Fair point about association versus actual thinking. (Though at least some versions of the backfire effect are doubtful...)
I don’t think this is all David Gerard’s fault (at least, not the fault of his activities on Wikipedia). Wikipedia is explicitly meant to be a summary of information available in “reliable sources” elsewhere, and unfortunately I think it really is true that most of the stuff about LW in such sources is about things one can point at and laugh or sneer, like Roko’s basilisk and neoreaction. That may be a state of affairs that David Gerard and RationalWiki have deliberately fostered—it certainly doesn’t seem to be one they’ve discouraged! -- but I think the Wikipedia article might well look just the way it does now if there were some entirely impartial but Wikipedia-rules-lawyering third party watching it closely instead of DG. E.g., however informative the LW poll results might be, it’s true that they’re not found in a “reliable source” in the Wikipedia sense. And however marginal Roko’s basilisk might be, it’s true that it’s attracted outside attention and been written about by “reliable sources”.
Wikipedia is explicitly meant to be a summary of information available in “reliable sources” elsewhere
So there seems to be an upstream problem that the line between “reliable sources” and “clickbait” is quite blurred these days.
This is probably not true for things that are typically written about in textbooks; but true for things that are typically written about in mainstream press.
Fair point about association versus actual thinking. (Though at least some versions of the backfire effect are doubtful...)
I don’t think this is all David Gerard’s fault (at least, not the fault of his activities on Wikipedia). Wikipedia is explicitly meant to be a summary of information available in “reliable sources” elsewhere, and unfortunately I think it really is true that most of the stuff about LW in such sources is about things one can point at and laugh or sneer, like Roko’s basilisk and neoreaction. That may be a state of affairs that David Gerard and RationalWiki have deliberately fostered—it certainly doesn’t seem to be one they’ve discouraged! -- but I think the Wikipedia article might well look just the way it does now if there were some entirely impartial but Wikipedia-rules-lawyering third party watching it closely instead of DG. E.g., however informative the LW poll results might be, it’s true that they’re not found in a “reliable source” in the Wikipedia sense. And however marginal Roko’s basilisk might be, it’s true that it’s attracted outside attention and been written about by “reliable sources”.
This is a good point. The Wikipedia pages for other sites, like Reddit, also focus unduly on controversy.
So there seems to be an upstream problem that the line between “reliable sources” and “clickbait” is quite blurred these days.
This is probably not true for things that are typically written about in textbooks; but true for things that are typically written about in mainstream press.