5 ms·

"Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process

by belorn 5y ago

"Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible. You can vote on it, you can form a temporarily consensus, you can elect people to make a decision for the community, but at the end its about convincing people through discussions. Naturally there exist edge cases where the conclusion is close to 99.9% determined from the beginning, like with spam and malware, and at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong). Remove the discussion and give the power to decide what is truth to a company and what you get is the consensus within that company. Naturally that won't be fair, reproducible or representative. Give the power to governments and you get similar results, just with more police and military, through with the slight bonus of people being at least being elected. Still a pretty pointless exercise unless discussion and transparency exist.

pphysch 5y ago
Wikipedia is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to (Western) epistemology. On one hand, it's a totally free and relatively up to date encyclopedia of incredible scope. On the other hand, it's a platform for political propaganda masquerading as Undeniable Truth. I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about misinformation in an article that has value to special interest groups with media leverage.
- ratsmack 5y ago
  They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects.
  - seeEllArr 5y ago
  - pphysch 5y ago
    I think the root problem is that Wikipedia was created by a couple of Objectivists and they projected that philosophy (belief in a universal Reason) onto its structure. Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia. The real world doesn't work like that. Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive topics. If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering) rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      > Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        Sure, HN has particular implicit ideological biases. Many a good faith comment has been censored (i.e. [flagged]/[dead]) for challenging those biases.
    - overgrownzygote 5y ago
      I feel like the line between Wikipedia and Objectivism is a bit of a stretch. The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world. I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify. I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?
  - brimble 5y ago
    > They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects. "Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
    - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      Exactly, and demonstrated beautifully by John Oliver: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's not an aim at facts or truth. Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer engagement'. Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in counter-factual directions.
    - Hakashiro 5y ago
      Indeed, when one side argues for dialogue, human rights, cooperation, peace and maybe a bit of socialism, and the other side argues for kicking immigrants, building an ethno-state where anything manufactured on foreign soil is heavily taxed, and the poor are left to starve to death, the middle ground really isn't the right answer. Middle grounds are rarely conducive to any intellectually honest discussion and this can clearly be seen in American politics: where the GOP has been sliding more and more into the right, the Democrats have followed, trying to capture the moderate Republicans that don't agree with the new "extreme" GOP. Middle grounds are a slippery slope.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    > They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it like that is a very US-centric way of going about it. Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics should really take a stroll trough the self-declared conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which features some of the most delusional content I've seen on the web.
  - throwamon 5y ago
    There aren't only "two sides", as much as American conditioning may have you believe. And if you want true representativity, you get problems like this: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182 https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects. Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might be? In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal representation." In a broader context, "equal representation" would include the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz, actual Nazis, etc.) There are examples of parties from the broader political spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party, American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.). Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party system. Pretending that the major US political parties represent the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at best, and willful deception at worst.
- dools 5y ago
  Where is this political propaganda masqureading as Undeniable Truth on Wikipedia?
  - pphysch 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide For example, the headline picture is from a normal prison in Xinjiang that houses convicted criminals of various Chinese ethnicities, not a "Uyghur Concentration Camp". Yet it is misused as representation of "Uyghur Genocide"? Nayirah level nonsense.
    - Schiendelman 5y ago
      You can personally challenge that very photo on Wikipedia. You can edit it out with a convincing argument that it's being misrepresented. You even have a citation; you can argue that the citation itself shouldn't be trusted and give a good reason why! And mods there will listen to well crafted arguments, and commonly do.
    - dools 5y ago
      The good thing about Wikipedia in this case is that it cites sources for every single claim. There are 502 citations on that page. So even if it's inaccurate, it is inaccurate in a way that the reader can assess, whereas the alternative way to find out about that conflict is through single news articles (ie. most of the citations are news articles, but it's like a longitudinal reference point of ALL news articles about the topic). Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it. Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues. I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        > 502 citations "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Joseph Goebbels (allegedly) It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide". It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against. It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs. Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign. And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?
ignoramous 5y ago
> ...at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong). Yeah, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_ci... > "Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible. Of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability_not_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability_not_tr... At least there's a method to their madness (:

by belorn 5y ago

pphysch 5y ago

Wikipedia is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to (Western) epistemology. On one hand, it's a totally free and relatively up to date encyclopedia of incredible scope. On the other hand, it's a platform for political propaganda masquerading as Undeniable Truth. I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about misinformation in an article that has value to special interest groups with media leverage.

ratsmack 5y ago
They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects.
- seeEllArr 5y ago
- pphysch 5y ago
  I think the root problem is that Wikipedia was created by a couple of Objectivists and they projected that philosophy (belief in a universal Reason) onto its structure. Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia. The real world doesn't work like that. Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive topics. If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering) rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    > Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      Sure, HN has particular implicit ideological biases. Many a good faith comment has been censored (i.e. [flagged]/[dead]) for challenging those biases.
  - overgrownzygote 5y ago
    I feel like the line between Wikipedia and Objectivism is a bit of a stretch. The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world. I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify. I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?
- brimble 5y ago
  > They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects. "Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Exactly, and demonstrated beautifully by John Oliver: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's not an aim at facts or truth. Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer engagement'. Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in counter-factual directions.
  - Hakashiro 5y ago
    Indeed, when one side argues for dialogue, human rights, cooperation, peace and maybe a bit of socialism, and the other side argues for kicking immigrants, building an ethno-state where anything manufactured on foreign soil is heavily taxed, and the poor are left to starve to death, the middle ground really isn't the right answer. Middle grounds are rarely conducive to any intellectually honest discussion and this can clearly be seen in American politics: where the GOP has been sliding more and more into the right, the Democrats have followed, trying to capture the moderate Republicans that don't agree with the new "extreme" GOP. Middle grounds are a slippery slope.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it like that is a very US-centric way of going about it. Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics should really take a stroll trough the self-declared conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which features some of the most delusional content I've seen on the web.
- throwamon 5y ago
  There aren't only "two sides", as much as American conditioning may have you believe. And if you want true representativity, you get problems like this: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182 https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=182
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >They would have much more credibility if they were to have equal representation from both sides of the political spectrum, and also include equally represented opposing views in articles for controversial subjects. Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might be? In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal representation." In a broader context, "equal representation" would include the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz, actual Nazis, etc.) There are examples of parties from the broader political spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party, American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.). Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party system. Pretending that the major US political parties represent the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at best, and willful deception at worst.
dools 5y ago
Where is this political propaganda masqureading as Undeniable Truth on Wikipedia?
- pphysch 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide For example, the headline picture is from a normal prison in Xinjiang that houses convicted criminals of various Chinese ethnicities, not a "Uyghur Concentration Camp". Yet it is misused as representation of "Uyghur Genocide"? Nayirah level nonsense.
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    You can personally challenge that very photo on Wikipedia. You can edit it out with a convincing argument that it's being misrepresented. You even have a citation; you can argue that the citation itself shouldn't be trusted and give a good reason why! And mods there will listen to well crafted arguments, and commonly do.
  - dools 5y ago
    The good thing about Wikipedia in this case is that it cites sources for every single claim. There are 502 citations on that page. So even if it's inaccurate, it is inaccurate in a way that the reader can assess, whereas the alternative way to find out about that conflict is through single news articles (ie. most of the citations are news articles, but it's like a longitudinal reference point of ALL news articles about the topic). Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it. Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues. I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      > 502 citations "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Joseph Goebbels (allegedly) It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide". It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against. It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs. Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign. And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?

ignoramous 5y ago

> ...at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong). Yeah, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_ci... > "Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible. Of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability_not_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability_not_tr... At least there's a method to their madness (: