It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.
But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.
Viva la Wikipedia!
For example:
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I spent countless hours writing articles in my early twenties. I stopped because the environment got more hostile as the site grew in popularity. I think that might have been necessary to address the influx of drive-by editing, but it still meant I stopped enjoying being a contributor. I don’t appreciate the constant asking for money — as far as I understand, they’re well off without donations.
There.
I think the misconception here is that criticism has to be mean and personal. As someone who celebrates the project’s ideals, giving criticism is an act of love.
They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care about articles creation or actual content, they fiddle about with URL fixes and categorisation. There was one horrible human being called BrownHairedGirl who did all these things and almost destroyed the place before they got indefinitely banned also.
Citation needed.
Ta bu shi da yu created the citation needed template: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation... (I remember that account name from Kuro5hin. Much respect!)
He edited under several accounts, all of which are permabanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aussie_Article_Writer
Why? Because he'd earned an interaction ban (IBAN) from engaging with BrownHairedGirl, and he breached the ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...
Whatever he said, it's been fully scrubbed, but it appears to have been commenting on BrownHairedGirl's not-yet-submitted Request for Adminship: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1039021442#Piotrus...
How'd he get the interaction ban? Because another account of his and BrownHairedGirl were squabbling, and the admins have working eyes and brains, they could see he was doing the instigating: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
You're not meant to wind up or troll your fellow Wikipedians, even if they are combative dickheads who need taking down a peg.
What was the beef? That he was creating small subcategories for each suburb of Brisbane, and BrownHairedGirl goes off her nut at small categories.
BrownHairedGirl was eventually taken out by being needlessly combative about - of all things - Wikipedia's "small categories" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
> what stops you from creating a new account?
Wikipedians inevitably go back to their old stomping grounds, use their normal tone in discussions, repeat their same old habits and basically don't change. When they do that, they're very recognisable to the people they already spent 20 years interacting with. They out themselves as a sockpuppet of the original banned user, and they get banned again.
I can assure you, I was not doing the instigating. Though I did comment on her RFA, not realising it was not yet submitted. There was never an appropriate review of my one-way IBAN, and nobody has been able to explain why this was done given her vile and ongoing obnoxious comments about myself. unless you consider her accusing me of "whining" to have been acceptable, something not a single person commented on. Also, I had been asking them not to comment on my talk page and had taken it to WP:AN/I. Not sure why you consider this to have been something that I was not allowed to ask for review about?
I had no part in the scrubbing of that page. That was the ArbCom, for reasons only known to themselves. Probably instigated by then-arbitrator Beeblebrox, who was later suspended from ArbCom for disclosing ArbCom matters on an external anti-Wikipedia site.
Also: I was not doing any editing of Brisbane categories. I don't know where you got that from.
Furthermore, I have not edited Wikipedia since I was banned. If you are implying otherwise, then you are wrong.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
Your fellow Wikipedians had had enough of your and BHG's squabbling, and they decided it was primarily you needling her. And yes, even in the brief exchange in the thread there, BHG comes off like an absolute prick. In no way does BHG's awful behaviour allow you to excuse your own.
See also your own words "Upon reflection, that was indeed a needlessly inflammatory comment I made. I apologise for that."
Perhaps you can accept you've made more than one needlessly inflammatory comment towards BHG?
* Here you made a snide little comment exclusively about BHG where she'd see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
* Here you accused her of gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wi...
* BHG then made a thuggish and threatening post on your user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Chris.s...
BHG later characterised this like "oh but he was trolling me and I merely asked him one time on his talk page to stop (which is allowed)", which is bollocks because the "one time" is a long, angry screed written in a menacing tone. But if you want to go no-contact with someone who's clearly bad for you to be around, go no-contact -- don't ever mention them again. Don't interact directly with them. Don't comment on things they're involved in. If you're in something and they join in, politely recuse yourself.
That you didn't, is the reason why your fellow Wikipedians decided to issue the one-way IBAN.
> Also: I was not doing any editing of Brisbane categories
OK, that was not quite right. What happened was: BHG relisted a bunch of small categories for Australian city suburbs (starting with Brisbane), then you commented with unhelpful snark on several of them, and then deleted all your commentary minutes later: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Categor...
That's a classic tactic for needling someone watching the page, then playing innocent afterwards, as I'm sure you know. Bonus points for referring to her as "the nominator" rather than by name, for a further level of deniability.
> I can assure you, I was not doing the instigating
Per Beeblebrox: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11595&p...
"AAW was actually doing good, quiet work for some time. Then he decided to let the committee know that it was him and he was doing a "clean start" and of course our only option was to inform him that he was not qualified for a clean start because of the interaction ban with BHG."
"And then he did the only thing he was not allowed to do, and did it like six times in a row on several different pages (and there was a seventh time that nobody had noticed on his user page like a week earlier). I don't think there's any coming back from that, and ArbCom has taken over the block"
If you had simply not interacted with BHG after coming back, until the point that she was finally banned, you'd still be editing today. Instead, you got perma'd for violating your IBAN with impunity. And honestly, would you really want to have your IBAN reviewed, maybe even removed... for what? So that you could go back to needling her, and having her bully you right back? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT? IT'S VERY CLEAR NO GOOD COULD EVER COME OF THAT.
> I have not edited Wikipedia since I was banned.
I never said you did. I was explaining to the other HN user how Wikipedians know that banned users have come back under a sockpuppet. Essentially, it is very obvious when the banned users come back and start doing the same things they were banned for, which decloaks them.
Also I don't think it's necessary to call people names.
What did she do on Wikipedia?
She "fixed" barelinks and did categorization work. On the former, she wrote a script that utterly buggered up links to the extent they were being cleaned up long after she was banned. On the latter, she was so toxic that she was eventually blocked for her actions on categories.
She was a toxic editor who did virtually no editing of content on the site.
I did find some of the vandals, and became good friends with a few. Some of what they write is side splitting humor, but also the alt-right has an amazing amount of power they are using to rewrite history.
I would never give them a thin dime.
In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...
I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.
In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :
>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]
This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.
I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".
From the talk page:
"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"
From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus
- led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright.
- (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting.
- (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.
So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.
So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."
The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.
Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?
Question: in the phrase "right and left", what does right mean?
Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
> it
What is "it", if not truth?
There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:
"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
Your rephrase is incorrect.
"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.
Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.
Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
> someone else's brain
Yes, like I said: it depends on context.
Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.
Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.
Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...
What about Albert Einstein?
https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...
Or Richard Feynman?
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...
Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.
I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes.
We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).
The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
So, that that is system of notation which has consistency is itself a truth, isn’t it?
Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).
The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.
Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.
Perfect example, since they only exist as a concept to describe an observation. With higher precision of observation, it became “the new truth“ that most of the time even on the observation level do not actually exist in terms of matter; they “flicker“ fast enough to appear existing at all times. When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.
Is this because atoms don't exist, or because we are looking in the wrong way due to partial (mis)understanding?
The "new truth" that you talk about is just a different understanding of the concept of atom, but the actual thing that we call atom and that exists in the real world (whether as matter or in some other form) has not changed.
One thing that gets me excited is that there's a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century might have an Einstein-level breakthrough that treats holography and some principle of informational consistency as more fundamental than QM, which is amazing, and would change everything.
But even in that hypothetical future paradigm, an "atom" would still be something true and meaningful against that backdrop, and our measurements or knowledge claims about it would still be meaningful. And our progress toward knowledge of the atom was still real progress.
It's legitimate to treat our knowledge as limited, subject to revision, or approximating. But treating that grain of truth like it implies no knowledge or progress is in hand is an abuse of the concept.
Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.
You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.
But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.
So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).
To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school.
>If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns.
Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed.
>To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.
When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.
The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
Not like those hair-brained philosophers!
Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.
That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.
Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different