Posted by imichael 2 days ago
You don't seem to be familiar with McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Fair enough, it's not to everyone's taste and doesn't try to be.
And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?
I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.
Thank you for your opinion, however I don't view it as anything more than that.
In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvements are still to come no doubt. Ive found inaccuracies in articles that I look forward to having grok remedy.
Soon we will get APIs which will slot into searxng well. The plan is to have grok be the only editor. You have to convince grok to edit a page.
Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]
So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:
>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]
So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?
https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture
>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism
This is shockingly better writing.
>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The
This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.
It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.
Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.
>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.
You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.
Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.
I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.
So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.
This is the basically the same evidence that says if I set you on fire you'll stop complaining about a cough, right?
> qwackery
Quackery has a 'u'. Maybe you need Grammarly.
> Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
Try not to source all your opinions from the guy who suggested people drink bleach.
Wow you are easily shocked.
by what metric(s) ?
> Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
Where do you think Grok's "AI editor point of view" comes from?
But also I was really pissed off by the fact that they put multiple bubbles for that that completely cover the main page when you are on mobile and a lot in desktop.
Having to scroll that much is kind of worse than cookie popup that I can close in one click.
So I realized that it is the reason why I don't go to the site anymore. It's more relaxing to get the answer directly from Google, Kagi, or a llm. Sadly for Wikipedia, they are responsible for them own demise in my opinion. And it is a good think in the hope that they will realize something when the traffic will really go down. Despite my sadness on the topic regarding the initial goal of the encyclopedia that was laudable.
https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...
Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.
I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
…and let the bickering begin…
Nothing is going to be immune from people accusing it of bias, etc. Wikipedia is pretty damn good (and free).
Less room for activism and other things
I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone.
If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockba...
>Hitchens has frequently rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is linked to global warming, stating that “there is no proof that this is so”
I wonder if that relates to one of the appalling biases he tried to fix? I'm ok with a bias towards scientific accuracy myself.
I think the question that XAI asks is "how close to mecha hitler can we get before people notice and complain?"
I'm kind of neutral on the conflict and genuinely curious.
About the only bit of Wikipedia I've come across that I feel is inaccurate due to editorial policy is on covid origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2
>While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence.
Which I don't think is true.
Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].
If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.
[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.
My guess is that although a grant application for Baric's research was turned down, the Wuhan lab went ahead and did it anyway and had a screw up.
Evidence doesn't have to mean proven beyond all doubt.
However, this all misses the point that the article is making: It's a store of knowledge added to and edited by humans. At least they're not AI, the article says. I don't know if this is true, but if so, I find it compelling.
I'm sorry but there is no way for reasonable people to believe that Grokipedia would be a legitimate alternative to wikipedia.
It betrays a deep misunderstanding about LLM's in general, but especially grok, and objectivity itself as a concept.