My Wikipedia vandalism metasthesized: how I put Avars on Novaya Zemlya in a Tom Clancy novel.

About ten years ago Wikipedia was still something new and the rigorous policing mechanisms that are now present were not in place. What is known as "Wiki vandalism" was very common: people entering absurd false facts into articles to see what would happen. Usually these were done to very popular sites and were usually quite obvious, sophomoric and usually extremely obscene; their half-lives could usually be measured in hours. I thought though, what would happen if someone put in something in a relatively obscure corner of wikipedia, something that, while obviously absurd to anyone knowledgeable on the subject, would be subtle enough to be absorbed by someone not paying attention, or thinking "well since it is in wikipedia and not challenged...". So I looked around and found my target: the page on the russian arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya

Famous for the nuclear testing that was carried out there, and not much else apart from being a desolate arctic wasteland, at the time the article mentioned that it was inhabited by about 100 nenetses who subsisted on fishing and sealing. In the decade since the article has been edited to state the nenetses population has been removed, who knows? So the sentence. "The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses who subsist mainly on fishing, trapping and seal hunting" I edited to read "The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses who subsist on fishing trapping and seal hunting and 50 Avars who subsist on polar bear husbandry". Avars are a central asian people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avars_(Caucasus)  who used to inhabit what is now Hungary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Avars  So I put 50 of these central asian people in an arctic tundra island herding polar bears. I just left it there and watched what happened. It was very easy to track its spread to other websites as any google search of "avars" + "Novaya Zemlya" was, well, highly unlikely to yield anything not related to my vandalism. This remained unchanged for many months and several sites mostly calling themselves atlases that mirror geographic information from Wikipedia copied it over. About 6-8 months later the reference to polar bear husbandry was removed from the original wikipedia site, but remained on many of the mirror atlases. I even saw a comment on one of the mirror atlases saying "looking at atlases on the web with my son and I came across this fascinating information about a people on an arctic island who live off polar bear husbandry, the things you learn from the web!". The information about Avars remained much longer, several years. This false fact made its way onto the website of an anti-nuclear weapons campaign group, where they mentioned the nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya and the suffering of the Nenetses and Avars who lived there. So now my apocryophal polar bear herding Avars of Novaya Zemlya were now suffering radiation poisoning. This website seems to have now been taken down. Later, on the original wikipedia page my statement of Avars living on Novaya Zemlya was added "[citation needed]" and it remained like this for several years. I was tempted at the time to add a complementary vandalism to the page about the caucasian avars about a group moved to a gulag on Novaya Zemlya in a horrible atrocity by Stalin and having both vandalisms cite each other, but I thought this might trigger the webs defence mechanism more than mask my vandalism so I just left it... Quite recently the page was completely changed and all references to Avars removed from the main text. The atlas sites that mirrored the info also seem to have been edited, with one exception that I could find where it still lives on, this blog here: http://vincijesus.blogspot.fi/2008/03/novaya-zemlya.html  On the original Wikipedia page, however, reference to the final discovery and purge of my vandalism remains on the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ANovaya_Zemlya#Avars.3F where they suspect that the source is a Tom Clancy novel. Sure enough, its there in Tom Clancys "Dead or Alive" but its him who got his information from ME not the other way around! In the middle of page 346 one reads "Novaya Zemlya was indeed hell on earth, according to the last census the island was home to 2500 people, mostly Nenetses and Avarsliving in the Belushya Guba settlement." So my wiki vandalism metasthesized and has thus been immortalized! 

Scientific ethics and addiction

I will post two posts today, as the first post is a bit heavy and dark, I post something lighter afterwards. An article appeared this week on my facebook feed that moved me, and made me think deeply in a more profound way than I can remember anything that has appeared there before: http://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epidemic-started-by-pharmaceutical-company

Read this article, to the end. Let is sink in...

The sudden and devastating opiate addiction epidemic in the rural USA that has directly led to the deaths of thousands, destroyed the lives of an order of magnitude more and laid waste to countless rural communities has a single source: the aggressive marketing of the legal medication OxyContin by Purdue Pharma. OxyContin is an opiate, the family of drugs of based on a similar molecular shape that all target the same mechanism; they only differ in strength of effect and time of onset. addiction to one is addiction to another, as addiction sets in the natural tendency is towards the faster acting forms ultimately leading to firect injection of heroin. 

For me two issues emerge here: 1) What scientific ethics should really be about and 2) Addiction as a phenomenon beyond physical drug molecules and how our economic system provides the highest incentive for triggering it through one means or another. Discussions around "scientific ethics" are usually focussed elsewhere, sometimes around legitimate issues of animal suffering, but often around frustratingly meaningless metaphysical issues that only make sense to someone with no understanding of the science whatsoever: embryonic stem cells, genetic modification, chimera species etc... Here is the real issue staring us in the face of science being used for evil that safeguards have failed to stop. This can not be passed off as a purely business decision, OxyContin was developed and tested as a new opiate drug molecule, and its addictive potential downplayed before being passed on the the salesmen who marketed it aggressively to doctors who were sought out based on their tendency to overprescribe medication, to the doctors who accepted kickbacks for making the prescriptions. The scientists who developed the molecule are no more or less cogs in the wheel of this catastrophe than any of the other actors involved, all just individuals trying to get their financial bonuses. 

But, sadly, is this not just a microcosm of what is a central part of the engine of our economic system? Addiction is not just about physical molecules that trigger a need for the reward provided by consumption of more of the same, while tolerance reduces the effect of a specific dose; the non-physical can trigger the same. Gambling is known to trigger a very similar set of reward centers to cocaine. In an experiment rats were given one of two types of food dispensers one dispensing a food pellet with every third push from the rats nose, and the other having a one in three chance of dispensing a pellet with each push. In the first case the rat learned that three pushes means food and it went about its life normally otherwise. In the latter case the rat fell into a pathological behaviour of compulsively continually pushing the dispenser: the uncertainty created a reward trigger led to addiction; the essence of gambling addiction had been isolated. Video games are designed specifically to pace the frequency and level of psychological rewards to maximize addiction. If one looks even more broadly the clearest route to wealth is the creation of a "need" in a large group of consumers that was not there before, is not success in our current economic system based on, in some way or another, the creation of an addiction reaction in others?