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Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Yeah, my initial take is "Conservapedia was pretty much a disaster, and there's a reason that people don't use it".
Like, go to Conservapedia's "evolution" article.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution
Like, you're going to have to create an entire alternate reality for people who have weird views on X, Y, or Z. And making it worse, there isn't overlap among all those groups. Like, maybe you're a young earth creationist, and you like that evolution article. But then maybe you don't buy into chemtrails. It looks like Conservapedia doesn't like chemtrails. So that's gonna piss off the chemtrail people.
There are lots of people on the right who are going to disagree with scientific consensus on something, but they don't all have the same set of views. They might all complain that Wikipedia doesn't fit with their views on particular point X, but that doesn't mean that they're going to go all happily accept the fringe views of some other group. And some views are just going to outright contradict each other. You could have a conservative Mormon, Amish, and a Catholic, but they're going to have some seriously clashing views on religion, even if they're all conservative. In broader society, the way we normally deal with that is to just let people make up their own mind on particular issues. But if you're trying to create a single "alternate reality" that all of them subscribe to, then you have to get them all on one page, which is going to be a real problem.
Maybe Musk could make Grok try to assess which fringe group that someone is in and automatically provide a version of truth in Grok's responses tailored to their preferences. But...that's not a Grokipedia, because the latter requires a unified view.
Would be a damn shame for people to make troll edits if he were to do so...
That happened to Conservapedia too. It's a poster child for Poe's Law, none of the editors over there really knows whether any of the other editors are true believer lunatics or highly creative trolls making up nonsense in the style of true believer lunatics. For all we know the true believers are a minority at this point and the whole thing is mostly trolling, there's no way to tell it apart from genuine lunacy.
Effective editing requires, at the very least, a lot of practice and fuckups (hopefully at your school paper, though I had a few gems professionally). And this is when your goal is to get things right while improving skills and understanding.
The Venn diagram of what editors do and "waaahhh, I don't like anything telling me my beliefs are unhinged" requires separate pieces of paper and likely leasing the LHC for a bit.
Reminds me of various old sayings, such as: "The truth is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." And "if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
I don't necessarily believe in a purely objective reality, personally. I don't know for sure that there is some kind of platonic ideal structure of all things that exists apart from observers and always has and always will, it's a hard thing to figure out how to even start to prove. But there sure does seem like there is one, some kind of underlying pattern to reality that everyone who makes honest rigorous measurements seems to be measuring the same way. So if you just do straightforward science it seems like you automatically end up participating in a single common shared worldview.
Whereas if you just make shit up based on your beliefs, you end up with a worldview that's divergent from everyone else who's also making shit up based on their beliefs.
It gives an inherent advantage to the reality-based people. They end up working together and supporting each other even if they have absolutely no way to communicate with each other. Physicists doing experiments on opposite sides of the planet with no awareness of each other can produce results that, when they're later brought together, click into place as if the two of them had directly collaborated all their lives. It's awesome.
I think one can take that even further. Is it possible that the fact that people who rely on truth and morality (which seems like a human constant if not a natural one) converge, is the whole reason either one has a place in our society? Almost all our instincts lead us away from them, otherwise. Everybody loves a comforting lie and the occasional atrocity against outsiders.
So do you believe in an objective reality, or not? You said a couple of opposite things there.
I don't think I did say opposite things. I don't believe in an objective reality because there's no way to prove it. But it does seem like a very useful concept, and well supported. I generally behave as if there is an objective reality and I'm not sure how I'd manage if there wasn't one.
It's the same as how one shouldn't say the "believe in" any particular scientific law, because it's always possible that evidence will come along later that disproves it. I suppose you could say I believe it's the best idea I know of, but I don't like getting that sloppy with terms like this when actually discussing the concept of "objective reality."
Ah, okay. So it comes down to a strict definition of "belief" which requires total certainty. I've seen it used that way before, but when I say I believe something in everyday conversation, I never mean there's no chance I'm mistaken.
The risk I try to avoid with this sort of wording is the religious connotations of "belief." When people believe in a religion they generally do intend that to mean "with no chance I'm mistaken" so I don't want anyone to mistake me as having a religious belief in an objective reality. It's not like that.
It's kind of a tale as old as time. If there's a socially correct way to think, and at least two people, they're inevitably going to disagree on which way that is at some point, and splinter into subfactions that hate each other. (Lemmy has examples of this already)
When this has happened before in politics specifically, liberal use of violent purges is the Nash equilibrium. If everyone with power but the great leader dies after a while, especially ones that dare contradict them, no enemy factions can organise.