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As of December 2005 this biography is still slanted against this great ecologist. Dr. Paul Ehrlich has been a respected Senior Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University for over three decades. This bio makes him sound like some weird insect specialist shouting "Everyone will die at age 42...."
I tried several times to edit this article with a more accurate biography, and each time, the same neocon extremist blogger reverted article to his own hateful inaccurate version. This ability to distort biography is a flaw of Wikipedia.
I have reviewed WikiQuote page, and these quotes are accurate as of December 2005-- I have tapes of these lectures from PBS and National Public Radio. Problem is prose of main article. Part of problem is Ehrlich's famous big-mouth. In heat of debate he often says deliberately alarming things for dramatic effect. Such alarmist claims should not be mistaken for scholarship. He is an easy target because it is easy to quote him out of context in such debates. I could write a more accurate article myself but I know that same neocon extremist would just vandalize it again.
To get a better definitive biography and meaning of his work I would say Ehrlich himself or his wife or staff should write it or approve it-- then Wikipedia should lock it to prevent further neocon anti-ecology vandalism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.37.39.176 ( talk • contribs)
This biography is a lot better today than it was a year ago. I still feel article content focuses too much on Ehrlich's "failed predictions" rather than his basic warning about ecologically sustainable Carrying Capacity. By steering content towards his failures, one still gets the impression that he was basically wrong, just some extremist shouting "We're all going to starve and die at 42!" If he was such an extremist, Stanford University would not have kept him as tenured professor for three decades, he would not have won so many awards, and would not have found an audience for so many books. In fact, Ehrlich is basically right*: Our species should live within our ecological Carrying Capacity based on the I=PAT formula and voluntarily stop at two children per family. I feel his basic message should be more obvious, considering it is the single most important message of the 21st century. (* Quite right! It is the facts that are wrong)
Such a message, that we should stop at two children, is controversial and serves as a lightning rod for his enemies. Ehrlich's message is correct but I readily admit Ehrlich has a big-mouth--When Ehrlich rants on public lectures and forums, he often shouts alarmist exaggerations and glaring howlers for dramatic effect.
Search "Overpopulation" on Yahoo and the top result is Overpopulation.com, a neocon extremist group which openly claims "overpopulation does not and will not ever exist!" Its Discussion chatroom is filled with hateful threads against Ehrlich and ecologists.
My running battle with a neocon occured in December 2004: Click Article, click History, scroll to December 30 2004: I was 63.231... and neocon was "TDC." Take a look at User Info for TDC: He describes himself as a "neocon troll" who vandalizes websites. Ehrlich's biography at that time said absurd stuff like, "Ehrlich, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU ruined America's population." That's troll vandalism. I tried to get rid of it a few times then gave up. Neocon troll won that battle.
Other neocon I disagree with is Willmcw. If he advocates "neo-confederates" as his User Info suggests, he is blood enemy of Ehrlich and ecologists. Willmcw wanted to place the bet with Julian Simon in its own section for maximum emphasis. This bet was Ehrlich's biggest public blunder, proving Ehrlich could be hoodwinked by the Cato Institute, Julian Simon's neocon think-tank. Any economist could see that harvesting natural resources is getting easier due to improving technology. Ehrlich was a fool for taking that bet. Anyone who wants to emphasize that bet is no advocate of Ehrlich. There is no mention of Ehrlich's second bet proposed in 1990's which focused on species biodiversity and habitat, which Simon refused to accept.
My last point, that Wikipedia is vulnerable to troll vandalism, is sad but true. Due to a recent famous Wikipedia biography scandal involving troll vandalism, my university just sent notice to all students, informing us to no longer use Wikipedia as a reference or resource in our papers, because content cannot be trusted. Due to troll vandalism, Wikipedia is now reduced to a minor diversion away from quotable Internet research. I don't see any solution except for Wiki webmasters to lock content when needed. As long as trolls are allowed to vandalize entries with subtle subversive point of view, any controversial article remains highly vulnerable to vandalism.
By the way, I only wrote this one "biography needs lockdown" discussion. Above criticisms come from other people. Anyone familiar with Ehrlich's work would find this current biography slanted towards his failures. I won't bother fixing article, since some neocon will just erase my fix again. Adios Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.37.39.176 ( talk • contribs)
Is it controversial to say that he's best known for his wildly inaccurate predictions? I put in a whole boatload of sources. Is it controversial to use his own words to inform readers that he said that India needs to be left to die so that other, less "hopeless" countries can thrive? I don't see the issue here. Red Slash 19:12, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Red Slash 23:32, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
It's been a couple weeks and no one has had any response to the sourced material, until very recently a slew of edits have been made to somewhat change the tone of the article. It's possible those changes are valid. I did revert them in order to bring them to talk: the other editor's edit would be on the left, and the version that had been in place previously is on the right.
Big changes include:
Any thoughts? Red Slash 19:54, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
The phrase "wildly inaccurate" occurs over all sorts of articles on Wikipedia--it is not POV to say that something is "wildly inaccurate" when indeed it is wildly inaccurate. Edward_Davies_(Celtic), Historia Regum Britanniae, Guelph Transit; the list goes on and on and on and on.
The best parallel is The Amazing Criswell (which I have not ever edited); they're both from roughly the same timespan (he's a little older than Paul) and they both received intense fame from making predictions that were largely completely divorced from what would eventually happen. There's still marine wildlife. England? Still a thing, actually. American life expectancy is still quite a ways above 40. Etc. Anyway, Criswell's lead sentence reads "Jeron Criswell King (August 18, 1907 – October 4, 1982), known by his stage-name The Amazing Criswell /ˈkrɪzwɛl/, was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions." And while Ehrlich may be a scientist and Criswell may have been a psychic, the accuracy of their predictions is eerily similar.
So if the phrase is good enough for Criswell, it's good enough for Ehrlich. The thing he's most famous for is undoubtedly the doom-and-gloom predictions which generally turned out to be absolute baloney. But while "absolute baloney" isn't very encyclopedic, "wildly inaccurate" is.. Red Slash 22:42, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
No editor has provided a single reference that states that his predictions were anything other than wildly inaccurate. The unwillingness to call a spade a spade. The dude predicted that by 1972 there would be no point living for the future because total societal collapse would at that point be inevitable. There would be no major marine wildlife by like 1980. Etc. His predictions have been repeatedly and pointedly ridiculed across a wide variety of major and reliable sources, and no sources to the contrary have been found.
WP:NPOV essentially requires us to call the predictions something along the lines of "wildly inaccurate" in the lead, just like with another dude from that era who publicly and repeatedly made extravagant predictions that completely failed to materialize. The fact that one dressed up his predictions with "science" and one dressed them up as "supernatural" doesn't change that both men made predictions that were wildly inaccurate, and which are repeatedly referred to as such by our reliable sources. Red Slash 18:12, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
You might consider it "not the most encyclopedic" to call it "wildly inaccurate" but I don't think anyone calls it dubious, especially not our sources Red Slash 19:26, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
Literally 18 years since the first mention of bias in this article and it's still there. A baby born when the first topic was added on this talk page can vote now. The page literally starts saying he was best known for his "pessimistic" and untrue views. I'm going to try to make this article more neutral, but i'm sure that by the end of next month someone will edit it back to it's current state. Qwexcxewq ( talk) 02:34, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist best known for his pessimistic and inaccurate predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources."
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist. He is best known for his book, The Population Bomb, in which he inaccurately predicted resource depletion and widespread famine as a result of population growth."
@ Professor Penguino: You may want to look carefully at the concerns expressed on this page and in the page history, with special attention paid to the sources used by Red Slash for the last "eight months" they have edit warred and violated NPOV and turned this article into a hit piece. It was not a hagiography when they arrived here, it was well sourced and well referenced. Your agreement to alter the lead to the satisfaction of Red Slash, the very person who has written the NPOV-violating version under discussion with poor sourcing, does not sit well with me. The better solution is to revert to the pre-Red Slash version and start from there. [3] Please take a look at that version and make suggestions. The current version is not acceptable and uses unreliable sources like Bjørn Lomborg and others. Viriditas ( talk) 20:32, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
So, I'm a little confused. If someone comes to this article for the first time and they read this:
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously stated that "[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
Don't you think that it might be... just a little bit of interest to the reader... to know whether or not this predictions were true or not? Did hundreds of millions of people starve to death in the 1970s? Don't you think that just might be relevant? Red Slash 20:47, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
This list excludes logged-out IPs. The list of user names is extracted only from the above talk page discussion on this page and may not represent additional opposes in the article history based on reverts or opposing edits.
Total: Nine opposes.
This article and the already-cited book by Dowbiggin (2008) provide credible allegations of Ehrlich's role in encouraging the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, and of millions of people in India. Yet this (surely noteworthy) topic does not yet appear in Ehrlich's article. The article already quotes Ehrlich as publishing that "We must have population control at home ... by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into ... population control." But it does not cover the results in the world of his push for compulsory sterilization. Gnuish ( talk) 20:59, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
I came across this page and have wanted to adopt it because I think it's in a terrible state. There is a lot of disjointed editorialising, which apart from not being encyclopedic, makes it hard to read. So I've started trying to rehabilitate bits of it, but wanted to leave a note here in case anyone is concerned or just wants to know the general gist of where my edits are going.
Firstly, I'm not here to get rid of criticisms of Paul Ehrlich. Not only does he richly deserve some criticism, but much of that criticism appears copiously in published reliable sources. However, not every iteration of every failed prediction needs to be reported and refuted here. Moreover, 90% of the time it's the same prediction - the rising population will kill us all, very soon, mainly through famine. So this page could and should be considerably shorter.
Secondly, criticisms (and support, which unfortunately also exists in copious quantities) need to be attributed. Wikipedia's voice doesn't need to point out that a prediction was failed, even when it's an obvious truth (we didn't all die of famine in the 1970s).
Thirdly, my proposal is largely to get rid of the "After 2000s" section and to narrowly tailor the writings section to talk about the reception of the books (and not so much of the ideas in the books), while merging all the support and criticism of his views and predictions into the "Reception" section which I think should be re-named - maybe to "Views & Activism".
Of course anyone else is free to edit at any time in any way they like, but I put this here in the hope that if anyone has alternative directions or suggestions, we can do this collaboratively. Samuelshraga ( talk) 13:04, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Paul R. Ehrlich article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 730 days |
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
This
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As of December 2005 this biography is still slanted against this great ecologist. Dr. Paul Ehrlich has been a respected Senior Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University for over three decades. This bio makes him sound like some weird insect specialist shouting "Everyone will die at age 42...."
I tried several times to edit this article with a more accurate biography, and each time, the same neocon extremist blogger reverted article to his own hateful inaccurate version. This ability to distort biography is a flaw of Wikipedia.
I have reviewed WikiQuote page, and these quotes are accurate as of December 2005-- I have tapes of these lectures from PBS and National Public Radio. Problem is prose of main article. Part of problem is Ehrlich's famous big-mouth. In heat of debate he often says deliberately alarming things for dramatic effect. Such alarmist claims should not be mistaken for scholarship. He is an easy target because it is easy to quote him out of context in such debates. I could write a more accurate article myself but I know that same neocon extremist would just vandalize it again.
To get a better definitive biography and meaning of his work I would say Ehrlich himself or his wife or staff should write it or approve it-- then Wikipedia should lock it to prevent further neocon anti-ecology vandalism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.37.39.176 ( talk • contribs)
This biography is a lot better today than it was a year ago. I still feel article content focuses too much on Ehrlich's "failed predictions" rather than his basic warning about ecologically sustainable Carrying Capacity. By steering content towards his failures, one still gets the impression that he was basically wrong, just some extremist shouting "We're all going to starve and die at 42!" If he was such an extremist, Stanford University would not have kept him as tenured professor for three decades, he would not have won so many awards, and would not have found an audience for so many books. In fact, Ehrlich is basically right*: Our species should live within our ecological Carrying Capacity based on the I=PAT formula and voluntarily stop at two children per family. I feel his basic message should be more obvious, considering it is the single most important message of the 21st century. (* Quite right! It is the facts that are wrong)
Such a message, that we should stop at two children, is controversial and serves as a lightning rod for his enemies. Ehrlich's message is correct but I readily admit Ehrlich has a big-mouth--When Ehrlich rants on public lectures and forums, he often shouts alarmist exaggerations and glaring howlers for dramatic effect.
Search "Overpopulation" on Yahoo and the top result is Overpopulation.com, a neocon extremist group which openly claims "overpopulation does not and will not ever exist!" Its Discussion chatroom is filled with hateful threads against Ehrlich and ecologists.
My running battle with a neocon occured in December 2004: Click Article, click History, scroll to December 30 2004: I was 63.231... and neocon was "TDC." Take a look at User Info for TDC: He describes himself as a "neocon troll" who vandalizes websites. Ehrlich's biography at that time said absurd stuff like, "Ehrlich, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU ruined America's population." That's troll vandalism. I tried to get rid of it a few times then gave up. Neocon troll won that battle.
Other neocon I disagree with is Willmcw. If he advocates "neo-confederates" as his User Info suggests, he is blood enemy of Ehrlich and ecologists. Willmcw wanted to place the bet with Julian Simon in its own section for maximum emphasis. This bet was Ehrlich's biggest public blunder, proving Ehrlich could be hoodwinked by the Cato Institute, Julian Simon's neocon think-tank. Any economist could see that harvesting natural resources is getting easier due to improving technology. Ehrlich was a fool for taking that bet. Anyone who wants to emphasize that bet is no advocate of Ehrlich. There is no mention of Ehrlich's second bet proposed in 1990's which focused on species biodiversity and habitat, which Simon refused to accept.
My last point, that Wikipedia is vulnerable to troll vandalism, is sad but true. Due to a recent famous Wikipedia biography scandal involving troll vandalism, my university just sent notice to all students, informing us to no longer use Wikipedia as a reference or resource in our papers, because content cannot be trusted. Due to troll vandalism, Wikipedia is now reduced to a minor diversion away from quotable Internet research. I don't see any solution except for Wiki webmasters to lock content when needed. As long as trolls are allowed to vandalize entries with subtle subversive point of view, any controversial article remains highly vulnerable to vandalism.
By the way, I only wrote this one "biography needs lockdown" discussion. Above criticisms come from other people. Anyone familiar with Ehrlich's work would find this current biography slanted towards his failures. I won't bother fixing article, since some neocon will just erase my fix again. Adios Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.37.39.176 ( talk • contribs)
Is it controversial to say that he's best known for his wildly inaccurate predictions? I put in a whole boatload of sources. Is it controversial to use his own words to inform readers that he said that India needs to be left to die so that other, less "hopeless" countries can thrive? I don't see the issue here. Red Slash 19:12, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Red Slash 23:32, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
It's been a couple weeks and no one has had any response to the sourced material, until very recently a slew of edits have been made to somewhat change the tone of the article. It's possible those changes are valid. I did revert them in order to bring them to talk: the other editor's edit would be on the left, and the version that had been in place previously is on the right.
Big changes include:
Any thoughts? Red Slash 19:54, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
The phrase "wildly inaccurate" occurs over all sorts of articles on Wikipedia--it is not POV to say that something is "wildly inaccurate" when indeed it is wildly inaccurate. Edward_Davies_(Celtic), Historia Regum Britanniae, Guelph Transit; the list goes on and on and on and on.
The best parallel is The Amazing Criswell (which I have not ever edited); they're both from roughly the same timespan (he's a little older than Paul) and they both received intense fame from making predictions that were largely completely divorced from what would eventually happen. There's still marine wildlife. England? Still a thing, actually. American life expectancy is still quite a ways above 40. Etc. Anyway, Criswell's lead sentence reads "Jeron Criswell King (August 18, 1907 – October 4, 1982), known by his stage-name The Amazing Criswell /ˈkrɪzwɛl/, was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions." And while Ehrlich may be a scientist and Criswell may have been a psychic, the accuracy of their predictions is eerily similar.
So if the phrase is good enough for Criswell, it's good enough for Ehrlich. The thing he's most famous for is undoubtedly the doom-and-gloom predictions which generally turned out to be absolute baloney. But while "absolute baloney" isn't very encyclopedic, "wildly inaccurate" is.. Red Slash 22:42, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
No editor has provided a single reference that states that his predictions were anything other than wildly inaccurate. The unwillingness to call a spade a spade. The dude predicted that by 1972 there would be no point living for the future because total societal collapse would at that point be inevitable. There would be no major marine wildlife by like 1980. Etc. His predictions have been repeatedly and pointedly ridiculed across a wide variety of major and reliable sources, and no sources to the contrary have been found.
WP:NPOV essentially requires us to call the predictions something along the lines of "wildly inaccurate" in the lead, just like with another dude from that era who publicly and repeatedly made extravagant predictions that completely failed to materialize. The fact that one dressed up his predictions with "science" and one dressed them up as "supernatural" doesn't change that both men made predictions that were wildly inaccurate, and which are repeatedly referred to as such by our reliable sources. Red Slash 18:12, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
You might consider it "not the most encyclopedic" to call it "wildly inaccurate" but I don't think anyone calls it dubious, especially not our sources Red Slash 19:26, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
Literally 18 years since the first mention of bias in this article and it's still there. A baby born when the first topic was added on this talk page can vote now. The page literally starts saying he was best known for his "pessimistic" and untrue views. I'm going to try to make this article more neutral, but i'm sure that by the end of next month someone will edit it back to it's current state. Qwexcxewq ( talk) 02:34, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist best known for his pessimistic and inaccurate predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources."
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist. He is best known for his book, The Population Bomb, in which he inaccurately predicted resource depletion and widespread famine as a result of population growth."
@ Professor Penguino: You may want to look carefully at the concerns expressed on this page and in the page history, with special attention paid to the sources used by Red Slash for the last "eight months" they have edit warred and violated NPOV and turned this article into a hit piece. It was not a hagiography when they arrived here, it was well sourced and well referenced. Your agreement to alter the lead to the satisfaction of Red Slash, the very person who has written the NPOV-violating version under discussion with poor sourcing, does not sit well with me. The better solution is to revert to the pre-Red Slash version and start from there. [3] Please take a look at that version and make suggestions. The current version is not acceptable and uses unreliable sources like Bjørn Lomborg and others. Viriditas ( talk) 20:32, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
So, I'm a little confused. If someone comes to this article for the first time and they read this:
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously stated that "[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
Don't you think that it might be... just a little bit of interest to the reader... to know whether or not this predictions were true or not? Did hundreds of millions of people starve to death in the 1970s? Don't you think that just might be relevant? Red Slash 20:47, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
This list excludes logged-out IPs. The list of user names is extracted only from the above talk page discussion on this page and may not represent additional opposes in the article history based on reverts or opposing edits.
Total: Nine opposes.
This article and the already-cited book by Dowbiggin (2008) provide credible allegations of Ehrlich's role in encouraging the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, and of millions of people in India. Yet this (surely noteworthy) topic does not yet appear in Ehrlich's article. The article already quotes Ehrlich as publishing that "We must have population control at home ... by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into ... population control." But it does not cover the results in the world of his push for compulsory sterilization. Gnuish ( talk) 20:59, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
I came across this page and have wanted to adopt it because I think it's in a terrible state. There is a lot of disjointed editorialising, which apart from not being encyclopedic, makes it hard to read. So I've started trying to rehabilitate bits of it, but wanted to leave a note here in case anyone is concerned or just wants to know the general gist of where my edits are going.
Firstly, I'm not here to get rid of criticisms of Paul Ehrlich. Not only does he richly deserve some criticism, but much of that criticism appears copiously in published reliable sources. However, not every iteration of every failed prediction needs to be reported and refuted here. Moreover, 90% of the time it's the same prediction - the rising population will kill us all, very soon, mainly through famine. So this page could and should be considerably shorter.
Secondly, criticisms (and support, which unfortunately also exists in copious quantities) need to be attributed. Wikipedia's voice doesn't need to point out that a prediction was failed, even when it's an obvious truth (we didn't all die of famine in the 1970s).
Thirdly, my proposal is largely to get rid of the "After 2000s" section and to narrowly tailor the writings section to talk about the reception of the books (and not so much of the ideas in the books), while merging all the support and criticism of his views and predictions into the "Reception" section which I think should be re-named - maybe to "Views & Activism".
Of course anyone else is free to edit at any time in any way they like, but I put this here in the hope that if anyone has alternative directions or suggestions, we can do this collaboratively. Samuelshraga ( talk) 13:04, 13 March 2024 (UTC)