Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

> Postmodernism cares deeply about truth. It is highly skeptical of power, bias, perception, etc. and provides tools to mitigate these risks to truth.

I think someone told you this and you believed it, but the track record of postmodernists in academia tells a different story.

I once saw a history lecture from a dean of the history department who had written of a book on WWII in the Philippines. This is one of the most heavily studied and well documented periods in human history. There are dozens of books and hundreds of papers on this topic.

My father-in-law, who was born there and lived through the war there, read the book. He called it historical fiction. The book cherry-picked facts badly, ignored events which countered the narrative of the book and in general made every effort to promote an entirely counter-factual narrative of events. In addition, the author had no real expertise in military or naval warfare and didn't seem to understand even the basics about how wars are fought.

When things like this happen on a regular basis, it is hard to say that postmodernism cares about objective truth in any way. In fact, they seem to actively dislike reality. This isn't a caricature, this is from the horse's mouth. If you want people to have a different perception of postmodernism, make events like this have some sort of penalty, because he's still the dean many years later.

Worldwide population peaked sometime between 2015 and 2020 at somewhere between 7.2 and 7.4B. So my take on the book is that it isn't very good.

Also, biofuels based on most crops other than sugar cane, in addition to not being very helpful in the fight against AGW, triggered large price spikes and political turmoil in a dozen different countries at once. Perhaps you heard of this event, we call it the Arab Spring. We are still dealing with the fallout of it.

Ok, the errors in Cosmos are covered here: https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2014/06/15/cosmos-follow-up-...

Quote:

Cosmos does not make Hypatia’s death so much a religious issue as an anti-intellectual on, but the truth is that it was actually a political one. A second problem comes when Dr. Sagan links her death to the destruction of the Great Library. In fact, in the final episode of the original Cosmos, “Who Speaks for Earth”, Carl Sagan says, “The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.”

The problem with this is that the last remnant of the Library of Alexandria were almost certainly destroyed in 391, 24 years before Hypatia’s death, and most of the library was likely destroyed, by accident, centuries earlier.

It sounds strange, but we actually don’t have a very good idea of when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. As best we can tell, much of it was burned unintentionally when a fire spread through the city during Julius Caesar’s invasion in 48 BC. While the majority of the library may have survived that war, it was almost certainly destroyed in the war between Emperor Aurelian and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in the 270s AD. This also appears to have been unintentional, as a large part of the city was burned.

What little was left of the library was deliberately destroyed in 391, when Emperor Theodosius I banned Paganism. The remaining repository of books in Alexandria was destroyed along with the Pagan temple it was stored in. [Even this has no evidence as pointed out by Tim O'Neill in the blog comments]

I admire most of Dr. Sagan’s and Dr. Tyson work, but when they characterize Hypatia’s death and the burning of the Great Library as the deliberate (and linked) actions of an anti-intellectual mob, they are simply misrepresenting the history.

Your link shows that South Africa ranks below the US. It is ranked 43rd in the world, vs the USA which is at 28 (in 2024 the latest year).

> The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though.

Is it clear what they should rather be - and are there any examples of mechanisms that have worked better at a scale like this? How are you judging that they are not what they are supposed to be?

If the resulting body of work, which is the totality of Wikipedia, is able to be a curated and high signal collection of knowledge as a result of these mechanisms, how can it be said that they are not working? Having forcing factors, even if they are not ideally aligned or executed, which pushes contributors to increase the quality of their edits to pass, seems overall like a good thing. I'm not saying that its processes and mechanisms cannot be improved, I'm saying I believe it is incorrect to say that they are not working as a whole.

> "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.

Overall I believe Wikipedia to be curated by a large group of people which coordinate through various rules and consensus mechanisms, where I don't believe it is correct to state that sources and citations are exclusively up to any specific article moderators, as they need to be able to build consensus and co-exist with other moderation.

Exactly because Wikipedia is such a large body of work it seems more resistant to corruption to have a large number of curators with different tastes and motivations. How would you determine that their selection of sources and citations is very rarely objective - especially when objectiveness itself seems quite hard to agree upon for many of the topics covered?

From my perspective it seems far more important to consider the quality and value of the totality of Wikipedia, which is massive and signs that many things are working, rather than insisting that it is not working, especially in times where knowledge is being broadly attacked, and where Wikipedia is one of the targets.