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Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#121

Post by chjj »

magicalist wrote: post #118
edgyquant wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the point is that the main article links only to the conspiracy theory and not that article. If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory. It’s made worse by the fact that “Marxist cultural analysis” is mentioned in…

> If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory Capital C, capital M "Cultural Marxism" and "Marxist theory being applied to culture" are two different things. As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda a…

> (sorry, "establish[ing] a counter-hegemony within the existing cultural hegemony, thereby subverting it")

To be clear: you realize you're paraphrasing Gramsci, not quoting me, right?

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#122

Post by chjj »

magicalist wrote: post #119
chjj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been there as long as the article has (almost two years)[1] Yes. This was already pointed out. I was mistaken about the antisemitic part not being there earlier. > its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. > apparently peddled…

>> its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school > I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here? It sounds a lot like you're just looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mar…

> It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here?

I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporates cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though.

> The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for the general critique of Marxism.

Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#123

Post by magicalist »

edgyquant wrote: post #120
magicalist wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory Capital C, capital M "Cultural Marxism" and "Marxist theory being applied to culture" are two different things. As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda a…

The real theory page, Marxist cultural analysis, is mentioned by name in the first paragraph of the conspiracy but not linked. I don’t know how wide spread this is on Wikipedia but there are a few of these examples that are very concerning and if our court system is utilizing it as suggested that is a worry. Yet another issue that mass information has created that solutions haven’t yet come up with. >As a parallel, s…

> The real theory page, Marxist cultural analysis, is mentioned by name in the first paragraph of the conspiracy but not linked.

I only see

> "Cultural Marxism" redirects here. For "cultural Marxism" in the context of social theory and cultural studies, see Marxist cultural analysis.

and "Marxist cultural analysis" is definitely linked.

>> As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda actually link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies?

> This is not even close to a parallel scenario and borders on bad faith.

Conflating a specific set of accusations of supposed degeneracy eating away at the base of western culture with a wider academic discipline that includes studying/discussing said "degeneracy" seems appropriate to me but maybe you can be more specific about why you think they aren't parallel?

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#124

Post by magicalist »

chjj wrote: post #121
magicalist wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory Capital C, capital M "Cultural Marxism" and "Marxist theory being applied to culture" are two different things. As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda a…

> (sorry, "establish[ing] a counter-hegemony within the existing cultural hegemony, thereby subverting it") To be clear: you realize you're paraphrasing Gramsci, not quoting me, right?

Obviously. Helps crystalize the parallel.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#125

Post by magicalist »

chjj wrote: post #122
magicalist wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school > I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here? It sounds a lot like you're just looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mar…

> It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here? I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporates cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though. > The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for the general critique of Marxism. Glad we agree…

> I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporate s cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though.

Or just go with the wikipedia convention of "criticism of X"?

> Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?

"Cultural Marxism" is a racist conspiracy theory.

Your argument appears to just be that marxism and marxism activism is inherently cultural (sure), therefore an existing use of the words "cultural" and "marxism" should be banished to some other name so that an article that already exists and already has a different name can be called "cultural marxism" instead.

edgyquant has a stronger argument about people like Jordan Peterson inadvisably adopting that term so usage is shifting over time. I could see that continuing and the article changing to a disambiguation page some day, though from your mention of Mao, I don't think you'd be satisfied with edgyquant's preferred redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#126

Post by mch82 »

wheelinsupial wrote: post #112
mch82 wrote: post #110

Curious what people think about the ethics of this study? The researchers describe running an experiment on the public without opt-in consent. They also describe allowing an algorithm to do the editing. That raises questions about the kind of edits the algorithm made, how the edits influenced case outcomes, and if/how the research team will clean up Wikipedia now that they’ve concluded the study. Are there profession…

There is a paragraph on this in the publicly accessible pre-print [1] of the article. "Approved by the respective ethics boards of MIT and Maynooth University, the experiment amounted to a friendly stress-test of the potential vulnerability of judicial legal reasoning to the limitations of reliance on Wikipedia, notably, its ad hoc topic coverage and unknown author/editorship. The experiment featured Wikipedia entrie…

Thanks. You summarized the paper better than the article this discussion thread is about. On closer reading, CSAIL had people write the articles and used natural language processing to detect “linguistic fingerprints of the Wikipedia articles that they’d created”.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#127

Post by merely-unlikely »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #77
roenxi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that obvious that this is alarming. What are we alarmed about? The point of judges is that they make judgements. The citing of other law is just to try and keep some consistency between the judgements to make them predictable. In theory they could even give out inconsistent judgements and that would also be workable, it just happens that it usually means something bad is happening because judges aren't natur…

The part that concerns ('alarm' implies surprise) me is the confirmation that activist wikipedians have levers and knobs to play with that impact court decisions. And if Wikipedia does, you can bet Google does too.

Seems to me that any concern here is more around case discovery. Whether judges learn about cases from Wikipedia, Lexis Nexus, university publications, etc there is always a bias in which cases get surfaced. Wikipedia being more open than most other venues can be good (more contributors/diversity of viewpoints, easier to critique) or bad (more potentially unsophisticated/ignorant contributions). I tend to bias toward more open platforms given the choice.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#128

Post by merely-unlikely »

photochemsyn wrote: post #39
feet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that law clerks are using wikipedia as an easy way to find info on cases, which isn't entirely surprising to me

I think law clerks and other legal professionals would be using a curated service (most likely LexisNexis) as their primary information source, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is quite unreliable on any major legal case, controversial issue, political personality, corporate entity etc., as the relevant wikipedia pages end up being heavily manipulated by agenda-driven editors who often erase or alter the most important infor…

Curated services like LexisNexis aren't necessarily free from bias either. One need not use a single service exclusively

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#129

Post by gwern »

stevage wrote: post #106
gwern wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a study and science. It's actually a rather high quality experiment too, I was in awe of the way they carefully constructed the pairs of decisions to make them as identical as possible, and then got the same law student to write an article for each member of a pair before randomizing to ensure they were written as similarly as possible. Everyone knows that you should be blocking to maximize statist…

I still don't understand why they bothered writing the articles for the ones that weren't being uploaded. I'm sure there's a reason, it just wasn't obvious to me.

Because that threatens the validity of randomization and the comparability of the counterfactual, if the article writer knows it'll be uploaded, they can do things like pick and choose which ones to work hard on. "Oh, I like this case, it accords with my personal politics, so I will work extra hard on it since I know it'll be uploaded." (One example from the RCT literature of how knowledge of the randomization before the intervention can be a bad thing: in one early study of steroids for babies, the hospital nurses 'knew' that steroids helped, and so they would pull out the randomizing ball and if it was 'wrong' for that baby, they'd put it back in and try again. This is why clinical trials try to use pregenerated randomness if they can't blind the nurses.) Even if mechanisms like that don't add a systematic bias, they do add noise and reduce the statistical power to detect an effect.

It also helps the ethics angle if you are simply holding back articles which you will upload eventually.

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