Larry Sanger says the website has become biased against conservative and religious viewpoints, but sees a way to fix it:
Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia millions of people treat as an authoritative source of information, is systemically biased against conservative, religious, and other points of view, according to the site's co-founder, Larry Sanger.
Sanger, 57, who now heads the Knowledge Standards Foundation, believes Wikipedia can be salvaged either by a renewed emphasis on free speech withttps://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/hin the organization or by a grassroots campaign to make diverse viewpoints heard.
Failing that, Sanger said, government intervention may be required to pierce the shell of anonymity that now protects Wikipedia's editors from defamation lawsuits by public figures who believe the site portrays them unfairly.
[...] "Basically, it's required now, even for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when [they believe] one side is clearly wrong," Sanger said. "Pretensions of objectivity are out the window."
[...] "You simply may not cite as sources of Wikipedia articles anything that has been branded as right wing," he said. [...] "Even now, people are still sort of waking up to the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages ... act as essentially propaganda."
[...] On his website, Sanger outlines a series of ideas for returning Wikipedia to its original stance on fairness and free speech. A handful of his ideas center on increasing transparency into site management, such as revealing who Wikipedia's leaders are, allowing the public to rate articles, ending decision-making by consensus, and adopting a legislative process for determining editorial policy.
Related: Elon Musk Plans to Take on Wikipedia With 'Grokipedia'
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Elon Musk plans to take on Wikipedia with his own rival encyclopedia site.
On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO tweeted that his xAI startup is building Grokipedia, which he claims will be a "massive improvement" over Wikipedia. Musk has long had a gripe with Wikipedia, accusing it of being "woke" and even calling for it to be defunded. (The encyclopedia site has long relied on donations.) In January, Musk also railed at Wikipedia for adding an entry about him allegedly making a Nazi-like salute at a Trump inauguration event.
To create Grokipedia, Musk plans on tapping xAI's Grok chatbot (which he also created as an alternative to another technology he didn't like, ChatGPT). Grok has been trained on web data, including public tweets. In a podcast earlier this month, Musk suggested that Grok is smart enough not only to replicate the work of human community volunteers who maintain and update Wikipedia, but also to account for any bias or inaccuracies.
"Grok is using heavy amounts of inference compute to look at, as an example, a Wikipedia page, what is true, partially true, or false, or missing in this page," he said. "Now rewrite the page to correct, remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context." (That said, Grok has suffered its own share of problems, including praising Hitler.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Wednesday October 22, @01:56PM (56 children)
... a well known liberal bias.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday October 22, @02:06PM
That's what worries me. Free speech has been weaponized by the right to the point where legitimately held views that disagree get buried with all the pro-fascist BS that people on that side make money grifting on. Reality is going to have a left wing bias for the simple reason that the left isn't trying to keep people stuck in a bygone era while ignoring the various issues that caused us as a society to move on. It may have been OK to not have health insurance in the '50s, but the cost of medical care in the '50s was a lot less expensive in general, and a bunch of life saving, and very expensive, procedures just flat out didn't exist back then.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Wednesday October 22, @04:09PM (52 children)
Reality does not have a "bias".
It's just that at this juncture in history, the opposition is more in touch with reality; but nobody is immune from delusion. There are too many people who think communism will work *this time* for me to sign on to that trite and oft repeated phrase.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday October 22, @05:47PM (48 children)
I'm not sure this deserved a troll mod. In general there's going to be a bias towards progressive ideology and other ideologies that are moving people away from how things were done in the past for the simple reason that we've done that stuff and if it were really that good, there's high likelihood that we wouldn't have moved away from it. People may like to wax romantic about previous time periods, but there's always significant issues no matter when you are talking about that would lead to trying to go back to that less than idea. Even time periods like the '80s which were often times generally good, there were massive issues like all the stuff still going on behind the Iron Curtain and even issues like the hole in the ozone layer that had to be addressed.
(Score: 2, Troll) by istartedi on Wednesday October 22, @07:16PM (13 children)
Thanks. This is happening a lot lately. Soylent is naturally drawn towards left/liberal echo chamber mentality and that triggers (LOL) me. I don't like group-think even when I agree with the group. The statement is tantamount to "Look at us. We're the good ones". It's just signaling, and it gets up-voted while anybody critiquing that like myself gets down-modded. If you disagree with my PoV, tell me. Don't swing the hammer. A troll, IMHO, is a statement made for no other reason than to elicit a negative response. If Soylent were a dedicated liberal/leftist forum then I believe the mod would have been valid--but we aren't that kind of forum.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @07:57PM (1 child)
What most people here consider "left/liberal" are really just democrats, and they are not "left/liberal". Their "opposition" against republicans is theater, misdirection, like a magician's assistant
I agree, but it is a result of conflating "democrat" and "liberal". And to them, unless you toe the party line, you are a trumpie republican. "With us or against us", as indicated by their attitude towards independents.
And speaking of Wikipedia, their definition of "liberal" is quite accurate
Liberalism [wikipedia.org] is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law... generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday October 23, @03:09AM
Although this seems to be less true now, there was a time in America where "liberal" meant Democrat, and usually socially liberal with a greater emphasis on equal rights and less emphasis on individual liberty--which are often in tension; such as the case of whether or not you should have to bake a cake for a gay wedding if you didn't want to.
So that's why I said "left/liberal", because if you just say liberal there are those who think it's the "classic liberal" which is more libertarian and tends to skew right here, and if you say "left" then inevitably somebody says we have no left.
The 227th hardest thing about American politics these days, is getting to an agreement about definitions before you even start the discussion.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @08:34PM
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @08:42PM (3 children)
I extends you a warm welcome to the contrarian movement. We are legion.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by deimtee on Thursday October 23, @12:37AM (2 children)
No we're not.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @04:05AM (1 child)
United behind the denial you are.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 25, @01:02PM
No we're not!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Thursday October 23, @02:13PM (5 children)
I don't think it was like that in the beginning. SN was supposedly founded as a reaction to the Slashdot redesign, but I think that it attracted people who didn't like Slashdot's shift towards more liberal viewpoints.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday October 24, @03:21AM (4 children)
It was absolutely about the Slashdot design. There have always been some loud proponents on both left and right on this site, and I think that's a good thing. I can understand why people would perceive that it's anti-them, because there is almost always a contrarian viewpoint available - something increasingly rare when we subscribe to our bubble chambers (or have them assigned to us by the algorithms of YouTube et al).
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday October 24, @02:27PM (3 children)
The Slashdot design reason was BS. Here is why:
It's possible (on a desktop browser) to configure Slashdot so it looks like the old design. The appearance of Slashdot and how I interact with it hasn't changed in decades (except for the obnoxious ads that have started showing up this year).
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Saturday October 25, @04:14AM (2 children)
That ability to use the old UI was only introduced after SN was created, as I recall...
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday October 25, @06:52AM
I seem to recall the same, although I cannot say that I paid much attention to /. once we started work on SN.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 27, @12:59PM
I don't know when SN was created, but what I do know is that I never had to new the "new" Slashdot UI.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @08:26PM (26 children)
I'm not sure the "There are too many people who think communism will work *this time*..." is a statement of reality or a flamebait.
In the context, I see nothing to indicate Wikipedia promotes communism, and neither that a left leaning bias means "thinking communism will work *this time*", so I'm inclined towards the second.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Wednesday October 22, @08:51PM (25 children)
The statement wasn't intended to imply that Wikipedia supports communism, or that there are a particularly large number here on Soylent who support it. I can see how you might infer that from context; but the statement was meant to stand in general, not within the framework of a particular venue.
Rasmussen is regarded as having a conservative bias but they're the only serious poll [rasmussenreports.com] I could find that asks the question directly, and finds 18% of voters viewing communism favorably. There is an often noted skew towards the left amongst youth; I shouldn't need to track down a citation for that. An 18% leaning in the general population, and the number of recently college educated youth I hear using Marxist language like "late stage capitalism" seems to support my PoV that communism has found increasing support.
Reasons why I find that troubling are left as an exercise for the reader.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @09:12PM (24 children)
Indeed, late capitalism [wikipedia.org] is too old a term, may have it's place in the "history" part of the education.
Would the use of "technofeudalism", "captured state", "oligarchy" sound better to your ear?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday October 23, @02:10AM (23 children)
I haven't put much thought in to *labeling* our present circumstances. I'm not even sure if it's a constructive exercise.
I think I can dismiss "technofeudalism" as being a bit hyerpolic and emotional.
The phrase "captured state" is tempting--but we already have regulatory capture [wikipedia.org] which sounds the same. While RC is an aspect of our present situation; I don't know if putting that phenomenon at the center and focusing on it is the best approach.
Oligarchy might be the best description, which is probably why the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, most notably Bernie Sanders, is using it as a label.
It's not the worst appellation to use, and it's not even politically biased when you consider that criticisms of figures like Soros coming from the right, Bill Gates coming from the conspiratorial fringe and of course the Koch, Elon et. al are all attacks on oligarchy--there is actually strong bipartisan/multipolar resistance to having a few elites run the country. It's not an idea that the left ought to own.
So there. If I were forced to pick among your proffered choices, I'd pick oligarchy but I'm not forced.
I'm more concerned with the question of why we even have something that looks like oligarchy in the first place. Is it a Constitutional failure? Social failure? Organizational failure on the part of government, political parties, the media or others?
These are not easy questions to answer--just food for thought.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @03:59AM (16 children)
But "those commie college professors" is such an obvious explanation to you.
The realities of 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 23 and 40 who want to buy a home say they can't afford to [newsweek.com] or younger generation being saddled with $1.8T [lendingtree.com] could have no bearing on those youngsters wanting a fairer deal from the society, right?
$500B of investment [techcrunch.com] locked in a company with 3000 employees [wikipedia.org].
Extrapolating a bit: what happens to Joe Average when most of the money of a society are locked from circulating in the everyday economy and only running in circles between stock market and rental properties? What meaning the word "money" does it have?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Thursday October 23, @05:28AM (7 children)
Sigh... you come off as really condescending here, so I'm reluctant to even address this. Let's just say that if those professors were doing a good job, and the students had really learned something, they might have a way to address all those disparities you describe without invoking the specter of guillotines, purges, and killing fields.
The way I see it, we've been here before in the 20s/30s boom/bust, and it was an American triumph that we managed to avoid the kind of revolution that so many were calling for. We accomplished that because our institutions were strong. Now those same institutions are failing to stop the opposite problem--right wing authoritarianism, open corruption. Why?
I know a lot of people here think I'm nuts to be concerned about us going hard left. It's the flip side of "it can't happen here". It concerns me precisely because the far left *does* have so many smart people. Intelligence and insanity are by no means mutually exclusive. Look me straight in the eye and tell me you trust the far-left to "solve" the problems you've outlined when one of their charismatic leaders is wielding the same kind of un-checked power that Trump is.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @06:29AM (6 children)
Now it seems you are suggesting those "commie college professors" invoked "the specter of guillotines, purges, and killing fields" as the solution.
If so, you have citations? ('cause if so, this would sound a lot like an incitement to violence, which is not protected speech even in US).
If not so, could you please rephrase in some way that's not so loaded? (and, maybe, provide citations or evidence)
Do you mean the New deal [wikipedia.org] and the Newer new deal [wikipedia.org]?
I don't know what institutions you actually refer to. Could you at least give a hint?
Given that you only have a center-tight with the Dems, I wouldn't be concerned that much. Most of Europe's social-democracy is to the left of your entire political spectrum and I don't think they have even half of your social problems.
Charismatic authoritarians aren't left or right, they'll take the side of whoever they can "charm" the higher number of people from (they may be the point where the two extreme meet - remember the name of the Nazi party in the "charming" phase? It was National Socialist German Workers' Party - they were actually as right-wing as one can get).
As long as one doesn't press a good percentage of their population into desperate survival mode, one shouldn't worry that much about revolutions. If however this is the case, with enough many being starving have-nots, it doesn't matter the leaning of the leader, heads are bound to fall because it's clear that everything else failed.
---
Apologies, but simplistic positions expressed in a loaded (or ambiguous enough to border loaded) language triggers me.
Nothing in this world is that simple to point a finger, say "that's the cause" and be right. Not even gravity that pulled apples onto Newton's head is that simple.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday October 23, @05:11PM (5 children)
I'm sorry I walked in to all that. I never actually said anything about "commie professors", but it was late and responded to you as if I had. You put words in my mouth, and I chewed on them. My mistake.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @07:12PM (4 children)
I never actually said anything about "commie professors"
Indeed, you haven't. You just mentioned
and I assumed you blame the colleges for indoctrinating their graduates in Marxism.
Now, if you were to explicitly state your position in regards with the role of colleges in the predominantly left leaning of their young graduates, I'll do my best to remember your position instead of making the mistake of assuming something that may or may not be there.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Friday October 24, @02:06AM (3 children)
That college education makes you more likely to lean left (in the USA) seems generally accepted, so there doesn't seem to be much need to address that. We're concerned with the why and while I wasn't prepared to say, "it's never the prof" because absolutes are always wrong (heheh), I decided to see what I could find. I never even thought about our freshman survey--they made it quite clear they were studying us. We were cool with that. I don't recall if they asked about politics. Anyway, I found a lot of links to a lot of studies and Dodson (2014) is said to give one of the best overviews--but it's paywalled.
This article [insidehighered.com] apparently written by somebody who read the Dodson study interprets the results as indicating that professors pull students away from extremes, but student activities polarize them. So if we're going to point fingers at anything on campus for creating extremists, looks like it's the clubs.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday October 24, @02:48AM (1 child)
I rather say it's more likely that the colleges teach the students how to think (you know? actually doing their job), then students discover the "reality has liberal bias" (ie we can't continue on the same as-is "conservative" path w/o running into troubles that are affecting or will affect them) and they want those troubles removed now. The clubs may offer only "watering hole" moments, but then again so is the social media - so closing the "clubs" where students communicate is not the solution.
Besides, not like the right wing doesn't get radicalized, even if not enrolled in colleges; actually more likely the lack of an education would make the conservatives more prone to extremist actions [archive.org].
I reckon is the habit of using critical thinking that prevents extremism - the current westernalized education still tries to teach critical thinking, in spite of external pressures.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Friday October 24, @05:19AM
Who said anything about closing clubs?
If you try to close down the Gay Communist Gun club (transcript, video URL was too long) [jt.org] it's just going to make all that seem more cool. Boy did that sketch hit differently in the 80s.
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(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday October 24, @03:30AM
I think in the past, professors kept their opinions to themselves and it was the student activists that were holding lectures like "Is this the end of Capitalism?" and similar.
I think what has changed is that those student activists never grew up, never left to get a job, stayed in the University / College system and are now academics themselves (the only employment path open to them). And they are using their new position to continue their advocacy from when they were part of the student activist groups.
Similarly, left-wing editors on Wikipedia were prepared to spend more time in page wars and eventually wore down the right, who had better things to do and left. Now it's gatekept to ensure that the right can't get back in.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 25, @01:21PM (7 children)
The rhetoric of hoarding has no place here. First, the real investment is a bit over $20 billion in investment with $13 billion by Microsoft and over $7 billion by other parties. That's the money that actually went into OpenAI as investment. It's not a significant portion of the every day economy. The $500 billion is a phantom valuation of the company given the investment so far made from a single group of transactions ($6.6 billion of formerly employee-owned shares sold to various parties). Second, do you even agree with that valuation? It doesn't make sense to consider it wealth withheld from Joe Average, when you probably don't even agree with the valuation to within an order of magnitude!
Given the discussion on "late stage capitalism", thinking of investment and renting as something taken away from Joe Average is classic Marxist. c0lo, you'd have a better argument, if you weren't falling to the thinking traps of Marxism in the course of your arguments.
As to the alleged dominance of rental properties? Make more where they are needed. A huge problem that is missed here is that there are artificial barriers to market forces for fixing the high cost of real estate. Zoning and its equivalents in particular restrict supply of housing very effectively over much of the developed world.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 25, @06:47PM (6 children)
My mistake: I didn't verify if openAI is publicly traded - it's not.
Explain this [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @01:33AM (5 children)
Even if such a company is publicly traded, it is typical for a small amount of stock to be issued and sold for the initial market while the great majority is held by the early investors and founders, resulting in a significantly smaller investment than the valuation of the company.
"This" is a short video about farmers giving away free, "ugly" food and people showing up for it. They claim that they are feeding "food insecure" people. Given that the people of the queue in question waited for hours in rain, that could well be true. It's a lot of effort to go through for free produce.
I find it interesting that when I googled for "us go to bed hungry" and "canada go to bed hungry" (looked at due to a claim in the above video) I got similar proportions of the respective populations (42 million [washingtoninformer.com] out of 333 million in 2022) of the countries (7 million [newswire.ca] out of 39 million in 2022 including covid). If Canada's greater social program coverage were effective, one would expect to see a noticeably smaller portion of Canada's population go hungry, right?
And no matter how much food we give to the food insecure, we're not researching AI with that money.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday October 26, @06:21AM (4 children)
Why are the people food unsecure when food is available and they take it when it's free?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @11:40AM (3 children)
Why are those people food insecure when British Columbia minimum wage is $17.85 per hour and British Columbia already has a variety of programs for feeding the food insecure and their children?
Nor was that food given for free. It was provided at considerable cost to the farmers involved.
A final point here is that there is a huge destination of ugly food: processed food. The global emphasis on reducing or eliminating processed food from the diet results in considerable food waste.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 27, @07:41AM (2 children)
You still didn't answer to the original question, just adjusted the scope.
Ah, yes, you nitpicked on "free" - if you want a more rigorous definition of the meaning I intended in the context, here it is:"when it was offered at no monetary cost to them as beneficiaries".
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 27, @09:59AM (1 child)
Very well. I see four categories based on a grid of whether they work (full time) or not, and have large expenses or problems outside of their control. So don't work and problems outside of control (single parent with young kids, very disabled). Don't but could work. Work but with large problems (large medical bills, garnished wages). Work but budgets poorly.
My view is that most food insecurity is due to present day human stupidity (past and present) rather than problems of society. And that's why a country with more comprehensive social programs than the US doesn't perform better than the US in this particular metric.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 27, @12:12PM
Hard to substantiate one way or the other w/o data.
Even harder when considering food insecurity is gradual (on a scale) in intensity and can vary over time - makes one-shot studies with low participation quite dubious.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @04:13AM (5 children)
FYI - Technofeudalism [wikipedia.org]
Methinks there's enough reality to support that the term captures something more than just emotional hyperbola. It wouldn't describe the totality of this world's society, but again neither any other term or concept.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday October 23, @05:40PM (4 children)
Now this, this is real meat and got me thinking. It was fortuitous that the 'net went down just before bed time. As I lay there before sleeping, a few things occurred to me.
First, I had dismissed the phrase because it seemed like the kind of thing a journalist might have tossed off in a Wired essay or something as opposed to anything with a formal definition. I still don't think it's correct or useful, because it really just takes a number of things we already know about and groups them: trust/monopoly, privacy concerns, "walled gardens", proprietary systems--these are all things we routinely complain about here; myself included.
It reminds me of Abundance. Have you heard of Abundance with a big-A? Google that one if you haven't. It's died down a bit, but for a while I was running in to it all the time with regards to urban planning, the YIMBY movement, etc. to the point where I actually was compelled to look it up on my own as opposed to somebody pointing it out to me as more than just a meme. Turns out there's a book all about it. The core is deregulation, although they've tacked on some bits it's basically that--a few hundred pages, a tour, some lectures; a nice thing going for somebody.
This seems to happen a lot online. It also reminds me of how I found out about BIPOC. This woman seemed to be looking down on me for not having read the author who introduced it. Not saying you were doing that, but this kind of chest-thumping is definitely real.
So yet another thing I've been saying over the years is that Marx was just responding to the social conditions brought by the Industrial Revolution. If there were no Industrial revolution, there would probably be no communism or the earlier Luddites (They were not actually anti-tech, that's propaganda).
Among other failings, I see communism as *outdated*, being a response to an earlier technological change. Now we're getting to something. A major hurdle, perhaps even the real core problem in society right now is our failure to properly integrate new technology.
I've said elsewhere that unlike in the past where the Western world disrupted primitive tribes with technology, we've disrupted ourselves, "Even the white man is building fake air strips, and fighting over the white man's cargo".
What are you and I even doing here? We're tussling online. Shaddow-boxing in a technical arena in some vain attempt to accumulate obscure Internet Points (TM). So what's the name of all this that I came up with before I drifted off last night?
Memeocracy.
Predictably, it's a term that's been claimed; but not formally. It seems to be used by people building fantasy worlds based on "memes" in the "pictures with captions" sense rather than the earlier more formally defined sense.
I think both definitions of "meme" are at play, defining our actions, influencing our culture, guiding our politics, and thriving in the aforementioned walled gardens and platforms encompassed by "techno fedualism", which itself is a meme.
To bring this full circle, if a meme like "reality has a left wing bias" can propagate, it will. It doesn't care if it alienates half the body politic by insinuating they're biased against reality. It just grows and mutates.
The memes are ruling us, my friend; and they are selfish.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @10:46PM (3 children)
Of course it's not correct, for the same reason the "late stage capitalism", "state capture" [wikipedia.org], "regulatory capture" [wikipedia.org] and "oligarchy" [wikipedia.org] are all incorrect: they don't perfectly match the current situation.
But while they aren't incorrect as stand-in words (or "labels" if you please) for the groups of phenomena their are meant to describe, they do have the evocation power even if the explanatory power is lacking.
From this perspective, your
is correct in the "not forced" part, but it seems to me you stopped short - I would have answered "bits from all of them are applicable, none apply in full"
Now, that's a thought. Or something to think about.
It seems to me it's the first time in human history when the technological advances and increased social complexity may happen faster than the biological/social ability to adapt to the new changes. For example, the X-ers have seen:
No wonder today's philosophers go nuts (and reduce their large horizon views of the world to a single point that they need to make day in and day out, namely janrinok is evil) and ADHD becomes a positive evolutionary trait (and this is an apropos to your "Memeocracy.") - until a narcissistic autocrat takes advantage of the attention deficit.
Do I really believe that the speed of progress surpassed the adaptation capability of the human society? Not exactly, may be there's something, may be not.
I certainly hope that my last words in some 20y or so will be "what a ride!" and not some watered down version of the tears in the rain monologue.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @01:38AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday October 26, @06:52AM (1 child)
Paint that elephant white with USD as trade/reserve currency
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @11:25AM
It'd still be the same elephant no matter how you painted it. . Global trade (and the important labor competition) would still happen even in the absence of a popular common currency of trade. And it wouldn't be hard for other parties to establish their own global currencies of trade/reserve. After all, the EU did it, for example.
And really, for evolutionary purposes what change has happened between the era of Bretton Woods and today's flavor of fiat currency? My take is that Bretton Woods was merely a fragile implementation of fiat currency in the first place and the primary effect of the transition over the 1960s and 1970s to fiat currency was to remove the broken pieces of the system.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @01:23AM (6 children)
In other words, change for change's sake. I think rather that most societal change happens because the established ways are fully occupied by a bunch of geezers. Change then becomes a way to achieve something that doesn't require you to wait for someone to move on. Sometimes change of that sort works out and sometimes it doesn't. Same goes for those progressive ideologies. Fresh ideas, even when complete garbage, stand out. And in something like politics, your ability to look sincere when you promise something is much more important than the quality of what you promise or your ability to deliver.
Also these ideas of progressive, conservative, and so on have grown very muddled. For example, the proposal to set aside half of the Earth's surface from human presence and activity is both extremely progressive and extremely conservative.
I have become pretty cynical about change. I think most such change is done for personal or special interest rather than social reasons. That's one of the reasons I favor capitalism. At least, when capitalists are doing change for personal/special interest reasons, profit only happens when someone else benefits as well (someone has to voluntarily trade for that change).
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday October 23, @03:50AM (5 children)
No, not at all. The issue with conservativism is that it's a lack of change for the sake of a lack of change. I just don't see a lot of progressives demanding change just to demand change. There's already far too much work to be done on things that need to be done.
As far as setting aside half the surface, that's far more realistic than you give it credit for. You could pack every human being into Texas if you accepted the population density of NYC. Obviously, you'd need more space than that to cover the necessarily agricultural land, but even if you accept a lower level of density and account for a lower population density, you could probably manage to keep it to 1/4 of the land surface.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @03:30PM (4 children)
Here, lack of change has just as much reason as change does. Your argument that "for the simple reason that we've done that stuff and if it were really that good, there's high likelihood that we wouldn't have moved away from it" is equally balanced by the argument that we wouldn't have done that stuff in the first place if it weren't really that good.
I think a classic academic example of change for change's sake is the broad category of post-modernism (and its techniques). While there is merit to the ideas, questioning established and very stagnant thought on a variety of subjects and deconstructing the ideas and beliefs of various systems, it's real appeal is in greatly reducing the difficulty of obtaining academic credentials and status.
Then there's Trump's weird renovations of the White House (considerable modification of the east wing of the building which includes removal of the Rose Garden). That's more to generate political drama and strong man-style theater than to improve some aspect of the White House.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday October 23, @06:25PM (3 children)
It doesn't though. Changing things involves an expenditure of resources to get the new idea developed enough to be useful and then popularized. It can take a large amount of resources to get it to catch on, and that isn't something that lends itself to change just to change things.
It's rarely a legitimate equal reason to change and remain the same. That is a very unstable equilibrium, there's normally a larger reason one way or the other. Somethings like paperclips have basically not changed in over a century. The only changes I've seen are that some are made of plastic and some are coated, but the uncoated metal is still by far the most people are shows no sign of being replaced. It hit a point where it was good enough that it's unlikely that it will ever be replaced with something that does the job better.
Likewise, look at what's happening right now in terms of health care. There is a very strong pull in the direction of change on basically every level.
In short, it's a bunch of nonsense to suggest that there's a compelling case for conservativism as a whole. There are some areas that make little sense to change, but there's also very little actual effort being made into changing them for the positive. The changes I see in areas that should be very conservative like with airplane manufacturing are mostly going in the wrong direction and mostly being pushed by alleged conservatives.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 25, @01:01PM (2 children)
On the first point, consider "take a large amount of resources". That in itself often drives change. There are plenty of political examples of change that happen merely because an influential someone profits from the activity or can skim off the top. Or it can be like pyramid building where a relatively meaningless, but costly project is done because someone tries to improve their personal status or legacy - scrubbing traces of previous pharaohs in the process.
While going through the example below, I ran across another deliberate source of change, vendors refusing to support old computer systems and programs (which often forces customers to upgrade to a newer, still supported system). It can be highly profitable to force customers to upgrade systems to the next big thing.
A more important problem is that it is a really common (and illegitimate) outcome to make change that doesn't change. For example, one of my employers more than a decade before I started working for it had attempted to upgrade a critical function to a new computer system and blundered so badly that they risked losing that part of their business altogether (they had to maintain certain functionality as part of a key contract), so they had to drop the system and do things manually until they could get the old system back up and running.
This failure was so bad that it created a two decade period where the local leadership refused to touch that system. Eventually as I understand it a top-down company movement forced this system to be upgraded (combined with Microsoft and various vendors dropping support for the old system), and was successful this time. Perhaps it could have been done much earlier, but nobody wanted to take that chance given what happened the previous time.
I don't fully know why the earlier upgrade failed, but a typical reason is that the upgraders underestimated the cost, what it would take to successfully upgrade such an important system, didn't test the new system properly before switching over, and didn't have a plan B should the upgrade fail. The upgrade failure mentioned above checked off a few of those boxes.
This brings me to another example of change for change's sake: implementing a big change without bothering to understand the costs or needs of the change first.
And yet, you just made the case (at least twice) that it isn't nonsense. There are plenty of areas where change needs to be made cautiously and conservatively for the reason you cite above of "little sense to change" or other reasons, For those who view change casually, they often run afoul of these reasons.
Dynamically, change is not in itself a state of equilibrium, but a change to a new state, hopefully, of equilibrium. Too often that future state is not in equilibrium and requires future change such as reverting to a previous state or applying additional changes. The latter can generate thrashing, a long term sequence of change (such as poorly thought out band aids to problems that appear) that provokes future change because the previous step of change created further (usually predictable) dysfunction in the system. In such cases, the policy makers often can't revert either due to ideological myopia (simply can't conceive of the system being done a better way) or because they burned their bridges/ships and can no longer go back.
A classic example is to create a public good, and then make endless policy adjustments to stop up loopholes that the local scam industry exploits while creating future loopholes.
Anyway, rationally there isn't a greater legitimacy to making change or keeping things the same. Just as there are reasons for change, there are also reasons for not changing. And as noted above, there are frequent cases of change that actually make the overall culture more conservative. Make frivolous changes in key systems, such as corrupting Boeing's manufacturing process or badly implemented upgrades, can result in long bouts of conservatism. Some things like paperclips just don't have much need or room for change. To decree beforehand that one side of this decision is more legitimate than the other is to ignore the decision-making process and its frequent failures.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday October 25, @11:06PM (1 child)
This is nonsense, for every one person that profits off of unnecessary change, there are others that profit off the status quo. That has never been the driving force behind any change that was durable enough to be followed through to completion. With the possible exception of some place like North Korea where one person is ultimately the final say in everything, that's just not a common thing to happen.
The fact that some incompetent people screw up change is not an argument for conservativism. Conservatives are on the whole some of the most ignorant people most likely to engage in those sorts of changes. There was certainly cost and investment involved in that, if not doing anything at all was expected to be a viable option the conservative view would have been to do that. At any rate, the fact that it was botched isn't a valid argument against change, it's an argument against incompetent business practices.
Where precisely have I made the case that conservativism isn't on the whole less advantageous than progress? The state that conservatives are pushing for is retrograde and something that had a bunch of issues that have to be ignored to view that as desirable. At least new things have unknown challenges and hopefully smaller ones.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @03:32AM
There is considerable unnecessary change for the sake of generating profit for someone, and thus support for change for change's sake. Also, focused special interests routinely triumph over diffuse general interests.
To the contrary, it is a very solid argument for conservatism. My upgrade example demonstrates how screwing up change implementation generates conservatism too.
In general there's going to be a bias towards progressive ideology and other ideologies that are moving people away from how things were done in the past for the simple reason that we've done that stuff and if it were really that good, there's high likelihood that we wouldn't have moved away from it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday October 22, @08:21PM (2 children)
Where are all these communists of which you speak? In the western nations I am familiar with they barely exist in any statistically significant numbers. I cannot remember the last time I read anyone advocating for that ideology on this site either. Too many?
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @08:44PM
Forgive him, he's triggered. That's how he is, he can't fight his nature.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday October 23, @02:45AM
Under the bed. Everyone knows that!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @08:15PM
Take a quick objective look out the window. Chances are you'll see advertising. This is evidence in front of your face that people with money want you to think things that aren't true. It's undeniable. If you want to talk about bias, it is heavily, heavily, heavily in favor of wealthy. One side of our political spectrum not only believes this but thinks it doesn't go far enough. Wealthy people should have all power, not just overwhelming bias in their favor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday October 24, @05:49AM
Reciting these kinds of mantras is exactly the kind of denial that got the Democrats into the pitiful state they are in.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Wednesday October 22, @01:57PM (22 children)
Maybe conservative and religious editors are just wrong more often?
Wikipedia also has a clear bias against flat-earth. And it has that bias for a very good reason: THE WORLD IS NOT FLAT!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday October 22, @02:16PM (19 children)
Yeah, these are the idiots that deny evolution, think the planet is 5,000 years old, deny climate change, think vaccines are bad, think tylenol causes autism, etc.
Of course Wikipedia is biased against them. Otherwise it would be called Jesuspedia or something.
Recent research has shown that 1 out of 3 Trump supporters is a stupid as the other 2.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @02:24PM (8 children)
Why does Jesus want people to be stupid?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sgleysti on Wednesday October 22, @03:28PM
Not stupid: misinformed. It takes a high degree of intelligence to rationalize all the things one needs to believe to maintain a fundamentalist faith.
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Wednesday October 22, @03:35PM (4 children)
Jesus was probably fine with education. It's his asshole followers that are the problem.
Proverbs 16:16 How much better to get wisdom than gold! To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @03:49PM (2 children)
So what don't they understand? They've had over 2000 years. You'd think they'd be better at it by now.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @04:34PM (1 child)
The Catholic Church had a track record of sponsoring science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Church [wikipedia.org]
Galileo's real problem was he made his Big Boss look like a fool. That's a bad move in lots of cases even not involving religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair [wikipedia.org]
Guess Galileo was also a fool...
If you're sponsored by Coca Cola, you don't go around saying in public Pepsi is better even if you think it is better. And you don't make the Coca Cola Boss look stupid in public. More so if the Coca Cola Boss wields significant amounts of military force.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, @01:42AM
Also he just got house arrest. Compare that to the even badder older days consequences of publicly making a King/Emperor look like a fool while still living within his domain.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/galileos-house-arrest/ [wordpress.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday October 22, @05:52PM
Also, those writings are pretty much all at least 1800 years old at this point. Even the most progressive people of the time were somewhat limited in terms of how far they could look while still having something that would be acceptable to the people of the time.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, @03:57AM (1 child)
The Abrahamic religions literally teach that humans were expelled from paradise for gaining knowledge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Thursday October 23, @09:37AM
And yet people are happy to follow them. But I don't think that's what it means. I think they're trying to say that any form of intelligence or knowledge comes with the burden of perception and that means being able to see imperfection everywhere. I think it's symbolic. I need to write that journal entry on how I became an atheist.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday October 22, @03:29PM (9 children)
Beware.
Well, that "Don't take God's name in vain." fits.
Couple of days ago, I got a phrase from local ideologist that said translated: "The question marks surrounding the flat Earth are more complicated than most people think."
My immediate reaction was "It's painful to share this Universe with fools."
As I am getting old, I understand genocide better, as a necessity.
It's the last defense against resolute determined manipulators.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @03:47PM
Genocide or ... I want to say stupidicide but the term is ... eugenics! Yes, some form of eugenics. I think "genocide" proper is promulgated by the same kinds of people who push these kinds of theories for self-aggrandizement or power.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RamiK on Wednesday October 22, @05:34PM (7 children)
Jesus isn't God's name. Its reverence is a separate practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Name_of_Jesus [wikipedia.org]
Which, at least in the east, borders on heresy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imiaslavie [wikipedia.org]
Jesus will disagree. Jehovah, on the other hand...
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday October 22, @09:26PM (4 children)
The God of the old Testament is supposed to be the God of the New Testament. If you are mainstream Christian, then you most likely believe in the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost)*, so the name of the Son is a name of God, and probably the most used one, as Christians are more likely to refer to Jesus than the Tetragrammaton [wikipedia.org].
*Creed of St Athanasius [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday October 23, @07:48PM (3 children)
Putting aside anti-Trinitarians, the Eastern Church rejected the Filioque clause which led to the very great schism that kept the two churches apart while Protestant Trinitarianism, while fundamentally the same as Catholic Trinitarianism, doesn't interchange God the Son [wikipedia.org], God the Father [wikipedia.org] or Holy Spirit [wikipedia.org] when referring to Jesus:
( Martin Luther https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-326?p=emailAYl8MMkObdFgE&d=/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-326 [oxfordre.com] )
It's nuanced but it basically comes down to a separation between signified and signifier where the name "Jesus" is designated to the second person in the Godhead but not the other persons while also saying all three are one and the same God.
As an atheist, the way I explain it to the more physics-inclined is that, in the same way photons and electrons are described through seemingly contradictory wave-particle duality, God can hold a trinity of personas. That is, under the right conditions, when collecting and comparing the different quotes, God can take one of 3 different states while staying God with "Jesus" being one of those states. However, referring to God as "Jesus" is sorta like trying to describe light as only a wave or only a particle: It's tolerably wrong depending on the context but is sufficiently reductive to be incorrect.
But again, as an atheist...
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(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday October 24, @12:09PM (2 children)
I'm not sure that the 'Filioque' debate is relevant, as Jesus is 'of one substance/essence' with the Father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousion [wikipedia.org]
So really, we are looking at Nicene Christianity [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousion#Adoption_in_the_Nicene_Creed [wikipedia.org]
I'm not surprised to be discussing this with an atheist: in my experience, many atheists have thought carefully about their faith position, and as a consequence often have a better understanding of the faith, or faiths they do not profess than people who simply accept the default of the faith of their parents, for example.
As for the nature of the Trinity: clever theologians have debated it for centuries, so I doubt I have a superior insight. One way I have of looking at it (which might be theologically unsound) uses the help of the 'letter cube' found on the front of some print editions of Douglas Hofstadter's work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid [wikipedia.org]. It is a cunningly carved block of wood whereby the shadow cast in each of the orthogonal directions is a letter of the alphabet: in this case G,E, and B
https://media.printables.com/media/prints/517878/images/4191990_5d323d6e-8db6-42f1-9330-1150ccd83ce4/thumbs/inside/1280x960/jpg/geb-logo-1.webp [printables.com]
similar 'cubes' can be made with other letters:
https://peterbeshai.com/experiments/godel-escher-bach/ [peterbeshai.com]
So if one chooses the letters F, S, and H to represent the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you have one 'thing' that, when you look at it, presents three aspects into the world - we 'just' see the same 'thing' in different ways. We point at the thing from one direction and see F, from another S, and from the third H, yet we point at the same thing. Those who say "I see F." and those whose say "I see S" are seeing the same thing. It is still all God, coeternal and consubstantial.
It is very, very easy to slip into the heresy that there is a hierarchy in the Trinity (ontological subordination), and that somehow, the Father 'outranks' the Son ( 'begotten of the Father before all things were made') and the Father and the Son 'outrank' the Holy Sprit ('proceedeth from the Father and the Son'), however, the majority of Christian theology rejects such ontological subordination, but does recognise that each part of the Trinity plays a different role.
Your average person-in-the-street Christian neither knows of, nor cares about such (fine) distinctions.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday October 24, @06:31PM (1 child)
It was just an example of the Trinity not being understood the same way even among major Christian groups who claim they follow the doctrine.
One reason I was inclined to mention Bulgakov was because his name-veneration was rooted on his Trinitarian doctrine and rejection of causality: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12708 [wiley.com]
Reminder: I'm giving a possible theological explanation to why "Jesuspedia" might not be considered "in vain" to some protestants based on the Lutheran position that the name Jesus refers to "second person in the Godhead, viz. the Son, [that] alone became true man" rather than the whole of the Godhead.
If I wanted to make a more general point, I could have also brought up how naming your kid Jesus isn't a problem to Catholics.
TBH, I'm basically just defaulting to my father's atheism where I can't recall ever believing in God or being led to believe in much of anything really. In fact, my interest in religion comes from political science, history and literacy rather than faith and I never really bothered defending my position beyond the atheist vs. agnostic quips where someone would squirm around "I don't know if God exists or not so I can't say I don't believe in God" and I'll respond with "Do you believe there's a magical fairy flying just behind you where you can't see?" to see if they turn around to check.
Basically, for me, religions and science fiction occupy about the same place: I like the literary discourse but faith never seems to enter into any of it.
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(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday October 24, @08:23PM
Heh, without getting too complicated, I think we can agree that different groups will treat the name 'Jesus' in different ways, which could well be incompatible according to each group's philosophy. In the same way, different groups have different ideas about the Trinity.
I don't currently have the energy to get worked up over the differences.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday October 22, @09:39PM (1 child)
In all cults in Asia, traditionally god (or sect leader) is absolutely responsible for deeds of followers of his cult.
This is respected in all sects and results in their diplomacy.
By this paradigm, Jesus, is absolutely responsible for all deaths executed in his name.
That goes to hundreds of millions of souls, if not billions already.
If not onyone else in this World, me I call him for taking up this responsibility, by this very rule.
His agreement on anything else is not relevant to me.
Also, in Taoism, all cults where worshippers or/and priests drink blood of a god and eat his flesh are considered demonist. This is a model sunday ritual behavior in all christianity.
To me, Jesus is just another demon of the Tian Mo, Sky Demons crowd.
And don't start me ranting about Jehovah, the Soul Eater.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday October 24, @07:06PM
(Ezekiel 18:20, NIV [biblegateway.com])
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Undefined on Wednesday October 22, @03:04PM (1 child)
Speaking as a (very) liberal person, religious folks are always wrong when they are pushing superstition. Because it's bullshit.
However, socially, they often provide considerable scaffolding to society, and that has value. There's a lot of good things can be said for community, and side effects like art and architecture — and the latter is often the former. Those arise out of religious conviction, so... side effects.
Conservatives often have valid points. I really think they get a bad rap here, and the reason for that is that the problem children, as it were, aren't actually conservatives: They're regressives.
Legitimate conservatism tends to keep social change slow, and considering how carefully that ought to proceed, I see it as a good thing overall, if annoying at times.
Regression... walking society backwards is almost always the wrong thing to do. There are exceptions, but they tend to arrive consequent to things that were regressions in the first place. Such as some of the rulings SCOTUS has dropped with its regressive majority, a great deal of what the executive has done during Trump's terms of office, and what the regressives in congress have been doing for quite a while now.
All of that needs to be rolled back with very few exceptions. But those that will (hopefully) roll those idiocies back won't be the regressives. It'll be the at-least-somewhat progressive folks, and yes, the conservatives.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday October 22, @06:06PM
In practice though it's a bit of a moot point as over time the things that people might want to conserve about now become things that require regression to get to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @01:57PM (3 children)
Tough for him but reality has a heavy bias against conservative and religious positions. Viewpoints and opinions are not of equal value to actual empirical facts. They are not even comparable. Nor should they be.
Sanger just wants to open the floodgate for illegal Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) against Wikipedia contributors to silence inconvenient truths. Not being able to compete on facts, he aims for censorship of Wikipedia through frivolous but expensive lawsuits, the more frivolous the better from his perspective. Wikipedia is already bad enough there with corporate public relations firms being paid to camp out on articles and maintain misleading or inaccurate content to the benefit of the paying companies. Sanger appears to want to take that to the next level and drive away all the non-corporate activity.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday October 22, @02:17PM (2 children)
Apparently he is upset that Wikipedia doesn't view Intelligent Design as a theory that should be taken as something other than pseudoscience. [scienceandculture.com]
Frankly, that tells you all you need to know about him.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @02:35PM (1 child)
Is he worried that MAGA are coming for him? Or has his brain melted?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 22, @11:56PM
Early senility perhaps.
Takes a functioning brain to fend off endless assaults upon reason.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Wednesday October 22, @02:01PM
Epoch Times wants changes to Wikipedia.
Epoch Times is not allowed as a source on Wikipedia.
Connected much?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @02:25PM (6 children)
Get your own website.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @03:51PM (1 child)
Couldn't this be done via a sort of parallel site, that has meta-information like this on articles? Wikipedia content is Creative Commons (thank goodness), so that's a possibility. Also, if he wants to put forth his own ideas, isn't Conservapedia [conservapedia.com] good enough?
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @03:56PM
Maybe Conservapedia is the wrong kind of wrong for him?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday October 22, @03:56PM (1 child)
We all laughed, but there is a market for 'alternative facts'.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @04:19PM
We didn't laugh hard enough, evidently. These people hate being laughed at.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday October 22, @04:39PM (1 child)
Nobody is forced to use Wikipedia.
There already are other websites with differing points of view.
Just like nobody makes you watch liberal news when you can watch conservative news and listen to QAnon.
If we sing a slaying song tonight, what tools will be used for the slaying?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday October 22, @04:43PM
Well, you've hit the nail on the head again.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by Brymouse on Wednesday October 22, @02:31PM (3 children)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @03:04PM (2 children)
I would argue that Wikipedia, being something of an encyclopedia, is much more about factual, verifiable information, than about free speech and diverse viewpoints.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, @12:56AM (1 child)
That was the original goal as i understood it back when Wikipedia started. Between the deletion wars and the automatic rejection of anything from half of the sources out there, it is clear that while you can still use it for actual science information, any history or sociological article is suspect.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nobuddy on Thursday October 23, @06:14PM
automatic rejection form sources is because those sources are proven over and over again to lie. That is not in any way a failing on the part of wikipedia.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @03:38PM (6 children)
Acupuncture [wikipedia.org] is one of the articles where you can clearly see language bias. If you went into the article without bias, and just read it for tone (or even ask an AI about it), it almost makes you think "Show me on the doll where the bad woman poked you with the pointy needle."
There's no currently postulated western scientific model for its efficacy, but I'm pretty sure China, Japan, Korea use it as a common treatment, and there's a decent amount of evidence [xkcd.com] that it has *some* effect. Even that "Efficacy" section grudgingly admits that it *might* work for neck pain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @04:49PM (2 children)
If the conventional stuff hasn't been working and the placebo works, good luck convincing the patient it doesn't work...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @05:14PM
Exactly. I wish there was a Wikipedia tag for "Even medicgal insurance providers are willing to pay an actual healthcare provider for it, so it probably isn't completely bogus."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @08:24PM
The thing is, if it worked reliably we would use it. Why wouldn't we? Look at the lengths we go to in other areas. Injecting fetus tissue into sports stars? Check. Fecal implants? Check. Literally creating radioisotopes with 15 minute 1/2-lives to do PET scans. We are not squeamish nor afraid to experiment. If something works, we use it. Ergo the needles are bullshit.
(Score: 3, Touché) by gnuman on Wednesday October 22, @05:19PM (2 children)
We use OTC medicines for viral infections even though there is no scientific efficacy for them.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @05:43PM
But ... but ... doctors agree [youtu.be] you shouldn't count on anecdotal advice [youtu.be]! Funny how it always seemed like pharmaceutical advertising was so informational in nature. Can't really blame them though, it's not like the WWW was available to disseminate scientific dis/information at the time, even within organizations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday October 22, @09:44PM
Placebo is an enormous confounder. Just because lots of people use a particular treatment, and claim "it works for them", unbiased studies, controlled for the placebo effect, show no effectiveness. If you do enough studies, by random chance, some of them will show an apparently significant effect, even more so if you do p-hacking: or the green jellybean effect [xkcd.com].
Lots of people get relief from back-pain by use of chiropractic. The theory behind it is absolutely and completely bonkers, yet many people swear that they feel considerably better after being manipulated by a chiropractor. When people genuinely (in their experience) get relief from their pain by chiropractic manipulation, it is very difficult to argue that it is 'just placebo' - but there is no good evidence for something that ought to show a massively significant (in statistical terms) effect, given the population of people willing to undergo treatment.
Homoeopathy is similar. Many people genuinely believe it works. Actual evidence, despite many studies, is rather lacking.
There is the quip as well: What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.
If it works under properly controlled circumstances, it will get adopted and used in mainstream medicine.
But many people go to alternative practitioners because they have far better bedside manners than stressed and overworked doctors. The psychology is important, and allows (unscrupulous) people to extract money from people who are either genuinely ill, or fancy that they are ill.