Not "authoritative", reliable. From WP:Reliable_sources "Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy."
You can see summaries of past debates about specific sources:
Those debates just show why Grokipedia is needed. Truth seeking is the opposite, it's when you demand crowdsourced consensus that debates become endless and stupid.
Here's a cut and dried case: the BBC admitted recently to broadcasting faked video of a Trump speech. It wasn't a mistake and the lying was institutional in nature, i.e. an internal whistleblower tried to get it fixed and BBC management up to the top viewed it as OK to broadcast video they knew was fake. Even when it was revealed publicly, they still defended it with logic like "OK, maybe Trump didn't say that but it's the sort of thing he might have said".
So the BBC can't be considered a reliable source, yet Wikipedia cites it all over the place. This problem was debated here:
The discussion shows just how stupid Wikipedia has become. Highlights include:
1. Calling The Telegraph a tabloid (it's not)
2. Not reading the report ("What exactly was editted incorrectly?", "it's just an allegation")
3. Circular logic: "This just seems like mudslinging unless this is considered significant by less partisan publications" but their definition of "less partisan" means sources like the BBC, that just lied for partisan reasons.
4. Shooting the messenger for not being left wing enough.
5. Not fixing the problem: "Closed as per WP:SNOW. There is no indication whatsoever that there is consensus to change the status of the BBC as a generally reliable source, neither based on the above discussion nor based on this RfC".
Wikipedia is as broken as can be. It institutionally doesn't care that its "reliable sources" forge video evidence to manipulate politics. As long as left wing people turn up to defend it, there is no consensus, and nothing will change even if those people clearly don't even bother reading what happened. The death of Wikipedia will be slow, but it will be thoroughly deserved.
The lies that Trump used to send that mob to the capital are in a different galaxy of falsehood than the BBC editing down some of his less fiery invective. It's one hell of a choice to focus on the latter over the former. Your bar for the the left is on Mt Olympus, your bar for the right is buried underneath the Mariana Trench.
If he really lied so badly they could have just broadcast those lies and held the moral high ground, but they didn't. They had to make things up (not "editing down", they spliced together sentences 50 minutes apart and hid what they did).
That should be a huge reality check for you. How do you even know that any of your opinions about Trump are true? You're getting them from the kind of people who fake videos of him. You should consider the possibility that nothing you know is accurate.
You're clutching this complaint about editorialization like a soccer player faking an injury but facts don't care about your feelings: Trump's speech wasn't just incendiary as fuck (I've listened to it in whole), it did incite a violent mob that broke into the capitol and chanted "Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!" as they carried a hastily constructed noose and gallows around capitol hill.
Meanwhile, there is no factual basis for Trump's claims at all:
Your team had 60 chances to make factual arguments of any length using any evidence and witnesses and they failed every one of significance, even in front of Trump's DOJ and judges appointed by Trump!
What's the evidence that he wasn't just wrong but intentionally wrong? Oh, only a hundred things: we have Steve Bannon saying he planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome because there was no reason not to do it, we have the emails where John Eastman set up the fake elector plan and complained when Mike Pence wouldn't help with it, we have the fake certifications signed by the fake electors, we have the emails from Ken Chesborough setting up the signings, hell, Mike Pence went on Fox and said Trump ordered him to overturn the election results. We have Trump standing by as his mob ransacked the capitol for hours while he hoped Pence would change his mind before at long last giving up and calling them off.
The contents of that speech are one of the most documented false arguments in history and it should be a huge reality check for you that you're ignoring this to pearl clutch about something that, at worst, would have been a million times less consequential. But it won't be, because you're a partisan hack and we both know it.
Oh, that was probably the point, that it's very weak but still better than k!ttyc4T. We both got downvoted for not picking up that implication. This thread requires too much mind-reading for me.
I remember that a not-so-recent investigation recommended five words. (Also you got the order wrong, "correct" was at the front, but you'd probably get it right second try, so the concept is still good.)
How does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does.
Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.
I don't find it contradictory to subscribe to both an individual Destiny and an "universal scope" Destiny of which the individual Destiny is a component.
This Destiny is in tension with Free Will (in my telling).
In retirement, my hope is to produce a lengthy, pretentious exploration of a few ideas that will doubtless help someone's insomnia.
Right, but any identification of the Ultimate Purpose is going to be a very vague bad guess. I kind of like "to learn", but besides that I tend to keep returning to a string bag of mixed values that won't boil down to anything neat.
The reason I don't think Destiny can amount to more than a "very vague bad guess" as an intellectual matter is that such a solution would tamper with Free Will.
The premise is that people are randomly notified of their imminent death, and variously decide that they have to make amends for things they did wrong, or make up for lost time, or stand up to their enemies, or do whatever they're most proud of, or make arrangements to provide for others, or create something for posterity.
Personally I think mortality makes everybody slightly crazy, and is best ignored, so I wouldn't want to react in any major way. I'd probably record the current state of my projects, in case somebody else felt like taking over. So I'd die doing admin chores.
My thoughts exactly, linux gaming really doesn't tell me much, beyond that I might be able to use it if I was using Linux. Could be some controller or a Proton-something for all I can tell reading the phrase.
Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.
And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?
If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.
Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:
> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.
> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.
Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?
> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.
If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.
Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.
I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.
Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.
A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.
As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.
How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?
> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.
The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.
Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.
Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.
So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?
I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.
Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.
Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.
OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.
I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.
> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".
I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:
>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".
is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.
People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.
So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.
Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.
[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.
I'm totally down with the arrogant "morality is objective" viewpoint. However, I don't think it can be reasoned from first principles: I think "from first principles" gives a bad smell to almost any reasoning. I see knowledge as web-like in structure, not hierarchical, and I see moral ideas as belonging to a separate realm where they're supported by other moral ideas. (Consider that "gain" entails values, which are moral.) Some of these ideas are basal urges, but that doesn't make them superior. So, I can't agree with making historical figures at fault for their failure to arrive at a present-day state of morality by figuring everything out from first principles, because I do think it's something the culture does, gradually, as a group effort, with individuals considered "bad" only for failing to be up to speed by the standard of the time.
Incidentally, if they are to be blamed for failing to arrive at future morality by using the first-principle building blocks you suppose it to be made from, then so are we, and so are all future people, since morality is open-ended and there's always more to learn. We're all terribly guilty for not belonging to the infinitely far future, apparently.
Well, I suppose you can say "that whole society, in that place at that time, went down a morally wrong-headed path". I'm not very knowledgeable about Aztecs, for instance, but I believe they had some nasty traditions, as well as a cyclic world-view. Yet there must have been good Aztecs. (Even objectively, we have to consider things in context.)
If we were to leap 300 years into the future, I don't think it'd be very surprising what they look down on us for, presuming they've advanced in a logic-oriented direction and not, say, a relapse into purely religious doctrine, which is by no means a given to occur. We will certainly be condemned, at minimum, for our utterly inhumane treatment of animals, for our relentless exhaustion and destruction of natural resources, for our abuse of the scientific method to proclaim things as factual with studies that can't actually be replicated, and for much more.
Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.
Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.
Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
You can see summaries of past debates about specific sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
If Grok is going to vet its sources, it will have to do a similar crowd-sourcing of opinion about them.
The advantage of avoiding seeking truth is that it avoids an endless quest and interminable debate.
reply