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Tim Bray on Grokipedia
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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
My expectations were extremely low, as were, and are, my expectations of Grok in general. Was just making an actual devil's advocate case.
> Was just making an actual devil's advocate case. Why? We're not nominating a saint or electing a Pope. If someone has a certain opinion, they're free to argue it here. There's no need to invent imaginary opinions and pretend to advocate for them when there are so many actual HN users.
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 standard tribalistic garbage (which it indeed turned out to be).
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#93Maybe it's just me, but reading through LLM generated prose becomes a drag very quickly. The em dashes sprinkled everywhere, the "it's not this, it's that" style of writing. I even tried listening to it and it's still exhausting. Maybe it's the ubiquity of it nowadays that is making me jaded, but I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays.
I completely agree. There's an "obsequious verbosity" to these things, like they're trying to convince you they they're not bullshitting. But that seems like a tuning issue (you can obviously get an LLM to emit prose in any style you want), and my guess is that this result has been extensively A/B tested to be more comforting or something.
One of the skills of working with the form, which I'm still developing, is the ability to frame follow-on questions in a specific enough way to prevent the BS engine from engaging. Sometimes I find myself asking it questions using jargon I 100% know is wrong just because the answer will tell me what the phrasing it wants to hear is.
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you share some of the references you tried to use here? It might be interesting to see the quality that they refused to accept towards overturning their narrative.
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". Another was the success of India's mission to bring piped water to every household in India (a luxury we take for granted in the West). There's a live dashboard maintained by the Water Ministry of India: https://ejalshakti.gov.in/jjmreport/JJMIndia.aspx Apparently it's a biased source. :shrug:
Other examples include the fact that Indian government paid for millions of households to construct toilets over the last 10 years. Or that millions of houses were constructed in villages, fully paid for by the government, during the same period. Or that the government also paid for rural folks to switch to gas-burning stoves instead of wood-, coal- or cowdung- burdning stoves. I'm too lazy to look up the references now, but you can find them with easy searching.
Surely you can't deny that Wikipedia is biased against the so-called "right" side of the political spectrum, and biased towards the "left"?
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#95I 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)
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception. Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it was ideologically-motivated garbage and significa…
The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation want it and those of us who think it's bad for society already know that its garbage. It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.
On one hand, yes, you're completely right.* On the other hand, there is an obligation for something or someone to do the job of pointing out the info is wrong, and how and why. Even if it makes most of them believe it even more strongly afterwards, it's still worse for it to go constantly unchallenged and for believers to never even come across the opposition.
*(The same is true of left-wing conspiracy theories. It's silly to pretend that right-wing conspiracy theorists aren't far more common and don't believe in, on average, far more delusional and obviously false conspiracy theories than left-wingers do, but it's important not to forget they exist. I have dealt with some. They're arguably worse in some ways since they tend to be more intelligent, and so are more able to come up with more plausible rationalizations to contort their minds into pretzels.)
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Was just making an actual devil's advocate case. Why? We're not nominating a saint or electing a Pope. If someone has a certain opinion, they're free to argue it here. There's no need to invent imaginary opinions and pretend to advocate for them when there are so many actual HN users.
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 commenters here.
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#98"Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great or whatever." Completely agree with the first purpose but would never use wikipedia for the second purpose. Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex in…
I think that's actually wrong, or hangs on a semantic argument about "complexity". Wikipedia is an overview source. It's not going to give you "all" the information, but it's absolutely going to tell you what information there is. And in particular where there's significant argument or controversy, or multiple hypotheses, Wikipedia is going to be arguably the best source[1] for reflecting the state of discourse. Like…
The best source is the one that provides the widest breadth of information on a topic.
This is a good use of wikipedia: "Like, if there's a subject about which you aren't personally an expert, and you have the choice between reading a single review paper you found on Google or the Wikipedia page, which are you going to choose?"
But that is like skim reading or basic introductions rather than in-depth understanding.
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation want it and those of us who think it's bad for society already know that its garbage. It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.
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…
This is very, very true. The best debunkers avoid being hostile and make the other side feel like they're being heard and that their feelings and fears are being validated. And they do it in a way that feels honest and not condescending and patronizing (like talking to a child). They make frequent (sincere) concessions and hedges and find as much common ground as they can.
Although he's more populist-left and I'm more establishment-liberal (and so I might find him a bit overly conciliatory with certain conspiracy theorists), Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5/All Gas No Brakes demonstrates a good example of this in the first few minutes of this video: https://youtu.be/QU6S3Cbpk-k?t=38
Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's actually wrong, or hangs on a semantic argument about "complexity". Wikipedia is an overview source. It's not going to give you "all" the information, but it's absolutely going to tell you what information there is. And in particular where there's significant argument or controversy, or multiple hypotheses, Wikipedia is going to be arguably the best source[1] for reflecting the state of discourse. Like…
The best source is the one that provides the widest breadth of information on a topic. This is a good use of wikipedia: "Like, if there's a subject about which you aren't personally an expert, and you have the choice between reading a single review paper you found on Google or the Wikipedia page, which are you going to choose?" But that is like skim reading or basic introductions rather than in-depth understanding.
> that is like skim reading or basic introductions
No? How do you learn stuff you don't know? Are you really telling me you enroll in a graduate course or buy a textbook for everyone one?
Like, can you give an example of a "deep dive" research project of yours that does not begin with an encyclopedia-style treatment? And then, maybe, check the Wikipedia page to see if it's actually worse than whatever you picked?
Again, true domain experts are going to read domain journals and consult their peers in the domain for access to deep information.[1] But until you get there, you need somewhere you can go that you know is a good starting point. And arguments that that place is somehow not https://wikipedia.org/ seem... well, strained beyond credibility.
[1] Though even then domains are really broad these days and people tend to use Wikipedia even for their day jobs. Lord knows I do.