The case against: This is inside baseball. This is the insidest of inside baseball, it’s about a LessWrong commenter talking about LessWrong on the talk pages of Wikipedia, written by someone who cut his teeth writing by writing in the LessWrong diaspora online.
Also, it’s kind of a bad look for LessWrong to prominently feature an argument that a major detractor of LessWrong is up to shady epistemic nonsense. Like, obviously people on this forum are upvoting this, we’re mostly here because we like LessWrong and this says good things about the forum.
The case for: If this was about any other online community—if Gerard had been skewing the Wikipedia sources to make the My Little Pony fandom look bad, or to Streisand effect some weird theory and associated ban decision made on the War Thunder forums—I would highly upvote it without any qualm. That’s because this is an excellent highlighting of two important topics: how knowledge production works in the modern internet, and how deception can be hidden by spreading edge-case decisions around in a lot of different places.
What Wikipedia calls a reliable source and how Wikipedia writes about things informs a lot of the internet. (Less now with the rise of LLMs, but still a lot.) My answer to “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it” often included “I think I know it because I just read it on Wikipedia.” Seriously, I live in Boston, and I think Boston has a population of about six hundred thousand people because that’s what Wikipedia says. A detailed examination of the how that particular sausage gets made seems pretty good!
As for deception. . . look, I know my interests these days. But I still like having this as a thing to point to. How would you spot this, on the ground and as it’s happening? How would you point it out to someone else once you’d spotted it? At so many points of interaction, other Wikipedians might look and go “eh, seems like a judgement call, doesn’t look too unreasonable even if maybe it’s not how I’d have called it?” When you try and follow up on all the leads, and present them in a collection showing the persistent pattern, you look like the crazy guy with a corkboard full of string.
I also go back and forth on the voice. This is written in a narrative, storytelling mode. It’s well written in that mode. Sometimes I’d prefer the dryer, just-the-facts-ma’am version. But that wouldn’t get people to read it as much, and I think it wouldn’t even get across the feeling of what’s going on as much. Like, the line “No, of course not. That would be crass. They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that.” is emotive and trying to get a response from you, but I don’t know how I’d write those facts in a way that wasn’t emotive and also made the connection for people.
All together, I’m voting for this to be included on the Best Of list. . . but maybe we can put a caveat at the top that it’s not because it says bad things about one of our detractors, but because of the talk of epistemic sausage?
I am very much of two opposed minds here.
The case against: This is inside baseball. This is the insidest of inside baseball, it’s about a LessWrong commenter talking about LessWrong on the talk pages of Wikipedia, written by someone who cut his teeth writing by writing in the LessWrong diaspora online.
Also, it’s kind of a bad look for LessWrong to prominently feature an argument that a major detractor of LessWrong is up to shady epistemic nonsense. Like, obviously people on this forum are upvoting this, we’re mostly here because we like LessWrong and this says good things about the forum.
The case for: If this was about any other online community—if Gerard had been skewing the Wikipedia sources to make the My Little Pony fandom look bad, or to Streisand effect some weird theory and associated ban decision made on the War Thunder forums—I would highly upvote it without any qualm. That’s because this is an excellent highlighting of two important topics: how knowledge production works in the modern internet, and how deception can be hidden by spreading edge-case decisions around in a lot of different places.
What Wikipedia calls a reliable source and how Wikipedia writes about things informs a lot of the internet. (Less now with the rise of LLMs, but still a lot.) My answer to “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it” often included “I think I know it because I just read it on Wikipedia.” Seriously, I live in Boston, and I think Boston has a population of about six hundred thousand people because that’s what Wikipedia says. A detailed examination of the how that particular sausage gets made seems pretty good!
As for deception. . . look, I know my interests these days. But I still like having this as a thing to point to. How would you spot this, on the ground and as it’s happening? How would you point it out to someone else once you’d spotted it? At so many points of interaction, other Wikipedians might look and go “eh, seems like a judgement call, doesn’t look too unreasonable even if maybe it’s not how I’d have called it?” When you try and follow up on all the leads, and present them in a collection showing the persistent pattern, you look like the crazy guy with a corkboard full of string.
I also go back and forth on the voice. This is written in a narrative, storytelling mode. It’s well written in that mode. Sometimes I’d prefer the dryer, just-the-facts-ma’am version. But that wouldn’t get people to read it as much, and I think it wouldn’t even get across the feeling of what’s going on as much. Like, the line “No, of course not. That would be crass. They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that.” is emotive and trying to get a response from you, but I don’t know how I’d write those facts in a way that wasn’t emotive and also made the connection for people.
All together, I’m voting for this to be included on the Best Of list. . . but maybe we can put a caveat at the top that it’s not because it says bad things about one of our detractors, but because of the talk of epistemic sausage?