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hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm talking with jimmy wales of wikipedia fame jimmy welcome thank you it's very good to be here let's say there's a benevolent donor of either money or time
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where in the wikipedia system is the highest marginal return for that person well i i think it depends on that person because if you're if you're looking to make a marginal impact um if you have unique knowledge on some fairly obscure topic
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uh that no one else has then you may be the best person or the only person in the world who can actually make a difference in that uh area uh on the other hand if you wanted to be you know the 11 millionth person who's keeping an eye on the
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donald trump article well your contribution while important is probably going to be marginally speaking uh a little bit less uh so i think it just sort of depends i mean certainly what we see oftentimes is that people
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who have the largest impact for the amount of time they're spending are people who are working in smaller languages in the developing world so if you've got some knowledge there uh you can have a huge impact just by helping to get the community going building the community and so forth so it it sort of depends on the on the skill set even for a fairly fixed historical topic take shakespeare's play hamlet this year there have already been at
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least 35 edits to that entry what exactly at the margin is being done there why does that happen well i mean it's very interesting oftentimes i have i haven't reviewed that particular article but oftentimes uh you know things that are relatively
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stable uh what we see are sort of slight improvements to wording making something that seems a little bit confusing read a little more smoothly adding some obscure fact but actually one of the things that's very
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interesting when we first got started we we took a look at and we imported a handful of articles from the 1911 edition of britannica which was in the public domain uh so it was not no longer under copyright so we were allowed to use it
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and you know we imported some articles and and you would think okay since 1911 what have we really learned about julius caesar well it turns out a lot uh even on very old topics uh like hamlet um scholarship has carried on scholarship
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continues new things are learned uh new perspectives are generated you know for things like uh hamlet the impact of hamlet on the world of course is still a thing that happens in the contemporary world it's kind of fun to think about you know what if we look at the wikipedia entries from 10 years ago what has changed in the last 10 years on some topic that you think would have been stable for the last 10 years and i think i think it would be
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quite interesting to actually study that and buried you think of wikipedia first and foremost as an enlightenment project because it's obviously teaching people a conservative project it's conserving the best knowledge of
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the past or is it also a radical project that it plays a role in mobilizing social movements uh a little bit of all three i guess um although probably more more of the enlightenment project um which in its own way is quite radical
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in today's culture i mean certainly when we look at the the tone and the style of wikipedia which continues to be quite dry quite matter of fact you know the wikipedia style and contrast that with a lot of what's going on in our media culture
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things like twitter and so forth where you do tend to have uh a much more outrageous style in some ways i think that that's it's quite a radical project to say okay hold on everybody why don't we slow down and if we're going to talk about
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something like obamacare is my favorite example um are we for her against it actually before we know for forward or against it maybe shouldn't we actually find out what it is so shouldn't we just read a neutral clear description
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as best we can as we can find to understand it before we come to some conclusion um and that's you know in today's culture maybe a little bit radical even though in another sense obviously it's quite old-fashioned if we put aside your
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official wikipedia role and just ask you jimmy wales as an individual human being are you an exopedian a metapedian or a mesopedian you'll have to define the three for me an exopedian is one who emphasizes the encyclopedia encyclopedia-like nature of wikipedia and the the knowledge building component of the project a medipedian is more of a focus on the social mechanisms the processes the rules the community and mesopedian is supposedly they tell
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me you're kind of moderate i mean which of those is the greatest attraction to you i must be i must be the moderate uh there are wikipedia pages on all of these terms by the way it's amazing it's amazing um yeah i'm a moderate on that i mean i think for me they you know and in fact there was an interesting discussion today that i was involved with um about uh i think her name is susan greenfield who is the she's the she's nope susan greenfield is
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a friend of mine anyway uh forgotten her name but she's the democratic she's running for the senate in iowa she's the democratic candidate and wikipedia doesn't have a page about her and i was somebody said this to me on twitter why doesn't
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you have a page on on this politician who's um the frontrunner at the moment to be elected to the senate in iowa and i said gee i don't know let me go check and what i found was this enormously convoluted very very wikipedia
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discussion about the rules and the process and that there was a deletion a while back because she was not notable when she first announced her candidacy because she was not someone who we could find any information about however she has become
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notable in the last several months including national media coverage but the whole thing got caught in this web of complicated wikipedia-ness and i said i i cited our one of our oldest rules the ignore all rules rule
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to say if some rule is preventing you from making wikipedia better then ignore that rule does that rule apply to itself it does yes in fact it's probably the most frequently ignored rule of all um but uh you know
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and interestingly like it was it was a situation where i in today's sort of discussion i think you would say i'm i'm the the first one i care most about let's make the encyclopedia be encyclopedic and good quality and neutral and all of that
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and the rules are kind of secondary to that at the same time i think the social processes and the rules and thinking about how do we design them is actually the in the long run the important part and the hard part
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because when i look at a situation like what we had today on that i say gee you know not this is all hopeless we got this one badly wrong i'm like okay but what exactly should we change because these rules are not completely random right there are
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reasons for them as somebody said you know it's it's like the garage band which gets nominated for deletion and then and request reinstatement 15 times till people are sick of it because they're no longer notable uh is
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actually the reason some of the procedures are in place it's just to give us a mechanism for dealing with those things but in some cases those procedures go wrong and so we have to really think about okay what went wrong how do we make that better
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and it's a very you know it's a very different kind of model as compared to moderation at twitter or youtube or somewhere like that where you know it's it's sort of behind the scenes invisible this is an open dialogue it's a chewing on ideas and so on it's very very public although often impenetrable in the sense that it's it's a it's a lot of words which kinds of topics do you think wikipedia is not so very well geared to cover instructively
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um i mean i i think there are you know there are cases where wikipedia is biased not because of any intention of people to be biased but just because no one cares about that thing except fans of that thing so i always give the example if you look
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at our articles on japanese anime they tend to be quite positive because nobody actually cares about japanese anime except for people who love japanese anime it's sort of a binary thing there aren't people who unlike
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say famous politicians where people do take sides um you know if you don't like japanese anime you probably don't watch it and you don't write about it in wikipedia and so uh oftentimes and that's fairly harmless right it's it's japanese anime and and if the articles are not sufficiently critical that's probably not a huge issue um other other cases are you know i think there are certain kinds of disputes where the amount of energy that we put in
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to trying to keep the articles good quality is probably far out of proportion to the results although the results are quite good so i don't mean that the results aren't good so if you look at something like um george w bush and you think about
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here's this article and it's this long and it's very detailed and then you say how many human hours were spent hammering away making this what it is today and it's an enormous amount of time spent doing it you probably could have
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done it in a smaller amount of time if you just sat down four or five thoughtful people and said let's work on this um on the other hand there's something interesting and something valid about this open public process where everything is
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open to challenge and a further debate and you think it's the case that wikipedia shifts the relative social balance away from philosophy and toward history so if i want to read about the life of napoleon wikipedia is clearly a very
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good place to go if i want to understand better what is beauty it's less obvious to me that i should start with wikipedia so aren't you making history more central to our thinking it doesn't have to be bad but do you think that's true yeah i mean it's interesting because i think if you if you wanted to understand the concept of beauty as understood in philosophy wikipedia would be a good place to go but it what you would be reading about
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in a sense is the history of philosophy and so therefore yeah yeah it's history again uh you know there's an old uh sort of meme and it's it is largely true that if you go to wikipedia and you go to any entry and then you
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once you get past the pronunciation and you click any uh like the first link of everything uh then it takes only a few clicks and you end up at philosophy so if i went to your uh biography on wikipedia it probably takes me four or five clicks
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by just clicking on the first link of each thing that i come to uh and then you end up at philosophy and that's just simply because of the the genus species nature of a definition or an explanation of something so i'm not sure that means philosophy is
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central in the sense you're talking about now as you know wikipedia is open it's free it doesn't have ads it's a kind of dream of the early tech utopians why is it the only surviving dream of that kind that has persisted
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well i mean it's an interesting thing and i'm not sure it's the only but it's certainly the most famous and the largest and you know i think there's there's a few different reasons um i i think so i've been on a real kick lately to talk a lot about how business model drives uh outcomes and in sometimes in surprising ways or they're not that surprising after the fact but they weren't maybe not anticipated and so you know for wikipedia it isn't
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so much that it's a non-profit although that probably has has a certain impact as well but the fact that wikipedia does not have an advertising business model means that the wikimedia foundation the organization behind wikipedia
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really faces a different set of incentives uh even as a nonprofit you have to think in a business-like way you have to say how we're going to pay the bills and how do we achieve our mission so if you think about advertising driven social media um
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the real incentive is to show you as many ads as possible so they really obsess over time on site and it's driven them to create addictive products it's driven them in many cases to prioritize um agitation and
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argumentation in a negative sense over education and learning and thoughtfulness uh simply because if you you know if you went to twitter and you found out the three things you wanted to know and you left they wouldn't get a chance to show you
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very many ads but if you go to twitter and you see 18 people who are wrong and you've got to sort of straighten them out uh you might stay for hours uh doing this very addictive uh hobby and so when we think about things at wikipedia
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so for example um you know we could probably increase engagement if we use some of the very basic machine learning techniques to start showing people random promotional links to other things in wikipedia and then have the machine learn over
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time how to how to show you links that are more interesting so that you you know you end up staying on the site longer now it might turn out that that that's completely normal and and vocal and in fact if you go to
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a you know a well-known economist that it turns out that the the way to keep you on the site longer is to show you other concepts of economics and economic theory but it might turn out and probably would turn out the best thing to do is when you go to
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look up tyler cohen to show you on the on the sidebar you know links to kim kardashian donald trump whatever the hot topic of the day is and so on which is not really what you want from an encyclopedia and so i think when we
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think about that our incentive structure at wikipedia is not to optimize time on site it's to say look every now and then normally at the end of the year we say hey you know would you donate some money and nobody has to donate uh and so the
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only reason people do donate and this is what donors tell us is you know they they think this is meaningful like this is important to my life like this should live this should exist so we got you know kind of a year between
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the time we ask you for money to become a part of your life and make it meaningful enough for you to say i want to click and i want to i want to contribute to this and that's just a completely different set of uh incentives in front of us in
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terms of how do we optimize that how contingent do you think is the history of wikipedia or something like it so if you and the people you were working with had not come along when you did and done what you did and it was simply left the field were left open would wikipedia be more like maximizing engagement a for-profit company it wouldn't be called wikipedia but it would be some kind of online encyclopedia something maybe more like a
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facebook model or do you think there's something intrinsic about your enterprise that it was going to be a not-for-profit no matter who did it um it's a very good question i i mean i i think in many ways it's contingent i mean i i think it didn't
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have to exist at all uh and so the idea of a publicly written encyclopedia using a wiki model is not necessarily something that was inevitable um and then a separate part of that is was it inevitable that we would choose a
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non-profit non-advertising business model definitely that was not inevitable uh that was a set of conscious choices that we made um i used to joke it was either the best decision or the worst decision i ever made but then i stopped even making the joke because even even if i said it was a joke i would get headlines saying oh jimmy wells regrets that he's not a billionaire it's like that's not what i said actually and it's only a joke anyway
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it's clearly a great decision but the um you know ultimately it i i think it didn't have to be this way i mean i think it could have been different in fact you could you could imagine several different models uh let's say that i
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i was still in charge of everything and instead of putting it into the non-profit structure i kept it in a for-profit structure but it pursued sort of like uh craig newmark of craigslist you know a model where i say look i'm
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gonna maintain complete control of the stock and i'm not gonna raise venture capital money i'm gonna run it as a very profitable hobby um and get some donations or maybe i'll stick a little ad here there but i'm not gonna try to monetize
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you know like crazy that's possible although hard to really imagine just as i think craigslist is hard to really imagine you know it's like craig's made a ton of money but he could have made 10 tons of money and he's just the kind of person
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for whom a ton is plenty so uh you know it's an interesting question really what are the greatest threats to the future of wikipedia um well this is what i always have trouble with because i always say i'm a pathological optimist and so that's part of why wikipedia exists as it is because i just think we can find a way and it'll all work out and it'll be fine um but the things that i would say that we focus on and think a lot about are really
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it's about community health so how do we make sure that the community is happy uh productive sort of not full of trolls uh thoughtful kind all of the all of those great wikipedia values which are you know like all communities all groups
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of people we have a certain set of values that we aspire to and we live up to them to a lesser greater extent on a day-to-day basis um and how do we make sure that we are still mostly doing the right things that we're mostly
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getting right knowing that it can't be perfect um because you know financially i feel like we're okay uh you know the the fundraisers do very well we're very conservative with money so i think that as an immediate threat or an obvious
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threat not so much although technology shifts and so you know will the technology move people to voice assistance where they don't actually come to wikipedia but they just get the information from us and end up not donating money now that's
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a possibility um but that's that's kind of it and then obviously there are other potential threats um but i feel confident that we can defeat them but as i say i'm a pathological optimist um there's a lot of noise these days
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about repealing section 230 of the communications thesis act without which wikipedia couldn't exist i mean it's completely impossible um and i can talk more about that i can talk for an hour about that if we wanted to um but because we've got some
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uh noise around that not only from the right i mean donald trump has been tweeting all caps repeals section 230 i'm not sure he even knows what it is um but from the left as well uh you know because people are
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are concerned about the power of the big tech companies and they wonder if section 230 is has something to do with that and so on and so forth um and so i think that is under threat and i think that that is a serious threat to anything that's open
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on the internet there's something called conquest's second law which i believe is itself on wikipedia and it suggests that all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing over time evolve to become more left-wing we've seen this with the ford
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foundation pew foundation rockefeller do you think conquest second law is essentially correct i i i don't know i i wouldn't think so although i don't know i have no idea i mean i i think we definitely have organizations
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that i wouldn't say you could easily categorize in contemporary terms as either left or right wing and i'm thinking in particular of the catholic church um which have maintained quite steady certain kind of values and ideas for a very very long
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period of time with minimal shift over time and you know if you try to characterize religion as either right or left-wing i think typically in the u.s you would tend to say right wing but if you look at the current pope and
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certain elements of the church's positions you you would say they're pretty left-wing in other words i mean i don't think they easily fit into that but but the broader point is can an organization maintain um you know an explicit set of values over a very long period of time that is neither left or right wing in its nature and i think so i mean certainly it seems possible to me but let's say in the us at least that politics continues to polarize
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along educational lines now obviously most wikipedia contributors people on the board are going to be well educated one way or another if only self-educated is it then really still possible for wikipedia to maintain what would be seen as a neutral stand by people on the other side i mean i i think that's a really a really tough question um i think i think there we can we can we can slice it up a little bit and get a little more refined and say
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can wikipedia maintain a neutral stand yes that i think yes objectively speaking yes but that would be recognized as such by some people on the other side that would be universally recognized as stuff as such that could be quite hard i mean
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we're we're in an era where um there there's such an a decline in respect for traditional journalistic institutions um across the board that you begin to think you know you know i the way i think about i i think about
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quality publications that matter and so i think about you know the wall street journal tending to be a bit more on the right and the new york times tend to be a bit more on the left uh and then you think yeah but where does breitbart fit into that um where where does some of the new media publications fit into that and where do people who believe that all of those things are part of some sort of elite conspiracy to you know hide the truth about
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pedophiles or whatever um it becomes hard i mean i think it's very hard when you have people who have given up on the concept of objectivity the concept of neutrality and that isn't necessarily just on the right um certainly when we when we think about
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post-modernism and some of the the critiques of the ideas of neutrality and objectivity that come from that end of the world it's it's it's sort of a deeper philosophical question i would say how well and how fairly has the media
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covered wikipedia i mean pretty well pretty fairly i mean it it's an interesting thing because there was a there was a time and even at that time i i did feel that it was a temporary phase so there was a time when it was a popular thing to do to kind of troll through wikipedia find something wrong and then write an inflammatory story about something was wrong on wikipedia and i said at the time to you know the community to volunteers
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that you know it there was a there was a period of time when it became fashionable to write very easy cheap news stories about something horrible on ebay you know you see oh no someone's selling their baby on ebay or they're selling
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their soul on ebay or they're telling the baby's soul on ebay or they're selling it gun or whatever and after a little while people realize actually it's not legal to sell your baby on ebay and it's against the rules of ebay and if
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somebody posts it as a joke it just gets taken down and over time the media more broadly got bored of writing a story like oh no someone vandalized wikipedia i mean i remember one case in particular when a uh famous celebrity died what was her name
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anna something she was a uh she married a really old guy for his money and so on anyway she died of a drug overdose and somebody vandalized wikipedia and wrote something terrible about her uh and then i got and it was a huge
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story the day she died because she had drago rosie's very famous um tabloidy person and one of the journalists said does this does this show something deeply wrong with the wikipedia model and i said it shows something deeply wrong with
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what's going on in journalism that this celebrity dies i get eight phone calls um about a vandalism on wikipedia like that's absolutely not the point so there have been times when i felt oh that's actually not fair but in general
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we've been treated well and i i think certainly over time a lot of the worst fears that people had about wikipedia that was just going to degenerate into a troll fest or something like that um haven't proven true
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and i would say in recent years once we've seen how bad social media can be uh we've been you know we've been treated very very nicely what's the biggest problem with how wikipedia has covered wikipedia there's a whole page as you probably
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know you know why wikipedia isn't so great is it too negative on itself well i mean when we when we set ourselves the mission to do something like that we're very thorough and good at it as we are wikipedians um and
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no i mean i actually think that's really healthy i mean i think that you know i've said to to people you know if you want to understand uh critiques of wikipedia there's a really good page about that in wikipedia and i think that's great i think that's
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fantastic i would say you know we the the areas where i think we struggle the most and i alluded this earlier just talking about a thing that i just happened to be involved with this morning um we we become very bureaucratic in a certain kind of
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way we've got a lot of history we've got a lot of rules uh we've got a lot of procedures they're all there for a reason they're all arguably do more good than harm uh and yet it it is hard for people new people to get
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involved it's hard for people to understand certain things there was a there was a a good example was we got a little bit of negative press because a famous author wrote quite a it was actually i thought quite an amusing piece about
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how something about his ideas was wrong in wikipedia and he emailed us to a correction to say no this that's not what i think and he got something back saying do you have a source and he's like what better source could i
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have for what i think and that was it's amusing and funny and it's sort of like oh isn't that terrible wikipedia won't accept an author's own words as except the issue was he emailed us from a random sounding gmail address there
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was no proof it was actually him he had a blog he could have easily written a post in his blog explaining something and so it was it was actually more subtle than that it was like no we actually do care what he thinks and we're not
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out to do this but because he didn't understand wikipedia and by the way it's not his job to understand wikipedia i'm not saying that at all um you know like we had an outcome that was okay not optimal how is the rise of mobile shaped the content of wikipedia so take a not too controversial article say the napoleon bonaparte one more and more people are reading it on mobile more are editing it on mobile what's the invisible hand mechanism
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that connects the rise of mobile to how the actual words on the page might end up being different so i it's a that's a great question and i define a great question as one that no one's ever asked me so very good
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um i would say that the connection is probably less than it should be so wikipedia editing is still overwhelmingly a desktop phenomenon part of that is is that the mobile editing experience isn't great uh in the past i would say the mobile
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editing experience isn't great because we need to invest more money in making it better but today i would say actually it's probably about as good as it can be i'm sure we can still improve it and there are people who are working on that
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but the issue is it's a small form factor like how do you actually make it easy to edit on a mobile device it's quite difficult and we look at things for mobile participation like is there is there a way for people to quickly do a
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spelling fix or something like that and then the content you know so it's written largely on the desktop and therefore there is a divide in a sense between reading and writing um but that probably doesn't matter
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so much because i think the reading experience for wikipedia on on mobile is perfectly fine in some ways it's better because the scan distance for reading is a little shorter but you know it probably could be a little more optimized for reading on
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mobile devices now you don't allow paid for editing but i've known people who are paid editors on wikipedia they write things they're not for the most part slanting content they're trying to fill in gaps or add detail on maybe the
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person they work for to what extent do you think wikipedia is actually somewhat parasitic on non-transparent paid for editing and you get rid of the worst manifestations of it but it's still a big part of the underlying foundation
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um it's a really good question um i mean it's something that we struggle with and uh we know that it does go on and we know that we don't approve of it and around the margins there are a lot of different kind of angles on on what that looks
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like and so uh i think one of the first things to to note is that we try to make a distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy editing so the the difference is let's say you're a university professor and your
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university says actually as a part of your evaluation uh we are interested in our professors uh being involved in in the public dialogue in public debate and actually if you can contribute knowledge to wikipedia uh and show us that we consider that a
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positive thing and and you'll get a good review based on that well then in some sense they're being paid out of wikipedia but they aren't being paid in the same way that the pr department of the university would be paid
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to make the university look good and in fact they probably wouldn't have much interest in making sure that uh you know the page about the university itself is good and so that's paid editing but not paid advocacy editing so paid advocacy editing is really the problem and in that case uh people are of different minds i'm quite a hardliner on this i just think it's not something people should be doing at all and in fact i think what we need to do
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to cope with it is have better mechanisms uh that are less combative for people who have a conflict of interest to actually contribute constructively by not editing pages by making suggestions in some organized fashion that will
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actually be paid attention to but that that gives rise to a lot of other problems one of the problems is um you know there's the old saying which i should know who said it but uh you know it's it's very hard to get someone to understand something
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when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it uh and so you know if you're being paid to spruce up the page about your boss and you know your idea of what's uh neutral filling in the gaps and our idea might be substantially
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different simply because you come to it with a an advocacy bias and that's problematic but there you know i think what works for people is if they come in in good faith and talk to the community that's that's by far the most effective
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way to get things done but we also know there are people who are who are doing paid editing and uh you know it's something that we we basically disprove because we also see the the the abuses of it uh you know where people go around
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uh trying to charge people a lot of money pretending things that aren't true about what they can get done and so on and so forth now i'm the rare person who actually has no sock puppets why not allow sock puppets what exactly
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is wrong with them so what if a person has more than one identity out there as long as you can monitor the identity that is operating on wikipedia so i mean that's a great question and in fact we we do try to make
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a distinction between a sock puppet and a legitimate alternate account and we actually have procedures whereby you can declare a legitimate alternate account uh to the arbitration committee uh so that you're sort of insulated from any uh bad harms
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if it's found out so some of the keys are that we we rely on trust and um one of the things that that is really important to us we we do a lot of um what we call not voting so it's voting but it's really a straw poll it's the the
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votes are typically not uh they're not the final word and if somebody comes into a discussion and pretends to be five different people arguing that something should be deleted and there are two actual different people arguing that it
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should be kept that's deceptive and it kind of skews the balance and so people who are reviewing that say well i sort of think we should keep it but i see there are five people here with a different opinion so maybe i
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maybe i'm wrong um and so that that bulking up your impact by double voting on something by pretending to be different people is super problematic uh the other kind of uh problematic puppeting is suck puppet to conceal your conflict of interest so
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i remember we had one notorious case of a pr firm that had engaged in quite a lot of problematic editing and one of their accounts it made you know a lot of edits and pretended to be a retired fellow who was a car collector and there were all these pictures of old cars and so on they had a whole persona created to seem like a lovely chap who just like to edit wikipedia but if i was just somebody at the pr firm who was just giving a cover
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and i just think that kind of deception is problematic the kinds of good examples of uh you know multiple accounts would be someone who wants to edit in a controversial area um i mean as an example let's say uh you know you're a well-known person
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and suppose you took an interest in our entries on pedophilia not because of any korean interest but simply because you think this is actually an important topic of social impact and and well you probably wouldn't
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necessarily want to be known at your university as the guy who edits the pedophilia articles on wikipedia like that's just not easy for people to be open about even if you're doing all the right things and so you might say yeah i actually want to edit uh you know in some areas of world war ii history under this identity but i'm going to do some work over here and i really prefer it not to be tied back to my real life identity and that's kind of
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okay right as long as you're not voting in in elections with two accounts and things like that do you believe in what the europeans sometimes call the right to be forgotten on the internet i i have a real problem with the right to be forgotten
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uh as it is currently enshrined in european law and um you know i think it's it's a complicated subject but here we go so first of all i think privacy is very important uh and i think that um a lot of internet services need to be much more
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thoughtful about people's privacy and really think harder about this i also think a lot of governments need to think harder in the new era about privacy versus uh transparency about public information about other citizens so
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as an example um i live in the uk but i'm registered to vote in florida and so i registered for mail-in ballot and i got an email saying you know here's your ballot information blah blah blah and you can go and and i can look up my
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ballot uh not not how i voted but i can look up my home address uh which i normally try to keep very very secret i probably shouldn't even mention this because trolls will now know where to go and look for it but my home mattress is there and all you need is my name and my date of birth and you can get my home address and i'm like that's not really necessary for public transparency or is it it's a good question like that i think we need to
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struggle with some of those questions so right to be forgotten my biggest beef with right to be forgotten in the uk currently is that um google can be forced to take down links to content that is perfectly legal on publishers website in fact the case
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that got this all underway is a link to a newspaper article which is still online but google is not allowed to link to it and there's no judge involved and so when we think about this kind of in a in a an american first
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amendment uh context what you would say is it wouldn't do it wouldn't pass first amendment scrutiny to say oh no it's perfectly legal to publish this magazine it's just not legal to offer it in stores like you're not allowed to you have to hide it and we would say hold on a second that's just not right like that that that is a violation of the freedom of expression if you can't distribute your content because clearly if you're not findable
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in google that's a problem like nobody's going to read the piece and so and there's no there's no easy right of appeal i mean you can appeal to google and i do believe google's doing the best they can to balance people's uh privacy interests with um
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with freedom of expression interest but i don't think it's google's job uh i don't think that we want to have a company however well-intentioned to be tasked in society with deciding um those kinds of issues where really if
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something is such an egregious privacy violation that it should be censored boy i really want to have a judge involved i really i think that is something that we need to to not have handled at the company level now in the middle of all these
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conversations we have a section overrated versus underrated i'll toss out a few ideas you tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated got it great yeah fun growing up in huntsville alabama overrated or underrated
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i would say underrated liberated well huntsville is a really interesting place so i grew up in alabama which is not known generally to be a super high-tech place but huntsville alabama is where the nasa scientists are headquartered
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so they're at the space and rocket center which means that well for a time in the early 60s huntsville apparently had the highest number of phds per capita of any place in the u.s so huntsville is quite a high-tech town
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and yet at least for me what what i feel was important as well was not just the high-tech piece of it but it is southern in a good way like people are very polite people are friendly uh it's kind of an open
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openness of culture which i think has served me very well uh with wikipedia because i'm basically just friendly to people and that that's actually very helpful so underrated transhumanism overrated or underrated uh a bit of both uh probably over
40:50
i'm not sure how it's rated actually i think 99.9 of all people have never even heard of the the idea and probably people are massively into it overrated and everybody else sort of underrates it so maybe that's the marleybone section of london
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oh well let's just say overrated it's very nice there i actually used to live there i live in in notting hill now but um it's really nice but if you're talking about living anywhere in london i think you have to say take a look at
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the property prices and you'll say this whole place is overrated it's outrageous black shoals option pricing theory overrated or underrated [Music] i know you have an opinion here well again i mean i think there was a period
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of time when it was definitively overrated uh because it's a genius sort of innovation a very very clever model and uh actually revolutionized a lot about how people thought about finance and enabled a lot of interesting stuff
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in derivatives of course as a model describing reality it's got serious weaknesses which is why it's been replaced over time with more sophisticated models uh so probably by today people think oh black shoals that's like a little toy model that
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doesn't actually show anything that's underrating it but but maybe at the beginning when people thought it was the uh you know the second commenting and that was probably overrated and your piece criticizing black shawls
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is that the first thing you ever wrote i don't i don't think i ever criticized virtuals i wrote a piece uh that was an extension i i always like to think it was it was the last extension of the most obscure possible thing which was the pricing of index options when all of the underlying assets follow a lot of normal diffusion so it was in the black trolls tradition it was sort of the last little tick of something it was a huge complicated
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mathematical mess but it wasn't a critique of black trolls it was just trying to extend it to a different sort of case ein rand's objectivist epistemology overrated or underrated i would say underrated there and i think that's an
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interesting one because clearly um her politics and sort of ethics and and other aspects of her thinking are hugely controversial and and you know whatever we could we could say lots of things about that but but her epistemology i think is very
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interesting and i'm not an expert uh but i used to be quite keen on this area and i read a lot and i thought a lot and i think there's some real insights and interesting insights there about concept formation that have not been appreciated by people who just think oh she wrote these long ranting novels um about capitalism and i think there was more to her thinking than most people realized so underrated what's the weakest part of her philosophy
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um i mean i i think that one of the biggest issues is that her her writing exhibits a lack of kindness and and you know one of her core values was chewing on ideas something she loved to do in her in her life and it's something that she
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advocated is chewing on ideas and what that means is you know really thinking things through considering alternatives and so on that you wouldn't necessarily know because once she chewed on the ideas long enough she has quite a
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sort of flamboyant and dramatic way of presenting them as if she's just ranting to you about you know the world as she sees it um and so i think that's that's kind of problematic i think it would be better if if her public image were more about
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let's be thoughtful and think and reflect on complicated ideas because the simple answers are probably not the correct answers how if the last five years or so of our experience with the internet caused you to revise your self-described
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libertarianism if at all um like is it working it's a it's a very good question um i'm always very cautious about the the label libertarian just because i find the libertarian party to be quite questionable on many things i guess where i where i
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come down is i would say uh on on many many issues i i like the the concept that we have in u.s law around the first amendment of strict scrutiny say look if we're going to have the government intervene in something
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we we need to be very thoughtful about that because we know very well from economics that uh many interventions don't work the way most people think they work and they actually can cause a lot more harm than good and so something very
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simple i mean the classic simple example would be you know let's raise the minimum wage to forty dollars an hour okay i think most people get um that actually probably isn't a great idea that isn't actually gonna help for
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people very much at all maybe a few of them but mostly not um and so it's the sort of thing you know it's like i guess over through my life as i've gotten older i've become more a a centrist in in the sense of or a gradualist right i think when i was
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21 i might have been sort of you know crush the state and eliminate all this and freedom is fantastic and now i'm really saying look if you're going to get anywhere and you're going to improve the state of the world and
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you're going to avoid authoritarian tendencies and you're going to avoid overreach by government you're going to have a prosperous society you need to be very thoughtful about how you change rules very thoughtful about how you get
46:38
somewhere my sort of classic example would be zoning laws uh if you just overnight eliminated all zoning laws i'm not sure you would get to the same place you would have gotten to had you had a more market-oriented solution from
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the beginning because zoning laws in some ways roughly replicate what a more market-oriented system might have come to and so they probably you know it's i don't know i guess i'm a gradualist in that sense so you've become more hayeky and you might say yeah maybe maybe that's possibly not sure what would your management advice excuse me what would your management advice be for facebook oh for facebook i mean so management advice i don't know i
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always say i'm a terrible manager but in terms of you know if i were giving advice to facebook um i think they've got a real a real hard problem so to be a little bit sympathetic for a moment although i've been quite critical
47:41
of facebook in many ways you know one of the things that we find easier at wikipedia is that wikipedia has never been a place that's a wide-open free speech forum and so we don't have to really deal with some very complicated edges around
47:57
what advocacy is crossing lines that are just too offensive because really at wikipedia you're not supposed to be advocating for any particular thing at all except for how do we make wikipedia better how do we how do we describe these ideas fairly
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and so if you come into wikipedia with some sort of an agenda however mild that's probably not the right thing to do and so for us these kinds of things we don't say oh yeah but people should be allowed to say
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whatever they want oh but what if it's so offensive like and they have to deal with that and it's really hard because the point of facebook and twitter is to just post whatever you think and your ideas and and then therefore
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you're going to find some people have completely horrific ideas so given that they've got a very difficult problem what i would say is they need to really think harder about the model that they're using for moderation which i think doesn't scale
48:49
very well so hiring people in sweatshop conditions to make content judgments um or trying to get ai which is not really ready to judge the nuances of human conversation to do it that neither of those is scaling very well none of those works
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very well as opposed to what i think is really more important is put more power into the hands of the community now what does that look like for wikipedia we know that what does that look like for facebook that's a
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hard problem i don't have a simple uh solution for them the one thing about facebook that i think is really really interesting is because of the structure of ownership of facebook uh mark zuckerberg has probably you know one of the strongest ceo
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positions of any company um he's it would be very difficult for anybody to oust him as ceo and therefore he can make decisions that would be death to a ceo who has to really panic about quarterly results so he can say
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look i'm going to make some decisions that are going to reduce engagement on facebook but that are going to prevent a situation where the whole world thinks we're destroying western civilization and we're going to maybe make half the
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money we were gonna make but in the long run it's good for shareholder value uh because we can demonstrate that if we carry on our current path everybody's starting to hate us and that's not good for business he could do
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that he has the power to do that and nobody could really fire him for that um and that means i kind of say old and responsible in a way i mean i hold all ceos responsible for doing morally right things but it's a little easier to understand uh you know if you're a company that says look if i i know what we're doing isn't great for the world but it's not illegal and if i stop doing it i'm going to get fired because the shareholders will revolt
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then it's like yeah you've got a tough problem for mark you know he doesn't need any more money he's got plenty uh and so therefore he is in a position where he can make decisions that are best for facebook in the long run
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i i'm not suggesting that he violate any fiduciary duties but that he can take a long view in a way that most ceos unfortunately can't how well is the facebook supreme court going to work the supreme court idea wikipedia i i not not wikipedia
51:17
at facebook i don't know how that's going to work out i think it really i'd like to know more about the structure of it and what actual power they have um if it's merely an advisory body uh filled with uh you know worthy types
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that facebook isn't going to listen to clearly that's going to absolutely do nothing but if they're willing to take seriously the idea and i think they do take this idea seriously that it isn't up to facebook to be the judge
51:46
of what's true or not i mean i think that's something that they don't want that responsibility uh and yet because it's a place where disinformation is being shared in a way that's is damaging the world and it's problematic they also have to take
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responsibility so you know it's like where do they draw the line i always remind people if we had a different set of historical facts and you know five years ago well i think it's longer than that now ten years ago facebook had suddenly said
52:16
we've actually decided to start shaping the public conversation by deciding what news is of quality or not uh and we're going to de-emphasize things that we think are low-quality we were all freaked out and said oh my god
52:29
it's orwellian facebook is now trying to decide for us what's true and what's not true now suddenly we're in this opposite universe where everybody's demanding facebook you must do something there's disinformation on your platform
52:41
so they're they're in a tough spot um and so i don't i don't know the the supreme court good yeah they better have some power otherwise i'm not sure what is it you think that you might know about the education of children
52:55
that other people do not oh that's a that's a good question i mean i i don't consider myself an expert on education but i have three children and i have my own experience you are then an expert on education i mean for me and i also can reflect on
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my own education so for me i think i you would either put me in the camp that says there is a big downside to traditional education in terms of if you aren't careful you can get into a very rigid process that is not good
53:30
for creativity um and so you know this is i'd say my ideas in that area are similar to uh unfortunately recently passed away sir ken robinson um and you know for me when i was young i had a very unusual education offering sometimes it was
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reported it was montessori but it wasn't technically montessori but it was very open and we had lots of free time and i basically spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia and incredibly valuable just to have time to
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explore be encouraged and following your curiosity as opposed to rigidly sitting in rows and sort of meeting testing standards and all of that having said that i'm not opposed to having standards for schools and and tests are a good way of
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measuring that um but i i think we need to really focus a lot on creativity uh because if we look forward the world faces a lot of problems and uh we're gonna need a lot of innovation to to solve some of these problems
54:33
if you had 100 million dollars to give away putting aside your own enterprises what would you do with it that's a really good question um well i i i liked seeing today that apparently michael bloomberg is spending 100 million in florida
54:51
uh for ads to defeat donald trump so i i'd be very tempted to go that route but i actually uh i was disappointed to to read something the other day and i haven't followed up so i don't know what the what the general public conclusion
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is that he had promised 100 billion to help people who had been disenfranchised in the state of florida because they had not paid some fines or some sort of fees to the government and therefore their right to vote had
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not been restored even though they had met all other conditions uh and he was gonna donate a lot of money and then i saw an ngo who said actually the money never showed up and a lot of other people donated but he didn't and they were
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unhappy with him so i don't know about that but i you know i think those kinds of things um which i mean actually if i step back probably defeating donald trump isn't how i would if i had one chunk of 100 million but i i think it's really about
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for me it's about how do we think about restoring a sense of decency and thoughtful public engagement um where you know we we we have a an election and i and i look at the policies and i say i'm going to vote for this person because i agree
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with that policy and you say oh i'm going to vote for the other person because i disagree on that policy and then we have an interesting conversation about the policy and we may not agree but we feel at the end of the
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day we've chewed on some ideas whereas today you know it's sort of the the ranting and the scandal mongering and all of that it's just it's not healthy it's not really giving us leadership that we need how happy are billionaires i know quite a few of them they seem pretty content how happy are famous people um that's a good question obviously that varies quite a bit uh i suppose actually to be fair it probably varies with the
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billionaires that was kind of a flippant answer um i don't think money buys happiness uh but the truth is um you know uh it buys freedom uh and so people you know they can pursue interest and do things like that um
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the the fame i mean i'll give an example of someone who i know uh reasonably well uh is sean parker and he is both famous and a billionaire and i think he were given the option to choose to give up one or the other he would definitely give up being famous
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because the the grief he's gotten in his life around his extravagant wedding and things like that are completely not aligned with the things he's interested in he's super interested in cancer research right and he
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and he donates money there and that's you know whenever i talk to him he's really passionate about certain areas of medicine not because he's trying to make money it's just like that's what he's interested in that makes him happy and being famous on
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the side is actually annoying that that's me assessing him i haven't actually asked him that but how happy are people who have power i mean that's a good question i mean the word even the word happy i mean what immediately comes to mind is uh
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president trump um he seems pretty i don't know does he seem happy i don't know it's a it's an interesting question um i think different people have different personalities um around power so some people have it because
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they want to do constructive things in the world and they like having power and so on and they're probably pretty happy other people i think they're just lost souls and they just want power and then attempt to be happy and maybe it doesn't
58:23
make them happy uh it's hard question i mean i i remember a few years ago i was on the street corner in new york city and i was just about to go into the uh steering general assembly and um the street was blocked off and
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then an enormous motorcade went by hundreds of motorcycles new york police then the secret service trump and more hundreds more motorcycles and i thought for a man who probably uh and i don't believe in diagnosing people
58:49
of medical conditions without knowing that probably qualifies for some sort of medical diagnosis of narcissism this can't be good for him but he must love it how happy are people who seem to have power but cannot in fact exercise it due
59:06
to constraints uh that's a that's an interesting question um i mean i think again it really depends on on who they are and how they got there um you know i i mean i i would sort of put that myself in that category people think i have a lot of
59:27
power wikipedia but um i'm very ceremonial um and i give advice and i try to be thoughtful and people do listen to me so i have influence uh but not power uh and i'm very happy about that uh for me i'm very very content about it
59:41
so other people though may have come to that situation in a way that they expected to have power and they don't so then they must be quite unhappy two last questions first can wikipedia truly survive without you i know you're
59:56
calling your role ceremonial but you're a kind of focal point a final layer of adjudication i once said to vitalik buter and in my chat with him well ethereum relies on you even when you do nothing you're the russian sage in the
1:00:10
background like in an old dostoevsky novel are you in fact the american now partly british sage in the background of wikipedia who underpins the whole thing even when or perhaps because you do nothing um well i mean it appeals to my ego
1:00:28
to imagine such uh that you know obviously without my sage wisdom and guidance and and calm uh ceremonial neutrality the whole thing would fall apart but frankly i really doubt that um i do think that it is a complicated
1:00:43
matter that i give a lot of thought to which is and and which i have given it's not a new idea but like how do we construct systems and models and procedures and processes in the community that strive for maintaining our values in the long run and improving the encyclopedia and building something that we value and i think we've done a pretty good job of that um you know we struggle at times as i say with excessive bureaucracy but people are
1:01:12
aware of that and so on and so forth i think uh you know for me i think the the hard bits and the complicated bits are probably around the interface between the community and the wikimedia foundation and i'm not so sure that we have a
1:01:29
sort of a long-term settlement of those issues that i feel confident can maintain without a lot of effort uh not just on my part but on the part of you know core people who are around to make sure that the foundation is both able to act as
1:01:46
necessary but doesn't become you know imagine that they're going to pursue a model like a twitter facebook moderation model where they're going to take on all the jobs of moderation which frankly wouldn't scale it wouldn't work
1:01:59
and so that's the area where i i do feel i've got some work to do still last question what will you do next oh well i mean i'm i'm really focused a lot these days on wt.social so wt social is rethinking social media trying to create
1:02:19
a new social media platform with a different business model i would say it is a pilot project we've got about 500 000 people on the platform but many of them are not active and so we've got a core community working on that uh that takes up a huge amount of my time and i can tell you this is not announced yet but as this won't go out until november it will be announced i got this goofball idea that i'm really excited and having fun with which is
1:02:43
i'm putting together a system so that children can visit santa claus this is why i've got the santa background here children can visit santa claus uh virtually this year because people shouldn't be going to shopping malls and stand in
1:02:58
long lines to sit on an old man's with coronavirus going around so you can you can sign up and visit santa claus so that's what i'm working on this week and i'm having a lot of fun with it jimmy wales thank you very much great