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My claim A is that academia/media/wikipedia are the best tools we have for arriving at what will be seen as the truth by the most people for the longest time in

My claim A is that academia/media/wikipedia are the best tools we have for arriving at what will be seen as the truth by the most people for the longest time into the future. You claim that A is false because the three are more likely to be influenced by persons who self identify as left leaning. Never mind that what is considered left and right has changed through history and varies around the world at the present. Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives. What I find rude is the implication that 'left' institutions can't be useful authorities because they are 'left'. Why is conservapedia utterly eclipsed by wikipedia? Because wikipedia's self correcting mechanisms on the whole work pretty well and produce something that most people find useful (cf Dawkins https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4173576/richard-dawkins-on-science-it-works-bitches https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4173576/richard-dawkins-on...)

viridian 9y ago
>You claim that A is false because the three are more likely to be influenced by persons who self identify as left leaning. I think we misunderstand each other. I claimed that A was false because I took "are on average as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come" to mean it reflects the reality of the body of individuals, which I guess both of us agree is not the case. I don't think we really disagree on that much then. For fun though, I'd like to point out that this applies to conservatives, too: "Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives." And also conservapedia is a failure because A) Shaffly is an authoritarian nutcase and B) vandals outnumbered serious posters 2:1 easily, since it's inception. I know this because I was one of those vandals back in my script kiddie 4chan days. They would sometimes just have to revert entire days worth of edits because for every 'good faith' edit there were a dozen there were less so, and often the difference is subtle, especially since you could invoke religious craziness at will on conservapedia.

viridian 9y ago

>You claim that A is false because the three are more likely to be influenced by persons who self identify as left leaning. I think we misunderstand each other. I claimed that A was false because I took "are on average as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come" to mean it reflects the reality of the body of individuals, which I guess both of us agree is not the case. I don't think we really disagree on that much then. For fun though, I'd like to point out that this applies to conservatives, too: "Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives." And also conservapedia is a failure because A) Shaffly is an authoritarian nutcase and B) vandals outnumbered serious posters 2:1 easily, since it's inception. I know this because I was one of those vandals back in my script kiddie 4chan days. They would sometimes just have to revert entire days worth of edits because for every 'good faith' edit there were a dozen there were less so, and often the difference is subtle, especially since you could invoke religious craziness at will on conservapedia.