How do you think you can reach anything close to objectivity without aiming for diversity and inclusion? What do you think will happen to an encyclopaedia which is mostly run by Elon fans? We already had that at one of the extremes (and the echos are still here) from the time medicine just didn't bother to study women.
When you grow up to be an adult, you will understand that "objectivity"is a fiction.
And an encyclopedia can absolutely do that and still present factual information based on actual research and facts.
You know that just because a lady has blue hair or a person has colored skin does NOT mean that they can't be right about something or do good research. Right? You do know it, right?
Because in the end, when you cry about DEI (whatever you believe it to mean), this is the implication that comes with it: that you can't imagine for a second that anyone who doesn't look exactly like you could ever do anything competently. I genuinely wonder if you've ever thought about that for more than half a second after you closed that Charlie Kirk video.
If you do believe it, fair enough. I guess you're allowed to believe it. But at least be honest about it.
I really don't mean to be rude but you sound insane. You have spent too much time in whatever insulated twitter space you're in, and you've ended up sounding like an insane person! Please go do independent research on these topics, so you can try not saying things like "DEI virtue signaling white knights". You just strung together 3 separate buzzwords (buzzphrase?)
What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji?
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
Comparing gov’t officials to civilians is a stupid comparison.
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
It isn't just hyperbole it is completely divorced from reality. Biden said "fund the police" at a state of the union address. Federal law enforcement didn't see cuts. Funding for state police (the bulk of police around the country) increased, with very few localities actually shifting funds from police to other things.
Changpeng Zhao broke the law and got caught. Everyone agrees on that. What you present above is revisionist history about "political persecution," which is the favorite justification of the current administration for pardoning convicted felons, even in the total absence of any evidence supporting a conclusion of political persecution. See also George Santos, J6 rioters, etc.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
You sound biased. If you believe this narrative, I got a few questions for you…
- How was Binance any different than any other crypto exchange?
- Should Coinbase and every other crypto platform be charged for the same crimes?
Is there a place for a logical counter-point in there not having been charges against people responsible for the 2008 financial crisis? It seems like a selective enforcement of rules or consequences in both situations to me.
Your argument is a non sequitur. You are saying in essence: "Someone, somewhere, under totally different circumstances was not prosecuted. Therefore, this particular prosecution is selective prosecution, and therefore inappropriate." By that logic, we should just stop prosecuting crimes altogether, on the logic that we are unable to prosecute all crimes consistently.
There wasn't an argument per se, but an attempt to point out a possibly, similarly politically-influenced miscarriage of justice.
It may be a non sequitur to suggest that the pardon of one convicted financial criminal is similar to the lack of convictions in another likely financial crime context, but it seemed germane and parallel to me.
They should be charged too. Every conviction for financial crimes is an incredibly hard fought victory, because this country runs on fraud. Your argument is why we should treasure CZs conviction and seek many many many more like it.
This was part of my point and a nuance I appreciate as well, and that the pardon resonates for me with the apparent lack of charges for those responsible for the financial crisis.
Yes, exactly, and yet I don't think there has been much in the way of charges brought against those responsible for fraudulently rating the securities.
Some form of fraud for misrepresenting the risk that the mortgages that were bundled together, seems like the obvious answer. But I'm not a forensic accountant or someone with the nuanced legal understanding to define a charge here. Do you think there was no crime in the actions taken by either the banks or the rating agencies? No failure of fiduciary responsibility?
With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.
He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.
The law says he should have prevented those bad apples from moving dirty money around, and he did not follow the law.
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
I would think any serious actor would know better than to store funds where they could be seized at a moments notice, so while I'm sure every exchange is guilty, Binances crime was getting caught.
Kinda like getting a speeding ticket, the fact that other people were also speeding isn't a defense.
They are emulating the behavior of every power-seeking mediocrity ever, who crave affirmation above all else.
Lots of them practiced - indeed an entire industry is dedicated toward promoting and validating - making daily affirmations on their own, long before LLMs showed up to give them the appearance of having won over the enthusiastic support of a "smart" friend.
I am increasingly dismayed by the way arguments are conducted even among people in non-social media social spaces, where A will prompt their favorite LLM to support their View and show it to B who responds by prompting their own LLM to clap back at them - optionally in the style of e.g. Shakespeare (there's even an ad out that directly encourages this - it helps deflect alattention from the underlying cringe and pettyness being sold) or DJT or Gandhi etc.
Our future is going to be a depressing memescape in which AI sock puppetry is completely normalized and openly starting one's own personal cult is mandatory for anyone seeking cultural or political influence. It will start with celebrities who will do this instead of the traditional pivot toward religion, once it is clear that one's youth and sex appeal are no longer monetizable.
Abundance of sugar and fat triggers primal circuits which cause trouble if said sources are unnaturally abundant.
Social media follows a similar pattern but now with primal social and emotional circuits. It too causes troubles, but IMO even larger and more damaging than food.
I think this part of AI is going to be another iteration of this: taking a human drive, distilling it into its core and selling it.
It's not new and it's far more broad than that. The staggering government corruption and incompetence has been ignored for decades. You can't just pretend that this is suddenly new and one sided if you want to solve the problem.
This just isn’t true, it is easy to find blatant corruption tied to politicians at all levels from both parties. Look at California, New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, look at the Biden family, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Letitia James, the Democrats are just as corrupt, the mainstream media just reports on it less.
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
I think it's naive not to see the "both sides" card get pulled anytime there is a criticism of the right. All the "centrists" come out to hold water for conservatives when their policies are clearly and specifically failing.
It’s pretty clear from this blogpost that Larry Sanger has abandoned a pursuit of truth and neutral point of view and instead does not like how reality fails to conform to his personal biases and preferences about the way the world is.
If nothing else, the rambling about global warming and MMR vaccines makes it obvious. It’s not neutral to spread many times disproven lies. Especially how he wants to spread it, without saying that it’s not true, because that’s not neutral. He just forgot that saying that something is true is also not neutral.
I understand the caution, and we need to be more cautious in today’s world. And I do in controversial topics quite frequently. For example, giving points for women during university admissions just for being women in Norway seemed outrageous. And when I feel that way, I immediately start to check its validity, especially that the article “forgot” to mention how many points. At the end they give out 1 or 2 points on a scale of 50, and not to just women but also men, where they are underrepresented. The article just lied about that we should have outrage. It’s a lie.
Larry Sanger wants such lies on Wikipedia. He should be way more cautious when he’s outraged. Also 100% of people who commented under this article on Reddit should do the same.
Organizations can't have commitments to truth. Only people can. And there is no mechanism that ensures that editors and admins have a commitment to truth.
OK, I can't argue with that. Timothy Snyder might make a similar correction, "markets can't be free, only people participating in the market can be free" is something he says frequently.
If only people can have commitments to truth, which organization, institution, or media do you think has a leader that seems to have a commitment to truth, especially truth in their institution? Who is our gold standard of "as good as it gets"?
I think for very scientific and technical matters that is entirely divorced from politics Wikipedia is fine, not great, but entirely serviceable.
For everything else I won't trust it, which sadly includes matters of war and history, as almost all causal claims about the world rests on counter factuals, and therefore does not merely depend on what is.
Politics also concerns what ought to be, not what is, and most editors of Wikipedia do not agree with me regarding what ought to be or even how one should determine what ought to be.
Wikipedia would do better if they could figure out a way to manage bias rather than try to eliminate it. I don't want to be overly critical. Wikipedia is useful, but it's really very far from ideal and I would not want my tax money going anywhere near it.
Roughly ~20 years behind current academic research on most subjects, makes it 10 to 40 years more advanced than other encyclopaedia and school curriculums.
But its value is on the bibliography. You have research papers linked, which makes it infinitely better than most other sources. The only way to get closer to the truth in history is rigorous demonstrations, and those only exist in academic papers.
The view on Wikipedia on the French revolution are mostly Furet's views, which is 20 years behind, as it is the case in the Anglo world. Furet isn't the only one cited in Wikipedia though, and his point of view is nuanced with research from the 90s and 2000s, all with links to actual research. The last time I checked, research from JCM on the recently (late 2000s) discovered 'archives du comité' isn't discussed yet there, but all that makes it infinitely better than encyclopaedia brittanica. Infinitely.
Do you have any examples to show why I shouldn't trust it in regards to political topics or history?
You also really avoided the "what's better"/"what's a better model" question.
Social consensus, consent, and political mandate aren't ideas that can be hand waived away, they matter and they effect you and they are deeply impact by what people perceive to be true.
So the question still stands, if you mention a topic like Mao's cultural revolution, where should I go to get a primer and verify that the way you're talking about it appears to be grounded in reality.
Not true, nearly 30% of their budget goes to partisan activism with DEI related initiatives.
"Supporting equity represents the second largest part of our programmatic work"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...