by such and such. And here's the Wikipedia article about, or I think another sort of noticed basically just links to the Wikipedia article about the subject as sort of essential background reading. Because you know, this, the fool who is talking on the video, might not know what he's talking about. You see, this is different because what we're talking about here is an open network that makes it unusually easy to find different competing points of view. There's going to be pressures there will be pressures on people to among those who are trying to control the narrative to continue to do so and and those who never want to consider any other Alternative point of view, those people will go out of their way to avoid competing points of view. Absolutely. I don't see how we can solve that problem. We're actually
Jon Leon Guerrero 26:11
learned that they'll have to go out of their way.
Larry Sanger 26:13
Yeah. The point is that other points of view will be more easily available now.
Jon Leon Guerrero 26:20
Right? Right. Okay.
Pete Turner 26:22
So when you have these competing points of view people's feelings tend to get hurt at least these days.
Larry Sanger 26:29
True,
Pete Turner 26:30
right liberty is not just about my liberty and what I want to do what's what Larry wants to do with what john wants to do. And my ability to let you guys you know, obviously within reason but for the most part, let you do whatever it is that you want to do are saying, Hey, this is Pete a Turner from lions rock productions. We create podcasts around here and if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable, that's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown, show calm, let me help, I want to hear about it. Liberty is not just about my liberty and what I want to do with what Larry wants to do with what john wants to do. And my ability to let you guys you know, obviously, within reason, but for the most part, let you do whatever it is that you want to do or say, No, how do we develop more of that capacity socially, I mean, it's great to have this tool that comes out but if people are wanting to shoot each other in the face, because they can't take it, you know, so much for the tool.
Unknown Speaker 27:32
We certainly have been doing something wrong with our kids. And of the last 10 or 20 years with so many recent generations basically coming to graduated from high school, essentially, not wanting to offend anyone, and being much too easily offended. It's actually the first one that bothered me. I actually when I stopped teaching in 2000 Five, I was actually starting to see some of this, it's like people were a little too nice. They were not engaging with each other in, in the sort of robust way. It doesn't have to be rude or anything, but it has to be, it has to be pointed and robust. And they weren't. that bothered me, I think there's a few things that we could try to change. One is to get rid of this notion of of every point of view is valid, equally valid, and that, you know, that basically relativism, unless you unless you have one of the the disapproved points of view, in which case, you know, relativism apparently doesn't apply. All the others are it's like, you know, it's just a matter of, it's just a matter of taste. And it's so easy. For philosophers, most most PhD philosophers are just too busted with this tendency of their introductory students, intro philosophy students to fall back into this really lazy minded relativism. It's so easy to refute. I think that that would help a lot. Because then, you know, then you can't just say, Oh, well, you know, so and so has a different point of view from mine, but I guess that's okay. Because everybody has his own point of view. They're all equally valid. No, you don't want to say that. No, there is a truth about things. It's really important that we get it right, that actually makes the existence of a disagreement more noteworthy. And so that's one thing. And then of course, then the other thing is that, for whatever reason, you know, people do tend to regard if they record regard disagreements, as as insults, basically, especially when it's something that that they can't just say, well, that's just a different point of view. About and I think that ultimately comes down to the political, the politicization of, of education. I think basically the left has taken over for education at all levels. And they they have, to a certain extent, to very great extent actually made certain points of view, unthinkable. unspeakable. That's one of the biggest problems actually. And obviously, that that makes it difficult for us to, to debate those. So on the one hand, you've got this relativism that we've been living with actually for many decades now, probably since the 60s and on the other hand, more recently, we have been dealing with this absolutism about certain issues, right? So absolutism on one side, this incurious relativism on The other side for for issues that are optional, no room for debate and either for either kind of issue. So my my view is entirely different. And this is like how I teach my boys. I homeschool my two children. Also how I always taught my philosophy students as well. It's everything is up for grabs. Basically, you have to justify all of your views, even ones that everyone agrees with. rationality is the answer.
Jon Leon Guerrero 31:30
Well, I want our listeners to know that you taught philosophy at Ohio State at The Ohio State University. Yeah,
Larry Sanger 31:38
number one team and football lately. I usually don't care. But when the number one my short cheering Sure.
Jon Leon Guerrero 31:46
Yeah, that's true for many of us. You know, my my cousin Dan went to Ohio State he would wanted that whole exchange to been published so good. There you go. Damn. teaching this philosophy. It's similar to many that We've heard recently from guys like Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein and and I certainly agree with you, I mean, politically speaking, and the educational prohibition that has come onto certain subjects is one that we definitely want to avoid. But I think that as much as that sounds like a doomsday, you know, a doomsday point of view. It's not it's the opposite. It's an optimistic point of view. It's to say that humanity and our society and we can take it, like Pete said, it requires a thick skin and it sounds to me like you have some optimism about where do we go from here?
Unknown Speaker 32:37
Well, I'm cautiously optimistic. Let's put it that way. I see a lot of pushback lately, not just from my conservative friends, but also from my liberal ones. Not so much progressive. progressives have basically stop talking to me on Twitter. It's like I just don't hear from many more period. But everyone else is sort of starting to push back against orthodoxy. I guess that's a good sign that the fact indeed that that Jordan Peterson I liked Jordan Jordan Peterson quite a bit. The fact that a lot of people have have been responding positively to him. And what he is doing is for the most part, just philosophy. I think that's also a very good sign if there's so much to do, obviously, because you know, those of us who believe in free speech and an open society Free Thought of various kinds on different subjects, those of us who instinctively hates the idea of hate speech, or laws against hate speech, for example, we are right now decidedly in the minority or at least in the minority, have a loud voices campuses. And that bothers me a lot. And I'm not really sure if we're making a lot of headway in battling that. Ultimately, I, I think that what it's going to take to actually change that part of Western culture is a massive shock to the system, such as we might be seeing in the form of Donald Trump and, and the unmasking of media, which are increasingly just looking like propaganda, Oregon's I mean, maybe it will, it'll be a shock to the system that does it, but maybe it will be just people, individuals taking matters into their own hands like, Well, my family husband doing so we don't want to have to even think about what you know our children are going to be taught in school, or how well they're going to be taught, whether they're gonna To be, you know, allowed to, to have their own independent thoughts and so forth. Now we homeschool. Right? And there's a lot of people out there who feel the same way. Who would like to do it even if even if they can't, and they do have what's called after schooling, and take some responsibility increasing amounts of responsibility for their children. I've seen a number of comments along these lines lately that the way that the Gen Xers now who are you know, teaching, they're not school aged kids or college age, whatever the case might be. It's different. We invest more in our kids, and we're hopefully the generation that is now coming up, not the millennials, Millennials were raised by the baby boomers, but the next one after that word is that that they tend to be A little more conservative than previous younger generations, and that they are just more free thinking more interested in considering illicit thoughts. So I hope so,
Jon Leon Guerrero 36:15
you use the word elicit. But it's, you know, in its purest definition. I think it's an interesting world that you describe. I think right now, though, the folks like you who are very deliberately homeschooling for that purpose, are still outliers.
Larry Sanger 36:33
Yeah, that's for sure.
Jon Leon Guerrero 36:35
The pendulum as it swings, you know, I'm interested in tightening that pendulum swing so that it swings more frequently and tractor and maybe not so far to the extremes but allows for the exploration that happens with faster swings. How do you think of the process of turning you know your method and your approach to educating your kids to something that is more widely done? Often environment.
Unknown Speaker 37:01
Well, I can give you another specific idea that I've been kind of chomping at the bit to work on. I don't know if I ever will pick up probably, well, I wouldn't want to go to school, I wouldn't want to go to college these days, myself, I wouldn't want to go to almost anywhere, I certainly wouldn't want to go to my alma mater, Reed College, because I know that I would be indoctrinated even more than I was from 1986 to 1991. Similarly, I don't want my sons to go to a lot of those sorts of colleges. I'm inclined to actually try to start a movement to get people to study independently, together. Like I can imagine the following thing and I've written about this on my blog. I just keep coming back to this idea. I've been thinking about this since the 1990s. And since I was a grad student myself, just imagine a group of college students, college dade kids, college aged kids, and they all rent a big house, you know, it's got like half a dozen rooms. And they each pay $500 a month. And they hire a few grad students who come and hang out for a few hours every day to do different things, mostly what would be called academic advising, and maybe looking over papers and whatnot, giving feedback and then basically motivating them to study on their own. So those same students could attend lectures if they want to look at live lectures, or they could look at recorded lectures here in there. And then who knows they could organize themselves into different sorts of study groups, I think face to face is really important. And also, they could go and have tutorials, they could just pay I'm sure a significant portion. Possibly as many as half of faculty members would be happy to accept a certain amount of money from people not affiliated with the university, to who are undergoing this sort of like, independent study thing. And then just imagine that that information information about the about a course of study is, is actually managed by a sort of registrar service. And a somebody that you had been studying with whether that grad student or professor who's acting as a tutor can say, okay, yes, so and so studied this, these subjects from this time to that time and did the equivalent of an A or B or whatever, and, and basically compile information in this way. So there's different things that that a startup could do to make that possible and more attractive. And there have been a few startups that I've done somewhat similar things, but they've been a little bit too regimented. So they basically just become new kinds of universities. Maybe that is actually what's necessary. But I actually think that that going back to the old medieval system of education, where could have a really big impact? So to get back to your question, if you have even a relatively small minority of people studying in this way, and then speaking out about how they have studied the whole phenomenon, the whole idea of independent learning, and here, I don't mean necessarily studying all on your own as an independent scholar, but independent of universities, independently managed, managed by yourself, man with the help of maybe a few professionals. That idea will get out there. And I think that is another thing that that could happen, I think eventually will happen, I might make it happen. So we'll see.
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:00
You know what makes that happen, though more so than one of us or several of us trying to create that environment or perpetuate the advancement of that environment is that somebody with that style of education becomes enormously successful? No, you're right. But that's really all we need is for some heightened of industry to say, Well, of course, I'm dominating this industry. Here's how I was, you know, here's how I developed myself. Yeah, and how everybody else should and then that's how the bandwagon is created.
Unknown Speaker 41:33
Right? Well, I mean, we're already getting some of those effects, just just by the all of the success stories about about homeschooled college students, and early startup people, any number of startup people, I can't give you an examples because there's just a lot of little ones out there
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:50
You know, well, look at look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, all they had to do was drop out of Harvard.
Larry Sanger 41:56
Yeah.
Jon Leon Guerrero 41:58
So let's see.
Unknown Speaker 41:59
Yeah, it's So far I'm not see, I don't know how good of an education those guys got. Right? They they started learning, presumably something about about their fields, you know, tech and entrepreneurship. When they left college, I think a better example would be would be somebody who actually did get a substantive education and used it. So, yeah, again, I think there's some some startup people who have been homeschooled. Yeah, it's interesting.
Pete Turner 42:32
You were talking earlier, and it seemed like you were referring to your influence in like, how you've got to be careful on what projects you take on or what you attach your name to, because you know, of the whole Wikipedia impact. Can you talk a little bit more about how that does impact what projects you pursue because putting your name and attaching your your influence to something definitely has an impact?
Unknown Speaker 42:56
Oh, well, thank you for saying that. I don't know how much of an impact it has. But the reason that I care about that is is not because I think my name has an impact, it's that, that I don't want to water down whatever reputation I have. And I also think that that business can be a force for bad as well as good. And I want to be on the side of the good, basically. So the question is, how do I decide?
Pete Turner 43:27
Yeah, like, how do you weigh that out in your on your personal scale?
Larry Sanger 43:30
Yeah, right now, for example, I'm going to start looking for new gigs. And you know, there have been people who've been after me, the last, actually a lot in the last couple of years. And I've been offered literally dozens and dozens of times to be an advisor for different blockchain. companies and I accepted twice. I just have to start talking about ethics. Right, because that's all it really comes down to. It's like, I don't want to represent myself as an expert in something which it seems it seems I would have to do that someone wanted me to be an advisor. This is a long time ago, but about startup about pharmaceuticals. I was like, Why on earth? Do you want me to be an advisor for a pharmaceutical company? That doesn't even make sense? I have enough money. I'm not rich at all. I'm middle class, I live more or less paycheck to paycheck, or at least I don't have a lot of cushion. But I'm not worried. I'm very grateful to be able to say that I'm not worried. And that is absolutely fine with me being able to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about whether I've done something wrong by joining some sort of shady organization. You can't put a price on that. Right. So the real answer to your question ultimately is you know, why should you be honest? Well, actually actually answered that question, by the way, why be moral? I have a blog post up, its recent too. So go to Larry sanger.org. And yeah, just scroll down. And right now it is about like number eight. Yeah, I mean beyond. beyond that. I mean, if you're if you're asking like how do I decide what you know who to work with or what to put my reputation behind, it has to be something that I am, have some expertise, expertise in, also has to be, I have to be really convinced that the people who are behind it are both intelligent and competent, so that they can actually successfully carry off that idea, but maybe more importantly than that, even is that I think the idea is one worth pursuing. Basically, So like I turned down jobs with with Jason Calacanis twice, and I don't know why he was after me so much. Exactly. But I was working on other things at the time. And, you know, the opportunities that he were he was offering were were not as they didn't seem to be as important for purposes of changing the world for the better. Basically, that's what it's all about. I mean, there isn't anything else.
Pete Turner 46:31
Right? Yeah, changing the world for the
Jon Leon Guerrero 46:34
better. Well, I want to tell our listeners, Larry sanger.org, there's so much more there than article number eight. There's a ton of reading material. You guys should go through it. There's a lot there. To to see, including a much more thorough and complete explanation of the cycle of sphere works and why it's important. It's always interesting talking
Pete Turner 46:55
to you, Larry, because you're part philosopher, you're part Wikipedia founder. You know, this is, this is an incredible opportunity to see and hear from you on how you how you see the world playing out. I think our generation is sort of, if we're going to be unfair, the boomers came up and they did all the hippie stuff and, and and then they raised shitty ex hippie kids and, you know, but come on be nice. But the Gen X folks we've sorted it's kind of been like, Well, whatever, we're just going to work on our stuff. And I was locked out of my house every day when mom and dad had to go work. You know, I was a latchkey kid. That's the story, basically.
Larry Sanger 47:37
Yeah, me too.
Pete Turner 47:38
Yeah. And you know, when you are left up to your own devices, you find out new things and you discover stuff and you read content, your spare time because there's nothing else you can do. And you end up you end up starting a world famous, you know, internet encyclopedia, and I love this in the thing I wanted to say is, as I tell these stories, and we create all these things, having a resource to learn about whatever president it is, or whatever historical thing it is. And giving all those authors a slightly, you know, it allows you to de silo all that great work into something that really can give you a better idea of who Julius Caesar was or what IBM is, or, you know, any topic, you can have a multitude of variety of perspectives and get truly a better sense, because it turns out one person can't capture everything about something,
Unknown Speaker 48:29
right? No, absolutely. No. I mean, I've always been a huge fan of collaboration. And I think that it is very possible that the top ranked articles in the future in psycho sphere rankings will almost always be collaboratively written articles, but it will be different groups of collaborators. And no, I mean, they look we we huge appreciate having all of this information at our fingertips. But I don't think we realize what we're missing out on when that information is not really up to snuff, that it isn't as well written or as well sourced or as credible as it might be. And I think that that when we actually are able to surface what has a reasonable claim to be the best explanation of a certain topic, according to the experts on the subject, or according to to some algorithmically determined neutral article, I think we're going to see what we have been missing out on with Wikipedia, it's a lot a lot and not just not just in terms of quality, but also in terms of quantity. So one thing that they that the young guys that ever pedia sort of turned me on to which I didn't really realize before. I'd started thinking about it a lot and working with them on it is just the idea that there could be encyclopedia articles about a hell of a lot more things than then there are out there now like, I, my desktop background happens to have a bunch of sailboats on it. I can imagine people writing pages encyclopedia articles through might not write any other kinds of articles about their stuff, but to catalog to as a way of just saving the information out there. I can imagine millions of articles about sailboats out there, and it's just one of the one of the things that people do. And if there's, I mean, the information on some obscure sale sailboat might be worthless, or we'll see I guess, there will be studies done to see how, how good the information about obscure topics is if it's available and out there. It might turn out to be make life even easier, I suppose. I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah.
Jon Leon Guerrero 51:00
Well, I think our guest today has been Larry Sanger. And Larry would thank you not only for coming on the show and expressing your point of view, but I think in large part articulating a good chunk of ours as well, because I think your advantage at this moment in time is that you have a great firm grasp of what has happened with technology, historically speaking with a very sharp eye on the future
Pete Turner 51:27
of what can
Jon Leon Guerrero 51:28
happen, so that we maximize the potential of what we're capable of doing and what we're capable of capturing. And we really appreciate that and we appreciate your optimism and we appreciate your willingness to share.
Larry Sanger 51:43
Thank you. I appreciate that.
