Wikipediocracy

Captain Occam

Another problem is that the mirror is not 'always improving' and gets stale. On Justapedia, Matthew Perry is still alive. For what it's worth, I've expressed some similar concerns to Atsme in private, including about the people who've died in the past year but who are still described as living peop...

Captain Occam

iii wrote: ↑
Mon Jan 01, 2024 6:03 am
I have to say, I've become quite fond of this conspiracy theory of yours.

I hope you're aware that you're parroting Deleet/Kirkegaard by calling it that. His usage of that exact term ("conspiracy theories") is actually mentioned in the account's block summary!

Captain Occam

As I'm sure you already know, he's referring to your Race and intelligence article and those related to that topic, and if you want anyone to take your website seriously (other than far-right extremist cranks) then you should probably listen to what Mr. Grump is saying. If you've been following the...

Captain Occam

Now being covered in The Federalist: https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/17/extensive-edits-to-hunter-bidens-wikipedia-page-prove-sites-extreme-bias/ Is it just me, or are these news stories about Wikipedia articles being manipulated for political reasons more common nowadays than they used to be? Gra...

Captain Occam

My prediction about what will eventually happen is that in the topics where people are losing trust in Wikipedia, there will eventually be smaller encyclopedias focused exclusively on those individual topics. I think this is already happening with respect to U.S. politics, where Ballotpedia seems to...

Captain Occam

I'm normally firmly on team El_C, but I think it's fairly likely that Happy is a returning editor claiming a clean start and immediately getting involved in the topics and discussions that made them want a clean start to begin with. I don't think Tamzin is really out of line in this circumstance. A...

Captain Occam

There was also some person badly joe jobbing as Occam in the comments of the blog post for some reason (who was commenting as Occam, the real Occam was also commenting under his other alias Tetrapteryx), but that's now deleted. Thanks for noticing that. There also was a similar attempt to impersona...

Captain Occam

There are parts of this story I'm still unclear on. How and when did you and Willoughby first meet (you obviously both have mutual interests in dinosaurs, Creationism and at least historically the furry fandom), and what sources first got you and Willoughby interested in behavioral genetics? Before...

Captain Occam

As the nominator points out, two of the keep votes were from IP editors with few or no other edits. Mr Butterbur , another of the keep votes, looks like a sock of Captain Occam, but I could easily be wrong about that. I know who Mr Butterbur is, but I'm not comfortable doxxing him in a semi-public ...

Captain Occam

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1560234047808339970 One of the downsides of attacking the entire fields of behavioral genetics and intelligence research is that it results in having intellectual giants such as Richard Dawkins among one's opponents. (I'm not as big a Dawkins fan as a lot of...

Captain Occam

Is this sarcasm? Most of it sounds like it is, but your example of e-meters makes me unsure, because those actually are used in real clinical research. Are they. though? That seems to be the case. This 2022 paper from the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology describes EDA ...

Captain Occam

Yes, yes, but what der Hauptmann Occam is saying is that just because these horrible people with their horrible ideas have done research that just happens to show that their horrible ideas are correct, there's no reason to dismiss that research just because they are horrible people with horrible id...

Captain Occam

If you must know, the specific thing I'm afraid of is utopian societies that try to guarantee equal outcomes for everybody, like what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Venezuela is the latest example of how these sorts of societies generally don't end well. I'm not interested in this discussi...

Captain Occam

I think programs to reduce socio-economic inequalities are worthwhile, but we have to be realistic about what's possible. So this is a decade long endeavor of yours. Why do we need to be "realistic?" Are we pouring in a lot of wasted effort in some area? Is this the contention? Describe your fear m...

Captain Occam

This is a straw man-argument. Nobody suggests that someone with a profound intellectual disability has the same cognitive abilities as the average person, nor do many people seriously suggest that "all humans are born with the same abilities". The view that all humans are born with the same abiliti...

Captain Occam

If you're arguing that behavioral genetics and intelligence research are more prone to fraud and shoddy research than any other area of psychology or social science, that isn't the case. Stuart Ritchie's book Science Fictions describes dozens examples of the same thing happening in other areas of ps...

Captain Occam

For over a decade, you and Willoughby have dedicated yourselves to this cause. I have to ask, why? What animates you so much about this particular issue? Do you not see how it's a major problem that hereditarian psychology is directly tied to white supremacists and racist cranks? (probably not, bec...

Captain Occam

Do you think I'm arguing against you or criticizing you here? I'm not. I just want you to finally be open about what you've been trying to accomplish all this time. You've basically succeeded at it, so why not own up to it now? What in the world do you have to lose from being honest?

Captain Occam

And this is why you continually fail to convince people of anything. There are obvious confounding variables when it comes to adoption studies, they are well-explained in the literature, and if you refuse to admit that, then there is no use continuing the discussion. I was asking whether you think ...

Captain Occam

The paper in question does not do any genetics whatsoever. It merely assumes that if a factor is more highly correlated with a biological parent than with an adoptive parent, the preferred explanation is that the factor has a genetic component. See (a) above. There's more to behavioral genetics tha...

Captain Occam

EDIT: Someone has suggested to me that her long time associate Jonathan Kane (Captain Occam) might be behind this account instead, based on the fact that the same username was used to comment on a 2014 blog post. https://archive.ph/QDvaO and the JSON output of the gravatar of that account gives Jon...

Captain Occam

So Jimbo's a leftie now? I'm old enough to remember when the Telegraph could credibly claim to be a newspaper of record... I followed the Twitter exchange between Jimbo and Elon when it happened. Jimbo didn't come across as ideologically driven, so much as someone who was too proud of the website h...

Captain Occam

I probably should have said "low reliability" instead of "low quality", to make it clearer that I was referring to the specific metric that's shown on the vertical axis in the Ad Fontes chart.

Captain Occam

I'm not trying to start an argument, but you would be ok with a pro-Stalin editor but not a pro-Hitler one? Is that because being pro-Hitler is strongly associated with White Supremacy, antisemitism, and neo-Nazism, but neo-Stalinism doesn't have the same associations? I think being pro-Stalin is a...

Captain Occam

Re-opening the RFA for another few days might cause some additional drama in the short term (by allowing the debate to continue), but in the long term I think there will be a lot more of it if the RFA is closed in its current state as either failed or successful. Either of the latter options would a...

Captain Occam

I like this because there is no right decision now. NO and the crats took an RFA not in the discretionary range and overturned it. YES and the crats approved what will likely be a troubled choice. A super!vote either way. ConCratulations! There's also a third option, which is to re-open the RFA unt...

Captain Occam

Wikipedia is run by all extreme left wingers. What other group is prepared to work tirelessly without pay for no discernible benefit? I think there is another factor here too, which is that most of the conservative Wikipedians I'm familiar with tend to focus exclusively on low-profile content work,...

Captain Occam

The last minute vote changing is pretty chilling, suggestive at the very least of some kind of intimidation. Whatever intimidation is happening, it's only happening one one direction. None of the support voters are changing their votes at the last minute; that's only being done by those who voted o...

Captain Occam

Beeblebrox wrote: ↑
Sun May 01, 2022 6:53 am
It's slipped below 80%, 309-80. 19 hours to go.

It's now down to 78.5%.

When the support for a RFA is trending steadily downward, as it is in this case, is there any precedent for the bureaucrats leaving the discussion open longer than usual to see whether that trend continues?

Captain Occam

If it turns out that she is not capable of being impartial, someone can take her to arbcom. Based on my experiences with her (including a time where she admitted that her side was wrong), I see little reason to worry. However, I would have opposed her had she not been active in SPI and RM. I'm righ...

Captain Occam

I'd be interested to know whether Tamzin's comments about treating people differently based on their politics apply only to political views those editors have expressed on-Wiki , or whether it also applies to views they've expressed on Twitter, Facebook, etc. if those can be connected to their Wikip...

Captain Occam

It's not like Kaleeb is quiet about being a Trump supporter; he's had User:UBX/Trump Supporter on his userpage since the first non-OSed revision. I guess it should be noted that this comment was before the majority of politics-based opposes came in, but I doubt there's any evidence that the candida...

Captain Occam

That isn't "technically what we mean" when "we" say a source has got its facts wrong. The statement in question is simply false. Whether it is widely perceived to be false or not is a wholly separate matter. So you're personally able to determine that these statements in Counterpunch articles are o...

Captain Occam

Dude, that's not what you were saying. If it is what you meant to say, then I take issue with your (lack of) ability to communicate precisely. It seems pretty clear to me that you were arguing the Ad Fontes chart provided means to determine a measure of "how frequently or infrequently they get fact...

Captain Occam

The best you can claim is that Wikipedia admits more sources from the political left than those on the political right for any given average perceived value of reliability. This is basically what I'm saying, and (I think) what Stossel is saying also. I suppose we don't actually know that the 9/11 a...

Captain Occam

For each individual article that they rate (they rate individual articles, and base the overall rating of a news source on an aggregate score), one of the characteristics that Ad Fontes measures is "Veracity", i.e. truthfulness. If you think measuring the veracity of an article means something diffe...

Captain Occam

You didn't read the methodology section for Ad Fontes. The "reliability scale" is manifestly not based on fact-checking. It's based on the genre and perceptions of the reviewers as to how much of the reporting is "fact-based". What are you basing that on? This is what the methodology section says: ...

Captain Occam

Does anybody have a counter-argument against Stossel's central point, that Wikipedia is more tolerant of low-quality partisan sources on the left than on the right? You just had to insert that term "low-quality" in there, didn't you? :applause: They almost certainly are more amenable to left-wing s...

Captain Occam

Does anybody have a counter-argument against Stossel's central point, that Wikipedia is more tolerant of low-quality partisan sources on the left than on the right? Stossel definitely is not the first person to point this out, and Jimbo's response to him comes across as somewhat evasive. There is a ...

Captain Occam

If the Guerilla Skeptics really have as many members as they're reputed to have, it's a bit strange that the case has only seven parties. Has ArbCom already decided they aren't going to do anything about the rest of the Guerilla Skeptics' members, regardless of what they ultimately decide about whet...

Captain Occam

On this forum I've sometimes seen the Guerilla Skeptics discussed in the same way that people discuss the Freemasons: a group that presents itself as harmless, but that allegedly is secretly in control of everything. (Or in control of all skepticism-related Wikipedia articles, in this case.) I've ne...

Captain Occam

I appreciate that! I'm just used to this, let's say it's not my first time getting this kind of feedback and after living these situations over and over again you just learn to embrace it and take the most out of it. I understand the burden is on me to prove it and being anonymous makes it so much ...

Captain Occam

1. You are arbitrarily limiting your search to (what you consider) “English-speaking countries” for exactly no reason. I'm limiting it to English-speaking countries because the English Wikipedia uses almost exclusively English-language sources. This thread was originally about whether English Wikip...

Captain Occam

Then you should probably do better research. Just as a quick, lazy example, where, on your utterly imaginary universal left/right spectrum do you place Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, David Cameron, Barack Obama, Kim Jong Un, Joe Stalin and the parties they ostensibly represent(ed) at the time they did s...

Captain Occam

And will you define "left wing" and "right wing" as Americans do? Or the British? Or Australians? The Chinese? Or me? Or you? Or define them as something else? You're looking, as has been mentioned a number of times, for an objective 'measure' of a subjective 'property', and seem to be studiously i...

Captain Occam

Hi, I'm doing some analysis on bias in wikipedia and both papers and people recommended I focus on the most obvious type of bias which would be political biases. I'm in particular interested in something the paper I linked above did not focus on, which is deleted content. For that I wanted to find ...

Captain Occam

Wikipedia lacks the expertise and staff to produce and maintain good articles on contentious important topics. I agree with this, but I'm concerned that even now it might not be well-known. I still regularly hear about people falling for hoaxes and false information in Wikipedia articles. Here's an...

Captain Occam

I hope the close is detailed enough to satisfy everyone, but given that nearly 200 people participated it only takes one to object and open a deletion review. If the "keep" votes really outnumbered the "delete" votes by a margin of 4 to 1, it ought to be obvious to everyone involved that there's no...

Captain Occam

The Telegraph is very right-wing biased. Also paywalled. But it's a lot different than something like Breitbart, isn't it? The Perennial Sources page lists The Telegraph (aka The Daily Telegraph) as a reliable source, while for Fox News reliability depends on the subject, and Breitbart is blacklist...

Captain Occam

Apologies if somebody else already posted this link, but this AFD is now being covered in The Telegraph : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/27/wikipedia-may-delete-entry-mass-killings-communism-due-claims/ Arguments that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias seem to be becoming more mainstream. The ...

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