An idea I’ve been toying with in my head, and discussed slightly at LW London yesterday: a sort of Snopes for “has person X professed opinion Y?”
Has Scott Alexander endorsed GamerGate? Did Eric Raymond say that hackers tend to be libertarian (or neoconservative, depending who you ask)? Did Eliezer say the singularity was too close to bother getting a degree?
I’ll put further thoughts in replies to this comment.
I’d be wary of making a thing like that. Even ignoring the EU’s bizarre “Right to be forgotten” law, people should be allowed to change their opinion, and such a website would incentivise consistency only. Not truth; consistency.
One of the things which inspired this idea was this thread: “okay, yes, it seems that Eliezer might well have said something like that, back in 2001”. Eliezer already doesn’t get to be forgotten. But if people are attacking him for things he said back in 2001, it seems like an improvement if we make it obvious that he said them back in 2001.
But for other people, I can see how this could be a bad thing to have. I’d like to be able to write “they said this in 2001, but in 2010 they said the opposite” and have people accept “okay, they changed their mind”, but that doesn’t seem entirely realistic.
I’ve updated from “probably good idea, unsure how valuable” to “possibly good idea, high variance”.
Ideally it would have “he said it”, “he did not say it”, and “he has since retracted it”. As is, you could find where someone originally said something, and have no way of knowing if it has ever been retracted.
The answers to questions like this aren’t necessarily “yes” or “no”. But it could still be valuable to say things like “the source for this seems to be this article from 2004, in which he is quoted as saying ….” Or, “he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote.”
That seems pretty similar to what I’m envisioning, but transposed. They want to look at positions, and ask “whose opinions on this position are notable?” where notability is based on whether they’re likely to have a clue. I’m going for looking at people, and asking “which of this person’s positions are notable?” where notability is based on (something like) whether people are talking about it being their position.
They want to look at positions, and ask “whose opinions on this position are notable?”
That’s just the default view. You can click on the name of any “expert” and bring up a nice report where all of their positions are listed and compared with other experts’.
And “notability” is viewed quite generally anyway. As long as the person has something genuinely worthwhile to say, you can add their opinion on all sorts of stuff.
Or, “he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote.”
The fact that I recommend people to read an article in which I’m cited doesn’t imply that I believe that the article is 100% factually correct.
In general journalists do simply the positions of the people they quote. Depending on the context I might be okay with a slight alteration of my position in the article as long as the main points I want to make appear in the article. If the quote then gets lifted into another context, I might have a problem.
I assume you’re talking about internet figures in the greater LW-memeplex. If so, I think this is a bad idea.
Tidy reasons this may have low-to-moderate value:
It’s already easy to find the public positions of an internet figure.
Reasons are more important than conclusions. Unless you think you can present the arguments better than the original source, you’ll just end up simply linking to the original source, which is, again, easy to find.
Messy reasons this might have negative value:
As a rule, no online community has ever suffered from a lack of introspection. I’m so very sick of hearing groups talk about themselves. In particular, talking about prominent group figures is extremely off-putting to newcomers.
It will become a source of emotional stress for those quoted. “Popular-online-writer” is a world apart from being a real public figure. Empirically, the latter handle third-party discussion of themselves poorly.
Realistically, this will not guard against drama involving the unfair attributions of positions. If somebody wants to pattern match so-and-so to a particular archetype, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
I love my favorite blogs, but gaining an audience is a quality-quantity game, with an emphasis on quantity. Why give particular attention to the conclusions of a figure who have been selected in this way?
I’m not intending it to be LW-focused at all (except perhaps by accident of userbase). Other public figures I recall seeing misrepresented include Eric S Raymond, Orson Scott Card and Larry Summers.
It’s already easy to find the public positions of an internet figure.
ESR wrote a blog post suggesting that the Haitian people really did summon up the Voudon god Ogun to kill off all the white Frenchmen.
I know that the blog post in question suggests that they really did perform a ritual for that purpose, and that the ritual had a significant effect on the mental state of the participants, but ESR does not believe that the ritual was effective in summoning any kind of god. The blog post doesn’t make that last part explicit, but if pressed I could find a slashdot comment where he does say so explicitly.
I don’t think it’s easy to do this.
(The RW line could be considered not-completely-false, because one can summon a god without the god answering. And it might even be honest, if the writer didn’t understand where ESR was coming from. But to the extent that people read it and think that ESR believes that Ogun was successfully summoned, that line isn’t true.)
I’m also not interested in arguing over whether or not that ritual ever took place. I don’t think anyone’s particularly interested in that. I think some people are interested in making fun of ESR, and I’m interested in making it as easy as possible to debunk those people when they say things that aren’t true. So I don’t need to present ESR’s arguments, I just want to say “no, you’re misrepresenting his conclusions”.
There are a lot of true claims of the form “person X said thing Y”. It would be a mistake to only include false claims, because then a claim which isn’t listed may be considered true by default. But including every claim would make it impossible to find the one someone is interested in. I’m not sure what notability guidelines would look like.
As far as famous/notable people go, skeptics.stackexchange works perfectly well for those questions.
In general however focusing on “he said, she said” is bad. I might argue I wide arrange of positions depending on the context. Sometimes I play devils advocate to make points.
Focusing on actual content instead of focusing on what someone said in a single instance if often better.
I’m envisioning this as a mediawiki, where a given person will have a page, and that page lists claims about things they have said. Edit wars can hopefully be fixed by having a number of editors who know how to be impartial, and being trigger-happy on locking pages so that only they can edit. The talk page can be used for discussion, and for the person themselves to weigh in.
What is your intention? If you hope to espouse truth then I doubt it helps. People have lots of opinions—many of them uninformed or guesswork. And such a site has the risk of additionally weighing the prominent voices too much.
But assuming there is a sensible purpose then I think care must be taken to balance against prominence. User pages are prone to become hubs and mouthpieces of prominent people. Same for popular topics.
I think wikipedias approach of mentioning popular backers for claims is a good balance. Maybe this could be realized as an add-on to existing sites like Wikipedia. “What did X say about Wikipediapage Y?”
I’m not hoping to espouse truth in general—I don’t think this is a good way to give people correct opinions about, say, neoreaction. I’m hoping to espouse truth about what people actually think, and I’m hoping that this will help to quell bullshit rumours.
So if someone starts a rumour that Eliezer is neoreactionary, someone else could add a section “Eliezer on neoreaction” saying things like: this rumour might be triggered by Eliezer’s associations with Mike Anissimov and LW; Eliezer has never publicly endorsed neoreaction; in fact he has publicly disclaimed it in a comment on this article, and hasn’t said much else on the subject.
(A lot of this has the implied qualification “as far as the editor knows”. I’m not sure how explicit this should be.)
And then anyone who sees the rumour will have an easy way to find out whether or not it’s true, instead of googling for “Eliezer Yudkowsky neoreaction” which by then could be a self-citing tumblr-storm, and will not show up anything by Eliezer on neoreaction because he hasn’t actually said all that much about it.
There’s an unavoidable disconnect between “what people actually think” and “what people report about what they think”.
As a matter of good faith, I think people should be taken at their word and deed for what they say they think. Others disagree, and will ascribe all manner of beliefs to a person, regardless of that person’s protestations. Eliezer might not say he’s neoreactionary, but they can read between the lines. They can probably put together a plausible post-hoc justification for it as well.
If someone’s motivated enough to believe Eliezer is a neoreactionary, I don’t think your site stops that. I don’t think Eliezer getting a “Seriously, Fuck NRx” tattoo stops that. It just gives them a new venue to try and make their case.
There are also people who would believe that Eliezer is a neoreactionary if they were told it, but would also believe that Eliezer is not a neoreactionary if they were told that.
I guess I’m hoping that if this question comes up on a public forum, most people won’t really know or care about Eliezer. The narrative in my head is along the lines of: someone says Eliezer is NRx, and someone else looks it up and says, no, Eliezer is not NRx, it says so right here. Then if the first person wants to convince anyone, their arguments become complicated and boring and nobody reads them.
An idea I’ve been toying with in my head, and discussed slightly at LW London yesterday: a sort of Snopes for “has person X professed opinion Y?”
Has Scott Alexander endorsed GamerGate? Did Eric Raymond say that hackers tend to be libertarian (or neoconservative, depending who you ask)? Did Eliezer say the singularity was too close to bother getting a degree?
I’ll put further thoughts in replies to this comment.
I’d be wary of making a thing like that. Even ignoring the EU’s bizarre “Right to be forgotten” law, people should be allowed to change their opinion, and such a website would incentivise consistency only. Not truth; consistency.
Are you sure that’s what you want?
Mm, good point.
One of the things which inspired this idea was this thread: “okay, yes, it seems that Eliezer might well have said something like that, back in 2001”. Eliezer already doesn’t get to be forgotten. But if people are attacking him for things he said back in 2001, it seems like an improvement if we make it obvious that he said them back in 2001.
But for other people, I can see how this could be a bad thing to have. I’d like to be able to write “they said this in 2001, but in 2010 they said the opposite” and have people accept “okay, they changed their mind”, but that doesn’t seem entirely realistic.
I’ve updated from “probably good idea, unsure how valuable” to “possibly good idea, high variance”.
Ideally it would have “he said it”, “he did not say it”, and “he has since retracted it”. As is, you could find where someone originally said something, and have no way of knowing if it has ever been retracted.
:My idea version of the wiki would include a history of the person’s ideas.
There still might be be problems with people (I’m thinking of Moldbug) whose ideas are hard to parse.
That wouldn’t prevent selective quoting, and all the other typical human behaviour which would, still, incentivise consistency.
The answers to questions like this aren’t necessarily “yes” or “no”. But it could still be valuable to say things like “the source for this seems to be this article from 2004, in which he is quoted as saying ….” Or, “he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote.”
That’s pretty much how TakeOnIt works already.
That seems pretty similar to what I’m envisioning, but transposed. They want to look at positions, and ask “whose opinions on this position are notable?” where notability is based on whether they’re likely to have a clue. I’m going for looking at people, and asking “which of this person’s positions are notable?” where notability is based on (something like) whether people are talking about it being their position.
That’s just the default view. You can click on the name of any “expert” and bring up a nice report where all of their positions are listed and compared with other experts’.
And “notability” is viewed quite generally anyway. As long as the person has something genuinely worthwhile to say, you can add their opinion on all sorts of stuff.
The fact that I recommend people to read an article in which I’m cited doesn’t imply that I believe that the article is 100% factually correct.
In general journalists do simply the positions of the people they quote. Depending on the context I might be okay with a slight alteration of my position in the article as long as the main points I want to make appear in the article. If the quote then gets lifted into another context, I might have a problem.
I assume you’re talking about internet figures in the greater LW-memeplex. If so, I think this is a bad idea.
Tidy reasons this may have low-to-moderate value:
It’s already easy to find the public positions of an internet figure.
Reasons are more important than conclusions. Unless you think you can present the arguments better than the original source, you’ll just end up simply linking to the original source, which is, again, easy to find.
Messy reasons this might have negative value:
As a rule, no online community has ever suffered from a lack of introspection. I’m so very sick of hearing groups talk about themselves. In particular, talking about prominent group figures is extremely off-putting to newcomers.
It will become a source of emotional stress for those quoted. “Popular-online-writer” is a world apart from being a real public figure. Empirically, the latter handle third-party discussion of themselves poorly.
Realistically, this will not guard against drama involving the unfair attributions of positions. If somebody wants to pattern match so-and-so to a particular archetype, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
I love my favorite blogs, but gaining an audience is a quality-quantity game, with an emphasis on quantity. Why give particular attention to the conclusions of a figure who have been selected in this way?
I’m not intending it to be LW-focused at all (except perhaps by accident of userbase). Other public figures I recall seeing misrepresented include Eric S Raymond, Orson Scott Card and Larry Summers.
I’ve read enough ESR that when RationalWiki says
I know that the blog post in question suggests that they really did perform a ritual for that purpose, and that the ritual had a significant effect on the mental state of the participants, but ESR does not believe that the ritual was effective in summoning any kind of god. The blog post doesn’t make that last part explicit, but if pressed I could find a slashdot comment where he does say so explicitly.
I don’t think it’s easy to do this.
(The RW line could be considered not-completely-false, because one can summon a god without the god answering. And it might even be honest, if the writer didn’t understand where ESR was coming from. But to the extent that people read it and think that ESR believes that Ogun was successfully summoned, that line isn’t true.)
I’m also not interested in arguing over whether or not that ritual ever took place. I don’t think anyone’s particularly interested in that. I think some people are interested in making fun of ESR, and I’m interested in making it as easy as possible to debunk those people when they say things that aren’t true. So I don’t need to present ESR’s arguments, I just want to say “no, you’re misrepresenting his conclusions”.
The list of misrepresented public figures is the list of public figures.
There are a lot of true claims of the form “person X said thing Y”. It would be a mistake to only include false claims, because then a claim which isn’t listed may be considered true by default. But including every claim would make it impossible to find the one someone is interested in. I’m not sure what notability guidelines would look like.
As far as famous/notable people go, skeptics.stackexchange works perfectly well for those questions.
In general however focusing on “he said, she said” is bad. I might argue I wide arrange of positions depending on the context. Sometimes I play devils advocate to make points.
Focusing on actual content instead of focusing on what someone said in a single instance if often better.
I’m envisioning this as a mediawiki, where a given person will have a page, and that page lists claims about things they have said. Edit wars can hopefully be fixed by having a number of editors who know how to be impartial, and being trigger-happy on locking pages so that only they can edit. The talk page can be used for discussion, and for the person themselves to weigh in.
I like this idea a lot. I honestly think it would be a useful resource, should it be well researched and accurate.
What is your intention? If you hope to espouse truth then I doubt it helps. People have lots of opinions—many of them uninformed or guesswork. And such a site has the risk of additionally weighing the prominent voices too much.
But assuming there is a sensible purpose then I think care must be taken to balance against prominence. User pages are prone to become hubs and mouthpieces of prominent people. Same for popular topics.
I think wikipedias approach of mentioning popular backers for claims is a good balance. Maybe this could be realized as an add-on to existing sites like Wikipedia. “What did X say about Wikipediapage Y?”
I’m not hoping to espouse truth in general—I don’t think this is a good way to give people correct opinions about, say, neoreaction. I’m hoping to espouse truth about what people actually think, and I’m hoping that this will help to quell bullshit rumours.
So if someone starts a rumour that Eliezer is neoreactionary, someone else could add a section “Eliezer on neoreaction” saying things like: this rumour might be triggered by Eliezer’s associations with Mike Anissimov and LW; Eliezer has never publicly endorsed neoreaction; in fact he has publicly disclaimed it in a comment on this article, and hasn’t said much else on the subject.
(A lot of this has the implied qualification “as far as the editor knows”. I’m not sure how explicit this should be.)
And then anyone who sees the rumour will have an easy way to find out whether or not it’s true, instead of googling for “Eliezer Yudkowsky neoreaction” which by then could be a self-citing tumblr-storm, and will not show up anything by Eliezer on neoreaction because he hasn’t actually said all that much about it.
There’s an unavoidable disconnect between “what people actually think” and “what people report about what they think”.
As a matter of good faith, I think people should be taken at their word and deed for what they say they think. Others disagree, and will ascribe all manner of beliefs to a person, regardless of that person’s protestations. Eliezer might not say he’s neoreactionary, but they can read between the lines. They can probably put together a plausible post-hoc justification for it as well.
If someone’s motivated enough to believe Eliezer is a neoreactionary, I don’t think your site stops that. I don’t think Eliezer getting a “Seriously, Fuck NRx” tattoo stops that. It just gives them a new venue to try and make their case.
There are also people who would believe that Eliezer is a neoreactionary if they were told it, but would also believe that Eliezer is not a neoreactionary if they were told that.
I guess I’m hoping that if this question comes up on a public forum, most people won’t really know or care about Eliezer. The narrative in my head is along the lines of: someone says Eliezer is NRx, and someone else looks it up and says, no, Eliezer is not NRx, it says so right here. Then if the first person wants to convince anyone, their arguments become complicated and boring and nobody reads them.