This is absolutely damning. I’ve known RationalWiki to be an angry crank site for many years, and I’ve also known that Wikipedia exists to launder the opinions of certain editors, but I hadn’t put the two together.
The fact that journalists read Wikipedia to get up to speed on topics then write about them is a feedback loop that massively amplifies these obsessive fringe voices, and I think it’s played a significant part in dissociating much of the media from the people it supposedly serves and from reality itself.
The pollution of the memetic space is permanent though. I have no idea how we can cleanse our collective corpus of knowledge of the intellectual sewage that @jimmy_wales has dumped into the internet. The Wikipedia project has failed and must somehow be replaced.
tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sou…
The fact that journalists read Wikipedia to get up to speed on topics then write about them is a feedback loop that massively amplifies these obsessive fringe voices, and I think it’s played a significant part in dissociating much of the media from the people it supposedly serves and from reality itself.
The pollution of the memetic space is permanent though. I have no idea how we can cleanse our collective corpus of knowledge of the intellectual sewage that @jimmy_wales has dumped into the internet. The Wikipedia project has failed and must somehow be replaced.
tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sou…
The game of Wikipedia editors is to project good faith whilst acting in bad faith. This has been going on for years in an attempt to craft an alternate reality where the liberal fringe of US Democrats are always and permanently right about everything.
The only hope I see is in LLMs - an alternative to the vast corpus built up by Wikipedia over 2 decades could be produced relatively quickly, with human proofreading.
But LLMs are, of course, trained on internet text. I would bet Wikipedia is a significant source. So these maniacs have got their biases encoded into the DNA of any AI you might want to use to try and get rid of it.
But LLMs are, of course, trained on internet text. I would bet Wikipedia is a significant source. So these maniacs have got their biases encoded into the DNA of any AI you might want to use to try and get rid of it.
Most of the pushback you get from this is people trying to push crankery in the other direction - Conservapedia, Breitbart etc. - once you’ve started the game of cynically dragging the discourse in your direction, a return to even the aspiration towards neutrality is near impossible.
It’s so depressing not to be able to trust anything. There is no penalty on the internet for being a compulsive ideologue and very little reward for actually caring about truth.
It’s so depressing not to be able to trust anything. There is no penalty on the internet for being a compulsive ideologue and very little reward for actually caring about truth.
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