Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

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!

Indeed, Wikipedia really is worth celebrating. While I sympathize with the GP, we should avoid devolving into purity spirals or we'll never have moments of joy.

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

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.

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.

> it

What is "it", if not truth?

The irony lol.

Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.

Yeah, that is where things get real fun!

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.

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.

> 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.

> This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge

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.

It’s possible to both criticise Wikipedia and celebrate it.

(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)

> 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."

There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus. "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be truth changes far more often than it stands to scrutiny.

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.

We don't always have to do both at once though. Sometimes we can just enjoy things.

> can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color

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.

> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.

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.

My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.

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.

Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning).

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.

> my brain interprets

> 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.

A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.

It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.

Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction.

It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?

Mathematics does its best, but it's still a language, and fallible. It's trying to explain things, and the concepts like "prime number" and "one" can be shaken by later improvements to understanding.

You know when you're proud of something and you tell it to someone and they always find something to nitpick while also saying good job. That's what this feels like. It's very unnecessary. Time and a place

All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme

That’s one example, but I mean less personal. Wikipedia isn’t a person.

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.

FWIW, i don't think of my comment as a criticism, Wikipedia is beautiful because of what it is. We should celebrate it as it is.

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

> Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.

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.

> 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.

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?

You think that's bad? I got permanently banned and I started many important things on Wikipedia - like the admins noticeboard, a number of Australia communities, and the [citation needed]. I wrote dozens of articles about Australian women - none of them gave a shit and so I'm not able to write about them any more.

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.

> and the [citation needed]

Citation needed.

Very common in STEM circles.

Why did you get permanently banned? And what stops you from creating a new account?

Why'd you get banned?

Also I don't think it's necessary to call people names.

If by "universal" we mean median adult human which are apt and willing to engage in basic mathematical thoughts, yes. That’s certainly already a very greatly reduced set of entities compared to everything in existence, though.

Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth!

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.

>Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.

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.

Yes, that’s a nice self-contradicting statement to ignite thoughts. One possible resolution is to conclude "even granted that absolute truths do exist, and humans can experiment the intuition that they indeed exist, doesn’t imply that humans can reach absolute truth and fathom it down."

I disagree, it is not universal. 1+1=2 is just a specific system of notation with consistency. There was a time when no human conceptualized this idea of 1+1=2, they did not have numerals or know about addition. Before you get to 1+1=2 you need a bunch of prior concepts that are themselves contingent on culture and history.

> Why did you get permanently banned.

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.

Act of love? It's simply he who yells the loudest gets to write history. The controversy around the George Galloway, and Wireds coverage of the glorification of NAZI platoons and war heros? There are some articles so bad-you cannot even bear to read. But at least there are a few nonsensical articles and BAJADON, bad jokes and other deleted nonsense. My favorite article is about black light power. Absolute and complete garbage. I think that is the true enshitification is they do not take out the trash.

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.

You have been trolled by Wikipedia troll bot(tm). - there are hundreds of thousands of them - the hypnotized never lie.

I disagree. She did not almost destroy the place, she successfully turned Wikipedia into an intellectual black hole encompassing the entire human history. There are only unprintable words to describe her vileness.

Perfect! Wikipedia is an overflowing of dickheads. Perfect. It is the instutionalisation of dickheads. And @#$# the czar of the New York Subway system and the people who endlessly add retracted citations.

I had a shocking interaction with a scientist who insisted that theories are simply the best lies to explain the data. He has been nominated for two Nobel prizes. He will win neither.

I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution.

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.

> I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems.

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".

I'm gonna need you to elaborate on that.

> The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one.

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.

The rest of talk page comment: "I was told during my education that the rectus-right definition was used by Robert Sidney Cahn as an excuse to use his own initials, although I cannot find a source to back that up."

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?

I think you are confusing what we believe to be the truth at a point in time and how the physical world is.

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.

>The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all.

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.

> Either atoms exist or they dont

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.

> 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.

I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.

Exactly the right question. If atoms are forever retained as a locally true-in-its-domain and at-its-level-of-description phenomena in every future theory, I think they count as real in any important sense. Even classical mechanics is true in the sense of strongly accurate and predictive at its scales of description, as an approximation of something more precisely described by QM.

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.

The first claim is correct, as the topic was direction, not correctness.

Ok, so you also failed at a very, very easy problem, but you're proud of that fact?

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.

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.

> 1+1=2 is just a specific system of notation with consistency.

So, that that is system of notation which has consistency is itself a truth, isn’t it?

That’s a bad take. Science does seek Truth. Take physics’ equations and the universal constants for example. Don’t act like there’s not objective, truthful realities that are undiscovered.

Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different

Curious - and do you know what I got the one-way IBAN for? The answer is: nothing.

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.

She was removed as an admin for the most extraordinary level of bullying. She continued bullying right up to when she was finally indefinitely blocked. I was one of the people she bullied. She had a coterie of rabid followers and so was allowed to run riot for years. There were many, many good editors who left because of her behaviour.

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.

You could look at the history.

If you say so.

I'm not calling her names - she was eventually banned for bullying.