Social Media Endangers Knowledge

If you write quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to common knowledge and pop culture, your Wikipedia experience will be very pleasant. Since the HN readership is skews educated and technical, they are very well-equipped to write such articles.

I have been attacked multiple times on wikipedia trying to add useful information. Even when I cite all the rules and how I am following them, my edits get reversed "because".

I run a separate wiki, and many, many people are hesitant to contribute because they think wikis suck because of bad experiences with the politics of wikipedia.

"You're wasting literally tens of kilobytes on that narcissistic two line bio of yours young man. Moderator! Moderator! Please delete this."

I agree that that's not an assault on knowledge itself.

This is true, but I also believe Wikipedia is beset by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Over time, the meaning of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" has shifted from "you can just go and contribute what you know!" to "write what you want, but it'll just get removed unless you spend lots of time learning our rules."

You have more access to text, not necessarily knowledge. Knowledge requires active construction through application, debate, and participation. The internet is the perfect medium for constructing software knowledge for obvious reasons, but what about something like economics? On the internet, there are endless supplies of really terrible misunderstandings of core economics principles floating around that, for someone starting out, look and sound no different than the real thing. What about the construction of new knowledge? Social media's mechanism seems to be based exclusively on hot takes. How enlightening or instructive do you think that is?

There is a great amount of information available today compared to before - all else held constant.

All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task than before.

Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational awareness as a member of HN.

They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of various turf wars, or the credibility of a page.

This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or distracted from information.

In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is now swamped with more noise than ever before.

So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific and intractable sense.

(The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational, non-impulsive minds.)

For example, there are technical subjects where a very long page has been maintained and evolved for years despite presenting a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject and despite various comments in the corresponding talk page by people who apparently did understand the problem. Trendy topics on technology seem to be particularly bad for this, as you can easily get a page dominated by young, inexperienced contributors who only learned a buzzword in a particular narrow context, with no idea of the history, original motivation, or more general application of the underlying idea.

True, but it's an absurdly strong statement to say that WP has anywhere near "most information" recorded. I find at least 2 or 3 times a week a need to find out more about some topic where WP has no entry on it.

Bonus for links to your thoughts on how to fork and expand another order of magnitude. This is something I'd love to work on at some point.

Add all this up and you start to see the educational system looking like it's being sabotaged.

Previous generations used taxes to manage business models that harmed many for the benefit of a few.

But since these companies can buy and hack democracy, will we ever see the much needed advertising tax?

That particular point within the article is one of numerous specious and vapid objections it raises.

How many truly illiterate people do you know?

I suppose you could say that most 5 year olds are illiterate... are they capable of rational thought, perhaps... are they wellsprings of human knowledge and culture, I personally doubt.

Writing things down doesn't just store and transmit information, it forces an author to crystallize and review their arguments. Writing certainly makes me more rational.

Those societies that never developed writing did have oral traditions with lots of "human knowledge and culture" but neither of these things are rational thought. Most oral traditions are rich with culture, but shot through with extreme irrationalism, exaggeration, fabuluism. This applies as much to a tribal society as to the stories your friends tell at the bar.

Of course, that might be exacerbated by her blindness/deafness, where for example a sighted person could probably conceptualize objects better without a specific language.

But is it true?

Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions are deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture.

Knowledge and culture is not the same as rational thought. Of course you can reason without writing, but the manipulation of thoughts is much easier when you can write them, the same as you can make calculations much more easily when you can write the operations.

For example, think of the first time you read a comment on HN which you impulsively disagreed with. If you gave it a second and a third chance, sometimes you come away with an alternate viewpoint, and sometimes you actually agree with the statement. That is the power of writing.

Now imagine what happened the last time you verbally disagreed with someone. Chances are, you soon branded them an idiot, and then slowly stopped talking to them. I would say a part of it was simply because the message was conveyed orally, with all kinds of meaning ascribed to intonations. And unlike reading a piece of text again carefully, its not as if you have a mental tape recorder you can use to replay the conversation. There is just too much distraction in oral communication.