Not sure what would be the most convincing evidence in this case. As far as I know, they do not have a page saying “yes, we are woke”, or anything like this.
But if you read the content, there are many articles that are just about politics, unrelated to the “science—pseudoscience” dimension. And I don’t mean articles like “Donald Trump”, because those are relevant: as a president he could increase or decrease some government spending on science, or promote some pseudoscientific opinion on TV, etc.
But why is it necessary to have a page e.g. on “men’s movement” (keywords: “non-existent problem”, “ridiculously absurd”, “neo-reactionary”, “overtly conspiratorial view”, “reactionary”—that was just the short summary at the top of the article) or “gamergate”? How is this, like, related to science?
The level of charity is exactly as much as you would expect from “a snarky point of view”, i.e. don’t let reality stand in the way of a good jab at the enemy. If you e.g. characterize the man’s rights advocacy as “bros before hoes”, you make it clear that their arguments are going to get a fair treatment, right?
Ok, let’s look at the specific ideas: MRAs complain about draft, but this “borders on red herring” because almost no one is doing it these days. (Meanwhile, in actual universe, there are quite many 18-years old kids drafted on both Russian and Ukrainian sides these days; you can watch them dying on Reddit.) According to Rational Wiki, even the argument that men were conscripted during the two World Wars is not valid, because… wait, I am not making this up… the disabled men were exempt. (Checkmate, misogynist!)
With gamergate, I will skip the object-level claims for the sake of brevity, and focus on the process. If you look at the Wikipedia article on gamergate, it clearly depicts the whole affair as utterly negative and without any merit whatsoever. Yet there was one editor, I think his name was Ryulong or something like that, who was kicked out from Wikipedia for being too obsessed and unfair about the topic. (Mind you, this was a judgment made by people who had a very negative opinion on the topic themselves, but tried to hold themselves to some standards, such as not making up stuff.) The banned editor then moved to RationalWiki, where he wrote three long articles on gamergate (at that moment, those were 3 among the 15 longest pages on RationalWiki), and those articles are still there. I take this as evidence that not only the standards of RW are way lower than Wikipedia, but also as evidence how one person can bring his own pet topic and publish it on RationalWiki with pretty much zero fact-checking, as long as it culturally fits.
Now let’s look at how RationalWiki treats the opposite fringe, for example “critical race theory”. It is a “cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement”. Nice.
Feel free to give me an example from RationalWiki that a woke person would not agree with.
So, vibe. If you can assess them as woke based on vibe, they can assess you as libertarian based on vibe. If the sole purpose of lesswrong is to prevent an AI apocalypse, why are there so many articles about government regulation (bad) and stock trading (good)?
The level of charity is exactly as much as you would expect from “a snarky point of view”
So they are not failing at what they say they are doing...they are failing at what you think they should be doing.
And “rationalwiki is woke” is hard empirical fact...or a “vibe”?
Not sure what would be the most convincing evidence in this case. As far as I know, they do not have a page saying “yes, we are woke”, or anything like this.
But if you read the content, there are many articles that are just about politics, unrelated to the “science—pseudoscience” dimension. And I don’t mean articles like “Donald Trump”, because those are relevant: as a president he could increase or decrease some government spending on science, or promote some pseudoscientific opinion on TV, etc.
But why is it necessary to have a page e.g. on “men’s movement” (keywords: “non-existent problem”, “ridiculously absurd”, “neo-reactionary”, “overtly conspiratorial view”, “reactionary”—that was just the short summary at the top of the article) or “gamergate”? How is this, like, related to science?
The level of charity is exactly as much as you would expect from “a snarky point of view”, i.e. don’t let reality stand in the way of a good jab at the enemy. If you e.g. characterize the man’s rights advocacy as “bros before hoes”, you make it clear that their arguments are going to get a fair treatment, right?
Ok, let’s look at the specific ideas: MRAs complain about draft, but this “borders on red herring” because almost no one is doing it these days. (Meanwhile, in actual universe, there are quite many 18-years old kids drafted on both Russian and Ukrainian sides these days; you can watch them dying on Reddit.) According to Rational Wiki, even the argument that men were conscripted during the two World Wars is not valid, because… wait, I am not making this up… the disabled men were exempt. (Checkmate, misogynist!)
With gamergate, I will skip the object-level claims for the sake of brevity, and focus on the process. If you look at the Wikipedia article on gamergate, it clearly depicts the whole affair as utterly negative and without any merit whatsoever. Yet there was one editor, I think his name was Ryulong or something like that, who was kicked out from Wikipedia for being too obsessed and unfair about the topic. (Mind you, this was a judgment made by people who had a very negative opinion on the topic themselves, but tried to hold themselves to some standards, such as not making up stuff.) The banned editor then moved to RationalWiki, where he wrote three long articles on gamergate (at that moment, those were 3 among the 15 longest pages on RationalWiki), and those articles are still there. I take this as evidence that not only the standards of RW are way lower than Wikipedia, but also as evidence how one person can bring his own pet topic and publish it on RationalWiki with pretty much zero fact-checking, as long as it culturally fits.
Now let’s look at how RationalWiki treats the opposite fringe, for example “critical race theory”. It is a “cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement”. Nice.
Feel free to give me an example from RationalWiki that a woke person would not agree with.
So, vibe. If you can assess them as woke based on vibe, they can assess you as libertarian based on vibe. If the sole purpose of lesswrong is to prevent an AI apocalypse, why are there so many articles about government regulation (bad) and stock trading (good)?
So they are not failing at what they say they are doing...they are failing at what you think they should be doing.