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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#101

Post by meowface »

lapcat wrote: post #97
meowface wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're discussing the central sources of knowledge on the internet and by extension pretty much the epistemological backbones of present human civilization. It's worth being open to other perspectives. I, a left-leaning person who detests Elon Musk and what he's done to Twitter and who generally trusts and likes Wikipedia, feel no shame or regret in assessing Grokipedia, even if I figured it was just going to be the s…

> It's worth being open to other perspectives. There's a big difference between listening to other perspectives and inventing other perspectives. Why not let the believers of other perspectives argue for those perspectives? Wouldn't they be the best advocates? And if nobody believes the perspective you've invented, then perhaps it wasn't worth discussing after all. Again, we're not really lacking in volume of comment…

Maybe "devil's advocate" was the wrong term for me to use. In this thread I am sharing only my honest beliefs and perspectives and was referring to the genuine initial willingness I had to show charitability to the concept of Grokipedia before its release.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#102

Post by LastTrain »

onetimeusename wrote: post #80
LastTrain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof? More than a couple anecdotes please.

The ADL was caught in a campaign making edits. I remember more details in the past but I simply can't find them now with any search engine. https://forward.com/news/467423/adl-may-have-violated-wikipe... But also the ADL is accusing others of covert campaigns: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... So I am sure this is a thing among corporations/NGOs. Note that I picked the ADL because I happ…

That's how Wikipedia works. People can edit it. People who are members of organizations can edit it. The edits are transparent, and the history is preserved. It is open to anyone. It is like you're saying the whole world is biased and stacked against your point of view. The example you provide doesn't suggest any kind of centralized control or gatekeeping at all. Just some interested parties trying vying to contribute to articles that are of interest to them. What if I told you a single person, soon to be a trillionaire, would like to replace it with one he controls himself. Why wouldn't that bother you more? Honestly perplexed.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#103

Post by meowface »

pstuart wrote: post #57
bawolff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a problem sometimes that "debunkers" are often more interested in scoring points with secondary audiences (i.e. people who already agree with them) than actually convincing the people who believe the misinformation. Most people who believe bullshit were convinced by something. It might not have been fully rational but there is usually a kernel of something there that triggered that belief. They also…

"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." Fox (and others like it) offer 24/7 propaganda based on fear and anger, repeating lies ad nauseam. It's highly effective -- I've seen the results first-had. Making ad hominem attacks against "debunkers" doesn't make your case. And again, trying to change people's minds by telling them what they believe is wrong is a fool…

>And again, trying to change people's minds by telling them what they believe is wrong is a fools errand (99.99% of the time). But it still needs to happen as that misinformation should not go unchallenged.

It's a trite point and I ended up repeating it before seeing your post but this really is very true even if it may not seem like it. On one hand the practice is basically futile. But someone absolutely needs to do it. People need to do it. The ecosystem can't only ever contain the false narratives, because that leads to an even worse situation. "Here's why Holocaust denialism is incorrect and why the 271k number is wrong" is essentially pointless, per Sartre, but it's better for neo-Nazis to be exposed to that rather than "one should never even humor Holocaust denialists".

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#105

Post by spankibalt »

generationP wrote: post #25

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an e…

> "If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases [...] The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up [...]"

One thing I love about the Wikipedias (plural, as they're all different orgs): anyone "in the know" can very quickly tell who's got no practical knowledge of Wikipedia's structure, rules, customs, and practices to begin with. What you're proposing like it's some sort of Big Beautiful Idea has already been done countless times, is being done, and will be done for as long as Wikis exist.

And Groggypedia? It's nothing more but a pathetic vanity project of an equally pathetic manbaby for people who think LLM-slop continously fine-tuned to reflect the bias of their guru, and the tool's owner, is a Seal of Quality.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#106

Post by meowface »

the_gastropod wrote: post #45
billy99k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please. What common conspiracy theories that have actual political impact have water carried by left-wing politicians? Here's a short list of RW conspiracy theories with real life political consequences: - Antivax conspiracies - Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States ("birther" conspiracy) - Biden / Ukraine conspiracy theory - The litany of Covid-19 conspiracy theories - The "deep state" conspiracy theory - Sa…

By left-wing politicians, basically none (while right-wing conspiracy theories are now promoted by tons of right-wing politicians). Among non-politicians: while right-wingers are far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and the nature of the conspiracy theories they believe are far less tethered to reality on average, conspiracism is still a serious issue on the left.

It's like 50x less of an issue but I deal with so many left-wing conspiracies on a daily basis. I think the right is much worse than the left (on this topic and in general) but quite a lot of the left, or at least the populist left/populist far-left is, to me, its own particular sort of exhaustingly insufferability. I am proudly a left-liberal and not a centrist and never won't be, but I am still at a point where I can no longer tolerate a big sub-faction of the left. (Though I can't tolerate basically any of the right, minus a bit of the anti-Trump center-right.) I am going to lose my mind when I see vast numbers of leftists demand people not vote for the Democratic party presidential candidate in 2028.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#107

Post by ares623 »

mlmonkey wrote: post #94
ares623 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP has a chance to be vindicated. Surely they will take it?

Since you insisted. This is from a couple of years ago, and I have moved on to never donating to Wikipedia again, so take it FWIW. I pointed out that India had reduced extreme poverty from ~16% in 2013 to ~2% in 2022. This is directly from a World Bank report: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0997221042225345... One would think this would be reliable? One would be wrong since this is deemed to be "pro Modi…

OP delivered. I'm not a Wikipedia editor so I don't know what kind of sources are allowed, but just on a gut-feel, that worldbank.org source seems okay?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#108

Post by meowface »

pstuart wrote: post #62
J_McQuade wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one.

I think their goto is "Russiagate" but that's because the refuse to acknowledge the facts that Mueller did have evidence but assumed that Congress would act upon it.

There is some (though in my opinion not much) merit to how right-wingers portray the "Russiagate" thing. The Russian government absolutely did try to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election to help Trump and hurt Clinton, via hacking and releasing emails and via social media influence campaigns, but there was a chunk of the left that from the start seemed to firmly believe Trump was some kind of literal espionage agent of Putin.

While it's difficult to deny Trump was a de facto asset of Putin in many ways, a surprising number of people were almost entering right-wing conspiracy theory territory with their epistemological practices regarding Trump's personal involvement with Putin.

Right-wing conspiracism is orders of magnitude worse and more frequent than left-wing conspiracism, but some people were way too willing to believe some of the more radical Russian collusion speculation despite no evidence.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#109

Post by 9dev »

jameslk wrote: post #95
hocuspocus wrote: post #83

I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally researched because the publicly available information is pretty bad. The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit is particularly good to begin with, even…

It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot (not sure if maybe they already do this)

Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. On Wikipedia, at least there’s lots of people checking on each other. There are no such guardrails for an LLM. You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.

If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#110

Post by lapcat »

meowface wrote: post #101
lapcat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth being open to other perspectives. There's a big difference between listening to other perspectives and inventing other perspectives. Why not let the believers of other perspectives argue for those perspectives? Wouldn't they be the best advocates? And if nobody believes the perspective you've invented, then perhaps it wasn't worth discussing after all. Again, we're not really lacking in volume of comment…

Maybe "devil's advocate" was the wrong term for me to use. In this thread I am sharing only my honest beliefs and perspectives and was referring to the genuine initial willingness I had to show charitability to the concept of Grokipedia before its release.

> In this thread I am sharing only my honest beliefs and perspectives

That's one of the reasons I object to the term. People often use "devil's advocate" to state their opinions while providing plausible deniability in the face of criticism of those opinions. Just be honest, stand behind your stated opinions, and take whatever heat comes from that honesty.

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