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Grokipedia and the coup against reality

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Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#101
Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire.

The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.

If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".

The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.

The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.

Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.

There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.

I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got some obvious bias right now, but some articles are already better than Wikipedia - for example on the origin of Covid. I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future.

> I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future. Situation: there is one mediocre online crowdsourced encyclopedia "The crowdsourced encyclopedia is untrustworthy? How ridiculous! We need to develop an AI-powered black-box that replaces everyone's Wikipedia use-cases!" Soon: there is one mediocre online crowdsourced encyclopedia, and Elon Musk's website developed in response to crowdsour…

[deleted]

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#105
post #92

winners write history, and Elon is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to put himself at the forefront, even if it means sacrificing humanity future. It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.

Spot on.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#106
post #66

I got the impression Grokipedia (what a lousy name, BTW; there's not a teenage rock band that would call itself that) has been trained on Wikipedia. I compared the entries for "Gallium Arsenide", and Grok's first sections is a copy of Wikipedia, with a an editor-like comment on top: Gallium arsenide Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify…

Is hasn't so much been 'trained' on Wikipedia but seems to have 'copied' a large fraction of the 'less contentious' (i.e. less politically biased) content of the site and marked it as such in the footer: The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Here's an example of such an article, this one on Toroidal Propellers:

https://grokipedia.com/page/Toroidal_propeller

This is not surprising and quite legal given the licence conditions. It is also fitting given the stated intent of 'Grokipedia' as being a less biased knowledge source - if Wikipedia did not suffer from being overly politically biased there would not have been a need for alternatives.

The above example is not a high-quality article - it reads more like a sales brochure - but it does not show political bias. It will be interesting to see whether Grokipedia follows edits to Wikipedia content and if it 'rejects' or 'edits out' politically biased edits.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is flawed, weaponized, and *intentionally* deceptive, with a myriad of articles locked down and editorialized by authors to fit their specific worldview, refusing to add information or even links to approved sources if it contradicts their narrative.

What are some examples?

The refusal to mention "federally named Gulf of America in the US" in the lede for the Gulf of Mexico (with the Talk page growing ad infinitum with blatantly negative commentary for the president until it was finally purged and locked), the refusal to name the alleged killer Karmelo Anthony in the killing of Austin Metcalf, the attempted deletion of the article for the killing of Iryna Zarutska, overemphasis on Charlie Kirk as "far-right" and a "conspiracy theorist", keeping the title "GamerGate (harassment campaign)" and purposely refusing any mention for what triggered it and motivations involved, instead hyperfocusing on victimizing journalists involved, etc.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lmao the manhattan institute

Ad hominem attack. Nice one.

They don't deserve a single iota of respect, are a total joke & nightmare for the world, feeding lies and disinformation to the world. Would be plutocrats Koch Brothers, Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Chris twitter-poster-shit-show-freaking Rufo?! A whose who of extreme conservatives eager to get us back to the 1850's. Here's some sites from about covering them, in gentle neutral terms, but Manhanttan Institute absolutely deserve more serious lambasting & being laughed out of any polite company. Ad hominem maybe, but absolutely people working in opposition to a better world, trying to drag us into a corporate controlled hell world, and deserving of no regards.

https://supremetransparency.org/powerbrokers/manhattan-insti...

https://centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-manhattan-institute

https://www.monitoringinfluence.org/org/manhattan-institute/

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#109

Some interesting comparisons I found between Wikipedia and grok. These are the intro paragraphs. Grokipedia: The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian ene…

In both these cases Grokipedia clearly comes out on top mostly due to the Wikipedia entries being so clearly biased.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples?

The refusal to mention "federally named Gulf of America in the US" in the lede for the Gulf of Mexico (with the Talk page growing ad infinitum with blatantly negative commentary for the president until it was finally purged and locked), the refusal to name the alleged killer Karmelo Anthony in the killing of Austin Metcalf, the attempted deletion of the article for the killing of Iryna Zarutska, overemphasis on Charl…

Another interesting comparison is the Wikipedia and Grokipedia pages for Imane Khelif. The former intentionally omits sources that don't fit the controlling editors' worldview, as the Talk page shows. Whereas the latter is a lot more balanced and discusses the controversy, with a full range of sources, rather than picking a side.
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