mathematics (and increasingly CS) enthusiast | MIT class of 2026 | Wikimedian | vaguely Grey Triber | personal website: https://duck-master.github.io
duck_master
Karma: 94
Bumping this.
I think this applies to every wiki ever, and also to this very site. There are probably a lot of others that I’m missing but this is a start.
I agree with you (meaning G Gorden Worley III) that Wikipedia is reliable, and I too treat it as reliable. (It’s so well-known as a reliable source that even Google uses it!) I also agree that an army of bots and humans undo any defacing that may occur, and that Wikipedia having to depend on other sources helps keep it unbiased. I also agree with the OP that Wikipedia’s status as not-super-reliable among the Powers that Be does help somewhat.
So I think that the actual secret of Wikipedia’s success is a combination of the two: Mild illegibility prevents rampant defacement, citations do the rest. If Wikipedia was both viewed as Legibly Completely Accurate and also didn’t cite anything, then it would be defaced to hell and back and rendered meaningless; but even if everyone somehow decided one day that Wikipedia was ultra-accurate and also that they had a supreme moral imperative to edit it, I still think that Wikipedia would still turn out okay as a reliable source if it made the un-cited content very obvious, e.g. if each [citation needed] tag was put in size 128 Comic Sans and accompanied by an earrape siren* and even if there was just a bot that put those tags after literally everything without a citation**. (If Wikipedia is illegible, of course it’s going to be fine.)
*I think trolls might work around this by citing completely unrelated things, but this problem sounds like it could be taken care of by humans or by relatively simple NLP.
**This contravenes current Wikipedia policy, but in the worst-case scenario of Ultra-Legible Wikipedia, I think it would quickly get repealed.
@Diffractor: I think I got a MIRIxDiscord invite in a way somehow related to this event. Check your PMs for details. (I’m just commenting here to get attention because I think this might be mildly important.)
Don’t worry, it was kind of a natural stopping point anyways, as the discussion was winding down.
...and it’s closed.
“Mixture of infra-distributions” as in convex set, or something else? If it’s something else then I’m not sure how to think about it properly.
Me too. I currently only have a very superficial understanding of infraBayesianism (all of which revolves around the metaphysical, yet metaphorical, deity Murphy).
More specifically: if two points are in a convex set, then the entire line segment connecting them must also be in the set.
Here’s an ELI5: The evil superintelligent deity Murphy, before you were ever conceived, picked the worst possible world that you could live in (meaning the world where your performance is worst), and you have to use fancy math tricks to deal with that.
I think that if you imagine the deity Murphy trying to foil your plans whatever you do, that gives you a pretty decent approximation to true infraBayesianism.
Google doc where we posted our confusions/thoughts earlier: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lKG_y_Voe02OkRGG9yaxtMuGM_dQBUKjj9DXTA8rMxE/edit
My ongoing confusions/thoughts:
What if the super intelligent deity is less than maximally evil or maximally good? (E.g. the deity picking the median-performance world)
What about the dutch-bookability of infraBayesians? (the classical dutch-book arguments seem to suggest pretty strongly that non-classical-Bayesians can be arbitrarily exploited for resources)
Is there a meaningful metaphysical interpretation of infraBayesianism that does not involve Murphy? (similarly to how Bayesianism can be metaphysically viewed as “there’s a real, static world out there, but I’m probabilistically unsure about it”)
Bumping it again.