Wikipedia is fine. Bias cant be avoided, only made explicit, and the fact that you think it can means you should probably move to Conservapedia or whatever slop Musk will release.
This is the first time I've heard about it. Is that meant to be a satire website? I can't tell anymore.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
It started out crazy but it only got crazier as time went on.
The biggest problem with wikipedia competitors, is the only people who tend to put in effort to make one are usually crazy.
That said, it is indeed so insane that trolls sometimes become contributors just to see how far they can push it. There were several known cases of trolls going far enough undetected to get various admin rights (to block etc).
Yeah, yeah, let me guess, the truth has a liberal bias.
But continue to insist that everyone pointing should just move somewhere else, that will certainly make it less biased and more factual.
I find this kind of a fascinating social phenomena.
I guess to give a personal example, I was trying to update a few pages about a country's Olympic history - that is, their Olympic bids, a few athletes, etc.
Unknowingly, I had stumbled across a particular power-editor's fiefdom, because they created all these pages and they were very aggressive in policing their articles to meet a certain style, tone and their beliefs.
Searching this person's username up (they went by their real name), they were closely related to that country's Olympic committee and an employee of a Ministry of Sport of sorts. The articles had lots of anonymous IP address edits from an university network this person was affiliated with in their program portfolio.
There was a clear conflict of interest, and I tried to point that out when they mass-reverted my edits, but they seemed committed to accusing me of edit warring by not sandboxing my changes and waiting for their personal review and approval, and quoted at least 12 different Wikipedia policies on notability, style, acceptable citations, etc. I still feel I was in the right, but I didn't have the willpower or stamina to fight against several requests for comments, speedy deletions, etc. They did get a warning from an administrator and some detractors in the discussion threads, but they weren't willing to let it go and at that point, it wasn't fun anymore for me. I have better things to do than to fight factual and nitpicky disputes on Wikipedia.
This is so untrue and this is a harmful belief. And I'm pretty much as liberal as they come.
In fact, the claim that “bias can be avoided and should be absolutely”, that is implicit in your resposne reflects a bias of its own: a bias toward moral or intellectual purity, as if the parent recognizing bias is equivalent to endorsing it. I get that this is a pedantic point to make but to come at the parent with such vigour for being realistic, again seems a bit unfair
A helpless "we couldn't possibly do anything about that issue" sort of mentality.
That said if we're talking literally then I fully agree with you that heuristics are a form of bias and can sometimes be a very good thing on a case by case basis.
Nonsense. Your definition of the word "bias" includes any assertion whatsoever. Bias is distortion from reality and truth. Saying that we can avoid distortion is not itself a distortion. I never claimed that all bias should be avoided, but the post I responded to said that bias can't be avoided.
Also,
> a bias toward moral or intellectual purity, as if the parent recognizing bias is equivalent to endorsing it.
There is no conceptual connection here between "purity" and the equivalence of recognizing bias with endorsing it, nor is saying "bias can be avoided" related to, or a kind of, "purity" in any useful sense. Stop using abstract words for effect and speak simply.
> I get that this is a pedantic point to make but to come at the parent with such vigour for being realistic, again seems a bit unfair
If the parent were being realistic, they'd say that we can't even recognize bias, which is actually more agreeable to me. But instead the parent admits that we can recognize bias. Since we've gotten that far, then I can say that failing to avoid it, when we should avoid it, is merely a lack of will and integrity rather than some inescapable fate.
In this case, I simply felt your judgment of the parent wasn’t fair, and showed a moral bias. Maybe they weren’t perfectly clear, and too absolute, but your response wasn’t proportionate either. It condemned more than it understood. I interpreted it as an epistemic observation and you interpreted it as an offense. The very fact that we came away with two completely different readings of the same short sentence rather proves the point.
Thank you for putting words in my mouth regarding my definition of the word bias, but lets use your own: "Bias is a distortion from reality and truth." If that is the case, we can never hope to avoid it, because we will never have perfect information. Using that definition, we are quite literally constantly in a state of bias. Your very own definition is far more broadly supportive of the notion that bias can't be avoided and consequently suggests bias is effectively ubiquitous. This to me is the primary point the parent was making.
I was perhaps too charitable, and you not enough. We are both biased, and going by the advice of the parent, I'm pointing it out. I don't think there is much more I can do.
I'm not interested in talking about what could have been implied, only about what was stated. I'm arguing against an idea that was articulated, not the person who articulated it.
One of the problems of the current-day liberals, in my opinion, is that they make universal statements that they don't mean in order to sound punchy and snag a few morality points. "Believe all women," "men are trash," "defund the police," "all cops are bastards" are all things you'd hear from a person who doesn't actually mean or want any of these things, even though the root of each of those is just and good. The idea that "bias can't be eliminated, only made explicit" is another one of these. If we don't believe it, then let's not say it.
> I certainly have a bias to judge it more charitably than I do someone who leaps straight to moral outrage and judgement this early in the interaction.
I'm not sure where you're reading outrage moral or otherwise. Was it that I used the word "so" in "so harmful"? And where's your bias against someone who tells another person to go to Conservapedia if they think bias can and should be avoided?
> Maybe they weren’t perfectly clear, and too absolute, but your response wasn’t proportionate either. It condemned more than it understood.
I merely stated that the belief was untrue and harmful, I don't think that's disproportionate at all. I can only understand what is stated, and according to my understanding we ought to condemn it.
> Thank you for putting words in my mouth regarding my definition of the word bias, but lets use your own: "Bias is a distortion from reality and truth." If that is the case, we can never hope to avoid it, because we will never have perfect information. Using that definition, we are quite literally constantly in a state of bias. Your very own definition is far more broadly supportive of the notion that bias can't be avoided and consequently suggests bias is effectively ubiquitous.
This is shifting the goalposts. First, I never claimed we could know the complete truth; it was the original post who stated that we couldn't course-correct upon learning new truth ("bias can't be avoided"). And second, the context of the original statement is bias in reporting, not epistemological certainty. We're not talking about positions of atoms here. We don't need perfect information to stop being biased against women in the workplace or against black people or whatever the subject. Even as individuals.
> This to me is the primary point the parent was making.
If that is their point then they can say it.
> We are both biased, and going by the advice of the parent, I'm pointing it out. I don't think there is much more I can do.
I have to ask, if I can't avoid my bias and you can't avoid yours, then what's the point of pointing out bias at all? Is it for other people to avoid our bias? How can they do that? I guess we're trying to minimize its effects, like you said.
> I was perhaps too charitable, and you not enough.
If I lack charity, it's in response to the original uncharitableness of the person telling someone to go to Conservapedia. If he would have mercy, let him show mercy.
I'm not saying there's a definitive interpretation with how terse it is, just that we aren't necessarily on the same page and attempts to come to any sort of agreement with each other might be a waste of time as we are practically talking about two different ideas. I take this response as pretty fair, and I think the point you're making is totally valid, I just think our respective ideas would never converge as we are talking about 2 distinct things. (Interesting how much conversation a lack of clarity can generate).
Also Wikipedia has the problem of being one type of article many subjects really need a other way to explain it.
Even facts can be slander.
For example, it would be stupid for me to entirely dismiss all of Wikipedia just because I know that there are some horribly biased articles and it'd be a disgrace if I shrugged such behavior off saying "hey, we all have biases, can't help it". That's what a child or even an animal would do.
2) For several others, see Alon Amit's superb Quora answer to "What are the most interesting or popular probability puzzles in which the intuition is contrary to the solution?" ([2], login-walled). Mentions the very counterintuitive Penney's Game [0].
3) Berkson's Paradox, aka "People in hospital/getting treatment tend to have worse health indicators".
4) Asymmetric dice behavior is counterintuitive, when you first see it.
5) Benford's Law, on quantities occurring in nature (e.g. river lengths), as opposed to uniform distribution.
6) There are lots of counterintuitive things about Platonic solids.
7) Bayes' Theorem itself, superbly useful but possibly one of the things in probability most abused on a daily basis by bad journalism and bad statistics.
8) The Multiple Testing Problem/p-hacking/aka the xkcd "Green jelly beans cause acne" and as a corollary: 8a) Most published (academic) findings aren't replicable, aka "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", Joannidis (2005)
[9] Almost-integers
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
[2]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-interesting-or-popul...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem
[9]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AlmostInteger.html
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penney%27s_game
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probability_theory_pa...
If you want a site that tells you that Jews launched a genocide of Nazis.
Conservapedia is intellectual cancer.