I already answered #3: the true rejection seems to be not “you are editing about us on Wikipedia to advance RationalWiki at our expense” (which is a complicated and not very plausible claim that would need all its parts demonstrated), but “you are editing about us in a way we don’t like”.
Someone from the IEET tried to seriously claim (COI Noticeboard and all) that I shouldn’t comment on the deletion nomination for their article—I didn’t even nominate it, just commented—on the basis that IEET is a 501(c)3 and RationalWiki is also a 501(c)3 and therefore in sufficiently direct competition that this would be a Wikipedia COI. It’s generally a bad and terrible claim and it’s blitheringly obvious to any experienced Wikipedia editor that it’s stretching for an excuse.
Variations on #3 are a perennial of cranks of all sorts who don’t want a skeptical editor writing about them at Wikipedia, and will first attempt not to engage with the issues and sources, but to stop the editor from writing about them. (My favourite personal example is this Sorcha Faal fan who revealed I was editing as an NSA shill.) So it should really be considered an example of the crackpot offer, and if you find yourself thinking it then it would be worth thinking again.
(No, I don’t know why cranks keep thinking implausible claims of COI are a slam dunk move to neutralise the hated outgroup. I hypothesise a tendency to conspiracist thinking, and first assuming malfeasance as an explanation for disagreement. So if you find yourself doing that, it’s another one to watch out for.)
No, you really didn’t, you dismissed it as not worth answering and proposed that people claiming #3 can’t possibly mean it and must be using it as cover for something else more blatantly unreasonable.
I understand that #3 may seem like an easy route for anyone who wants to shut someone up on Wikipedia without actually refuting them or finding anything concrete they’re doing wrong. It is, of course, possible that that Viliam is not sincere in suggesting that you have a conflict of interest here, and it is also possible (note that this is a separate question) that if he isn’t sincere then his actual reason for suggesting that you have is simply that he wishes you weren’t saying what you are and feels somehow entitled to stop you for that reason alone. But you haven’t given any, y’know, actual reasons to think that those things are true.
Unless you count one of these: (1) “Less Wrong is obviously a nest of crackpots, so we should expect them to behave like crackpots, and saying COI when they mean ‘I wish you were saying nice things about us’ is a thing crackpots do”. Or (2) “This is an accusation that I have a COI, and obviously I don’t have one, so it must be insincere and match whatever other insincere sort of COI accusation I’ve seen before”. I hope it’s clear that neither of those is a good argument.
Someone from the IEET tried to seriously claim [...]
I read the discussion. The person in question is certainly a transhumanist but I don’t see any evidence he is or was a member of the IEET, and the argument he made was certainly bad but you didn’t describe it accurately at all. And, again, the case is not analogous to the LW one: conflict versus competition again.
first assuming malfeasance as an explanation for disagreement
I agree, that’s a bad idea. I don’t quite understand how you’re applying it here, though. So far as I can tell, your opponents (for want of a better word) here are not troubled that you disagree with them (e.g., they don’t deny that Roko’s basilisk was a thing or that some neoreactionaries have taken an interest in LW); they are objecting to your alleged behaviour: they think you are trying to give the impression that Roko’s basilisk is important to LWers’ thinking and that LW is a hive of neoreactionaries, and they don’t think you’re doing that because you sincerely believe those things.
So it’s malfeasance as an explanation for malfeasance, not malfeasance as an explanation for disagreement.
I repeat that I am attempting to describe, not endorsing, but perhaps I should sketch my own opinions lest that be thought insincere. So here goes; if (as I would recommend) you aren’t actually concerned about my opinions, feel free to ignore what follows unless they do become an issue.
I do have the impression that you wish LW to be badly thought of, and that this goes beyond merely wanting it to be viewed accurately-as-you-see-it. I find this puzzling because in other contexts (and also in this context, in the past when your attitude seemed different) the evidence available to me suggests that you are generally reasonable and fair. (Yes, I have of course considered the possibility that I am puzzled because LW really is just that bad and I’m failing to see it. I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case, but I could of course be wrong.)
I do not think the case that you have a WP:COI on account of your association with RationalWiki, still less because you allegedly despise LW, is at all a strong one, and I think that if Viliam hopes that making that argument would do much to your credibility on Wikipedia then his hopes would be disappointed if tested.
I note that Viliam made that suggestion with a host of qualifications about how he isn’t a Wikipedia expert and was not claiming with any great confidence that you do in fact have a COI, nor that it would be a good idea to say that you do.
I think his suggestion was less than perfectly sincere in the following sense: he made it not so much because he thinks a reasonable person would hold that you have a conflict of interest, as because he thinks (sincerely) that you might have a COI in Wikipedia’s technical sense, and considers it appropriate to respond with Wikipedia technicalities to an attack founded on Wikipedia technicalities.
The current state of the Wikipedia page on Less Wrong doesn’t appear terribly bad to me, and to some extent it’s the way it is because Wikipedia’s notion of “reliable sources” gives a lot of weight to what has attracted the interest of journalists, which isn’t your fault. But there are some things that seem … odd. Here’s the oddest:
Let’s look at those two refs (placed there by you) for the statement that “the neoreactionary movement takes an interest in Less Wrong” (which, to be sure, could be a lot worse … oh, I see that you originally wrote “is associated with Less Wrong” and someone softened it; well done, someone). First we have a TechCrunch article. Sum total of what it says is that “you may have seen” neoreactionaries crop up “on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong”. I’ve seen racism on Facebook; is Facebook “associated with racism” in any useful sense? Second we have a review of “Neoreaction: a basilisk” claiming “The embryo of the [neoreactionary] movement lived in the community pages of Yudkowsky’s blog LessWrong”, which you know as well as I do to be flatly false (and so do the makers and editors of WP’s page on neoreaction, which quite rightly doesn’t even mention Less Wrong). These may be Reliable Sources in the sense that they are the kind of document that Wikipedia is allowed to pay attention to. They are not reliable sources for the claim that neoreaction and Less Wrong have anything to do with one another, because the first doesn’t say that and the second says it but is (if I’ve understood correctly) uncritically reporting someone else’s downright lie.
I have to say that this looks exactly like the sort of thing I would expect to see if you were trying to make Less Wrong look bad without much regard for truth, and using Wikipedia’s guiding principles as “cover” rather than as a tool for avoiding error. I hope that appearance is illusory. If you’d like to convince me it is, I’m all ears.
Villiam started with a proposal to brigade Wikipedia. This was sufficiently prima facie bad faith that I didn’t, and still don’t, feel any obligation to bend over backwards to construct a kernel of value from his post. You certainly don’t have to believe me that his words 100% pattern match to extruded crank product from my perspective, but I feel it’s worth noting that they do.
I feel answering his call for brigade with a couple of detailed link- and quote-heavy comments trying to explain what the rules actually are and how they actually work constituted a reasonable effort to respond sincerely and helpfully on my part, and offer guidance on how not to 100% pattern match to extruded crank product in any prospective editor’s future Wikipedia endeavours.
Viliam started with a proposal to brigade Wikipedia.
No, he didn’t. He started with a description of something he might do individually. Literally the only things he says about anyone else editing Wikipedia are (1) to caution someone who stated an intention of doing so not to rush in, and (2) to speculate that if he does something like this it might be best for a group of people to cooperate on figuring out how to word it.
I already answered #3: the true rejection seems to be not “you are editing about us on Wikipedia to advance RationalWiki at our expense” (which is a complicated and not very plausible claim that would need all its parts demonstrated), but “you are editing about us in a way we don’t like”.
Someone from the IEET tried to seriously claim (COI Noticeboard and all) that I shouldn’t comment on the deletion nomination for their article—I didn’t even nominate it, just commented—on the basis that IEET is a 501(c)3 and RationalWiki is also a 501(c)3 and therefore in sufficiently direct competition that this would be a Wikipedia COI. It’s generally a bad and terrible claim and it’s blitheringly obvious to any experienced Wikipedia editor that it’s stretching for an excuse.
Variations on #3 are a perennial of cranks of all sorts who don’t want a skeptical editor writing about them at Wikipedia, and will first attempt not to engage with the issues and sources, but to stop the editor from writing about them. (My favourite personal example is this Sorcha Faal fan who revealed I was editing as an NSA shill.) So it should really be considered an example of the crackpot offer, and if you find yourself thinking it then it would be worth thinking again.
(No, I don’t know why cranks keep thinking implausible claims of COI are a slam dunk move to neutralise the hated outgroup. I hypothesise a tendency to conspiracist thinking, and first assuming malfeasance as an explanation for disagreement. So if you find yourself doing that, it’s another one to watch out for.)
No, you really didn’t, you dismissed it as not worth answering and proposed that people claiming #3 can’t possibly mean it and must be using it as cover for something else more blatantly unreasonable.
I understand that #3 may seem like an easy route for anyone who wants to shut someone up on Wikipedia without actually refuting them or finding anything concrete they’re doing wrong. It is, of course, possible that that Viliam is not sincere in suggesting that you have a conflict of interest here, and it is also possible (note that this is a separate question) that if he isn’t sincere then his actual reason for suggesting that you have is simply that he wishes you weren’t saying what you are and feels somehow entitled to stop you for that reason alone. But you haven’t given any, y’know, actual reasons to think that those things are true.
Unless you count one of these: (1) “Less Wrong is obviously a nest of crackpots, so we should expect them to behave like crackpots, and saying COI when they mean ‘I wish you were saying nice things about us’ is a thing crackpots do”. Or (2) “This is an accusation that I have a COI, and obviously I don’t have one, so it must be insincere and match whatever other insincere sort of COI accusation I’ve seen before”. I hope it’s clear that neither of those is a good argument.
I read the discussion. The person in question is certainly a transhumanist but I don’t see any evidence he is or was a member of the IEET, and the argument he made was certainly bad but you didn’t describe it accurately at all. And, again, the case is not analogous to the LW one: conflict versus competition again.
I agree, that’s a bad idea. I don’t quite understand how you’re applying it here, though. So far as I can tell, your opponents (for want of a better word) here are not troubled that you disagree with them (e.g., they don’t deny that Roko’s basilisk was a thing or that some neoreactionaries have taken an interest in LW); they are objecting to your alleged behaviour: they think you are trying to give the impression that Roko’s basilisk is important to LWers’ thinking and that LW is a hive of neoreactionaries, and they don’t think you’re doing that because you sincerely believe those things.
So it’s malfeasance as an explanation for malfeasance, not malfeasance as an explanation for disagreement.
I repeat that I am attempting to describe, not endorsing, but perhaps I should sketch my own opinions lest that be thought insincere. So here goes; if (as I would recommend) you aren’t actually concerned about my opinions, feel free to ignore what follows unless they do become an issue.
I do have the impression that you wish LW to be badly thought of, and that this goes beyond merely wanting it to be viewed accurately-as-you-see-it. I find this puzzling because in other contexts (and also in this context, in the past when your attitude seemed different) the evidence available to me suggests that you are generally reasonable and fair. (Yes, I have of course considered the possibility that I am puzzled because LW really is just that bad and I’m failing to see it. I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case, but I could of course be wrong.)
I do not think the case that you have a WP:COI on account of your association with RationalWiki, still less because you allegedly despise LW, is at all a strong one, and I think that if Viliam hopes that making that argument would do much to your credibility on Wikipedia then his hopes would be disappointed if tested.
I note that Viliam made that suggestion with a host of qualifications about how he isn’t a Wikipedia expert and was not claiming with any great confidence that you do in fact have a COI, nor that it would be a good idea to say that you do.
I think his suggestion was less than perfectly sincere in the following sense: he made it not so much because he thinks a reasonable person would hold that you have a conflict of interest, as because he thinks (sincerely) that you might have a COI in Wikipedia’s technical sense, and considers it appropriate to respond with Wikipedia technicalities to an attack founded on Wikipedia technicalities.
The current state of the Wikipedia page on Less Wrong doesn’t appear terribly bad to me, and to some extent it’s the way it is because Wikipedia’s notion of “reliable sources” gives a lot of weight to what has attracted the interest of journalists, which isn’t your fault. But there are some things that seem … odd. Here’s the oddest:
Let’s look at those two refs (placed there by you) for the statement that “the neoreactionary movement takes an interest in Less Wrong” (which, to be sure, could be a lot worse … oh, I see that you originally wrote “is associated with Less Wrong” and someone softened it; well done, someone). First we have a TechCrunch article. Sum total of what it says is that “you may have seen” neoreactionaries crop up “on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong”. I’ve seen racism on Facebook; is Facebook “associated with racism” in any useful sense? Second we have a review of “Neoreaction: a basilisk” claiming “The embryo of the [neoreactionary] movement lived in the community pages of Yudkowsky’s blog LessWrong”, which you know as well as I do to be flatly false (and so do the makers and editors of WP’s page on neoreaction, which quite rightly doesn’t even mention Less Wrong). These may be Reliable Sources in the sense that they are the kind of document that Wikipedia is allowed to pay attention to. They are not reliable sources for the claim that neoreaction and Less Wrong have anything to do with one another, because the first doesn’t say that and the second says it but is (if I’ve understood correctly) uncritically reporting someone else’s downright lie.
I have to say that this looks exactly like the sort of thing I would expect to see if you were trying to make Less Wrong look bad without much regard for truth, and using Wikipedia’s guiding principles as “cover” rather than as a tool for avoiding error. I hope that appearance is illusory. If you’d like to convince me it is, I’m all ears.
Villiam started with a proposal to brigade Wikipedia. This was sufficiently prima facie bad faith that I didn’t, and still don’t, feel any obligation to bend over backwards to construct a kernel of value from his post. You certainly don’t have to believe me that his words 100% pattern match to extruded crank product from my perspective, but I feel it’s worth noting that they do.
I feel answering his call for brigade with a couple of detailed link- and quote-heavy comments trying to explain what the rules actually are and how they actually work constituted a reasonable effort to respond sincerely and helpfully on my part, and offer guidance on how not to 100% pattern match to extruded crank product in any prospective editor’s future Wikipedia endeavours.
If you have problems with the Wikipedia article, these are best addressed on the article talk page, and 0% here. (Readers attempting this should be sure to keep to the issues and not attempt to personalise issues as being about other editors.)
Anything further will be repeating ourselves, I think.
No, he didn’t. He started with a description of something he might do individually. Literally the only things he says about anyone else editing Wikipedia are (1) to caution someone who stated an intention of doing so not to rush in, and (2) to speculate that if he does something like this it might be best for a group of people to cooperate on figuring out how to word it.