blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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The Wikipedia editors who hang out here might thank you for calling to their attention pages that clearly need to be fixed, since they cite non-peer-reviewed preprints on the arXiv, the shit journal Entropy, and the fucking LessWrong blog.

Me, I'm going to block you anyway. Bye!

The same author has also written about Max Tegmark.

I had some good physics conversations on g+. Slivers of memory from happier times....

(looks up meaning of WP:AGF)

... Yeah, that site is probably not the right hobby for me.

(looks up the LessWrong discussion page)

My God, it's full of smeg

They want sneers about Yud's lack of qualifications? Fine:

Noncy prig who never went to high school founded a cult for people who can't leave it behind! How's about that, eh?

Here's a link that bypasses the URL shortener.

Also: ew.

Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.

nopetopus

It occurs to me that, intentionally or not, he's probably steering TESCREAL types to Wikipedia itself as well. I wouldn't be surprised if accounts were coming out of the woodwork to post multi-kiloword screeds about Wikipedia being soooo unfairrrr....

Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They're indomitable.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?

There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article.

(ahem) The correct term is a prior.

:-P

Correction: I sure hope they're in charge of security at some place I don't like.

Huh. OK, so I boiled away more of my precious time on this plane of reality chasing links and reading old Wikipedia arguments instead of doing something healthy, like discovering a new genre of porn. Anyway, one of TW's complaints is that "outlets like PinkNews [...] are treated as reliable despite long histories of misconduct". He points to a discussion thread where PinkNews was supposedly deemed to be terrible, horrible, no good and very bad despite David Gerard saying it was basically fine. But the analysis proving that PinkNews is terrible, horrible, etc., is itself weirdly bad. I mean, take a look at this:

Another example of a dodgy source is at is [11]. where the claim "Queer-coding has affected many fictional villains. These evil characters are generally either shown as flamboyant and overly dramatic, like Disney characters Scar and Hades, or written as having a deep fixation on the main character, like Jafar, Kim Possible villain Shego and Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. In the past few decades, Disney fans have seen Governor Ratcliffe and Professor Ratigan—as well as Scar, Jafar and Hades—being portrayed as queer characters." The source for this claim? A Twitter tweet by "Jay, a self-described 'transmasc enby' who uses they/he pronouns".

But the story doesn't actually use that "Twitter tweet" as the source. It just springboards from a viral tweet to talking about the larger picture. The tweet didn't say any of the specifics that PinkNews supposedly sourced to it. And the claim that Disney villains have been queer-coded is ... not exactly shocking. I mean, just look up any of the authors that James Somerton plagiarized.

Or consider this article,[12] with the breathless headline "Star Trek: Picard season finale sees iconic character finally come out as queer, inspiring a million new fan fictions. The Star Trek: Picard season finale has confirmed a same-sex romance for iconic character Seven of Nine, and fans are thrilled." The evidence? Two characters holding hands. In a series that already had more than one openly gay couple and thus no real reason to be ambiguous.

Well, actually, Star Trek: Picard did not "already" have "more than one openly gay couple". Star Trek: Discovery had one, and the Kelvin timeline movies had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it implication of one. The PinkNews article didn't just go aflutter over two characters holding hands, but also pointed to an interview with showrunner Michael Chabon:

There are hints that both Seven and Raffi are bisexual.

Oh yes. [...] With a character like Raffi, to the extend we imagined her history in a fair amount of detail, her history included all kinds of sexual partners. There’s a father of her child, but that was far from her only sexual or life partner. She’s had relationships with all kind of people. If it was ever to come up, it was always going to be organic. [...] Same thing with Seven of Nine, having to catch up after such along absence from the human race. If you think about that, it almost seems unnatural that she wouldn’t’ have had partners of other genders. It seems clear she would have. So even if we didn’t see that on Voyager, years have passed. In that time, she’s continued to explore the spectrum of human relationships in a broader way. So in our show, there are echos and implications of that.

And it's not like the article was actually wrong, was it? Jeri Ryan said that Seven is "canonically bi", and the Seven/Raffi romance went on to become a whole thing.

I won't go to bat for PinkNews being good, but this investigation of what's wrong with it is itself irritatingly flawed and superficial. As, apparently, somebody at Wikipedia has already pointed out.

Moreover, when TW makes the flat statement, "Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source", he conveniently elides the caveats that naturally come when people who LARP at building an encyclopedia try to summarize the results of their own arguments:

There is rough consensus that PinkNews is *generally( reliable for factual reporting, but additional considerations may apply and caution should be used. Most of those who commented on PinkNews' reliability for statements about a person's sexuality said that such claims had to be based on direct quotes from the subject.

So, yeah, just because the table puts it in green doesn't mean that editors will use it uncritically.

Oh, and look, a lie by omission!

Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.

<sup>

14

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After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.

He cited Reuters too.

Winning sentences of the day so far:

Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: https://www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)

Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.

🎶 Three ladies! / deedle-dee-dee-dee-deet / Three ladies! / And I'm the Son of Man, Ja! 🎶

OK, I just spent 10 minutes of my life that I'll never get back clicking around Wikipedia edit histories, and it seems that LessWrongers are really unhappy about the LessWrong article saying anything about neoreactionaries. And they're willing to say why at typical length.

Classics in the replies:

If you think wikipedia is bad see arstecnica chat. On covid immunity chat I respectfully said natural covid immunity as good got ad hominem reply. I cited ars policy against ad hominem. 5 min later moderator kicked me out for 2 weeks

Btw, I saw on Reddit how the people of r/wikipedia attacked you for being a nazi and supporting the "conspirational theory" of cultural marxism

Midwits at best

If I had fans like these, I'd like to think that I'd re-evaluate some life choices.

🎶 we don't need no water let the motherfucker burn 🎶

"Specialist terminology" like... the word edit?

Not sure writing an encyclopedia is a good hobby for you, bro.

The Singularity (of hating that we know what those words mean) Is Near

Open post in private browser window, click profile... Oh, wow, he is.

As for carving out my own little space online where dissent is purged, everyone from Steve Sailer to Zero HP Lovecraft to BAP follows me on Twitter, where I openly and emphatically argue against them.

Dude. Not healthy.

I feel like I should quote some proverb about not mud-wrestling a pig or debating a creationist. This is like going out of your way to make the Nazis feel at home in your neighborhood bar.

I love the "uh, you know we can see what you've done" reply.