4 ms·
> There’s potential danger when pranksters alter Wikipedia entries, or fraudsters publish scientific papers with bogus data, but the truth eventually comes out.
by yrdmb 4y ago
> There’s potential danger when pranksters alter Wikipedia entries, or fraudsters publish scientific papers with bogus data, but the truth eventually comes out.
Pranksters? No, the danger is the people with power meddling with information. They start wars, not pranksters. But there's nothing that can be done about that so it's pointless talking about it.
> The scientific-historical record of accumulating human knowledge has grown steadily for ten thousand years. Yes some information gets lost, some gets proven wrong, some is disputed, and some gets hidden when winners spin the facts to flatter themselves.
"Scientific-historical"? Almost all historical information ( written record ) is lost. Less than 1% of all written text from ancient greece and rome survived. Also it's not a matter of the winners hiding facts that's the issue, it's the winners pushing particular "facts". Take the civil war. It was a war where one side had slave states and the other side was the confederacy. Yet we are told that it was a war to end slavery. Have fun squaring that circle.
> But despite the system’s flaws, until now it’s worked fairly well to maintain our shared understanding about what’s real and what’s true.
Our understanding of what's real and true is solely a function of who is in power. Same as it always has been and always will be.
It doesn't matter whether the tool is spoken language, written language, printing press, radio, tv, social media or AI. Knowledge "pollution" is what societies and nations breath to survive. The only struggle is the fight over who gets to pollute.
- crimjow 4y ago[flagged]
- yrdmb 4y ago[flagged]
- mrtranscendence 4y agoAre you denying that slavery was a factor that led to the civil war? Because that's incontrovertible. At the very least I can't see how you can credibly disagree that the issue of the spread of slavery was one driving factor. Pointing to Kentucky and Delaware misses the point. It's not like the thirteenth amendment -- ratified in the same year the war ended, which is not coincidental -- didn't apply to them.
- nl 4y agoYeah this statement by the OP: "It was a war where one side had slave states and the other side was the confederacy" only gets away with not being an outright lie by stretching the English language into ways that wouldn't be parsed by most people. There were some slave states that remained in the Union. All Confederacy states were slave states.
- yrdmb 4y ago[flagged]
- nl 4y ago"It was a war where one side had slave states and the other side was the confederacy" implies the following: [only] "one side had slaves states" "one side had slaves states" [and the other didn't]. [there was the side with slave states] "and the other side was the confederacy" All of these are wrong but all are implied by the most common, good-faith parse of that sentence. Indeed using a strict parse of that sentence and De Morgan's theorem for inference it is outright wrong. (Not buying into the "the civil war was not about slavery" argument. It was: https://www.tyseidule.com/excerpt.html https://www.tyseidule.com/excerpt.html)
- yrdmb 4y ago> [only] "one side had slaves states" No. It implies the opposite. The assumption was that only the confederates had slave states. My comment debunks that notion. Everybody knows that the confederacy had slaves. Now they know both sides had slave states. Nice try.
- yrdmb 4y ago[flagged]