511–520 of 669 posts
>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Bein…
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> The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission. But I'm unclear if you're trying to say that this turned out to be false (the reduction in transmission), or that you're pointing out how some policies were driven by claims that didn't yet have strong enough evidence backing them up?
> Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission. You can't retroactively justify a lie. If I think Bob is in jail and I tell you he's not in jail, it doesn't matter later if he turned out never to have been in jail. The claims that were being made, and being used to push policy, were at the time something that hadn't even been tested.
If we're saying that reduction in transmission is a lie, well that might be false, as data now seem to indicate it does cause reduced transmission.
But if we're saying people claimed that they ran a trial specifically to investigate the effect on transmission, when no such trial took place, than I agree, this would be a lie.
Now I never felt like "official" sources said there were trials about transmission conducted and that proved massive reduction in transmission. But I can believe maybe there was one somewhere.
I do agree though that policies were made with claims that had sometimes poor evidence or incomplete data and experimentation. And we should all wonder and discuss what could have been done policy wise that would have been better. Was acting fast on low confidence better than waiting for high confidence? Would more educating and less regulating have had better results? Etc.
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You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
Lefties always rationalize their embrace of illiberal tactics like censorship by citing extreme cases (“we just want to filter out people who want us dead”), only to turn around and apply the tactic very broadly (wrongthink = permanban). This Motte-and-Bailey fallacy is the rhetorical lever which has allowed the left to crybully millions of erstwhile liberals into becoming so many cheerleaders for censorship.
An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter, the fact that many of these communities are on public platforms doesn’t guarantee your access. Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.
One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
I'd expand that: Wikipedia's greatness is due to its policies and guidelines in general. It is not surprising that they were drafted by a second-time encyclopedist and PhD in epistemology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.
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> Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously…
> If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off. This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.
Even if, much later, those same experts realize they were wrong, and it turned out one of those fringe conclusions online was actually right.
One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
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Is it true, or false, to observe one gender seeking out more or less conflict than the other?
It does hold some weight really. Especially when you consider change over time. Perhaps, your observations have become obsolete, so to say.
I'm not saying I love this argument because it means the end of the argument but maybe that's just the lesson to be learned here.
One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. When a source is not freely available online that often involves going to the library and looking things up; there are people who spend many hours a week doing this, unpaid as a hobby.
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> The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. I'll assume that (1) you're not sexist and (2) you're asking why is this claim rooted in sexism. The nature of this claim is rooted in an idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves. It is not worded to indicate that its root is, for instance, a commentary about how _external factor…
(Not the poster to whom you are replying) I didn't suggest there was a causal relationship, nor that the observed behaviour was due to some intrinsic properties of the respective genders, nor that gender controls behaviour. I just said that I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Not trying to pick on what you wrote here, but I wanted to take a moment to break this specific sentence down to illustrate my message. Without surrounding context, this sentence appears to make the claim that all women dislike something. And specifically, the qualifier is _only_ gender. Worded this way, it starts to look like a statement about a causal relationship. (Again, my apologies, I know that you don't mean this at all).
It's a sensitive subject, so I think it always helps to wrap the message with language that attempts to really clarify whether or not there's an underlying implication of `if gender then behavior` that someone _may_ get from reading. (And that can be hard to do, because _sometimes_ a reader will decide to draw incorrect conclusions!)
Hopefully this was all actually interesting and something that you didn't already know beforehand (if not, apologies!).
I do think that there's a way to re-word sentences like this one to show that there's no underlying intent of `if gender then behavior`. For example,
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Could be re-worded to show that it's a claim rooted in statistical averages of expected behavior (so, implicit assumption: it can just be correlation!) -- "On average, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more often than men."
Or, one could expand it by including the complete chain of logical consequences: `society creates gender norms` (expectations around behavior rooted in one's gender, inherently the crux of sexism) -> leads to `if gender then behavior`. This could lead to that sentence being written as, "Because of the pressure that society exerts on girls and women to be conflict avoidant and conflict resolvers, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more than men." Crucially, at least to me, this is a big difference because the `I suspect` part is _conditioned_ on the `Because of the pressure` bit.
This kind of wording also explicitly notes the existence of sexism and how that social phenomena can become the causal force that is ultimately observed through behavior and the correlations of that behavior with gender.
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These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechani…
Isn't individual action the only action? The only ones with hands and thoughts are individuals, whether they imagine themselves part of a collective or imagine themselves to be alone. Yeah sure you may not be able to fix the world yourself, but you can undeniably make it better. Waiting for some grand wave of collective action to arrive and fix the problem seems like it would above all stand in the way of even making…
Jokes aside, you're completely right, but I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.