Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. No, I mean for sure. To take this area of discussion seriously is to say, yeah, you know what? Actually that is a big part of what Wikipedia and spend their time grappling with is to say, how do we figure out whether a less popular view is pseudoscience? Is it just a less popular view that’s gaining acceptance in the mainstream? Is it fringe versus crackpot, et cetera, et cetera? And that debate is what you’ve got to do. There’s no choice about having that debate of grappling with something. And I think we do. And I think that’s really important. And I think if anybody said to the Wikipedia community, “Gee, you should stop covering minority viewpoints on this issue,” I think they would say, “I don’t even understand why you would say that. We have to grapple with minority viewpoints in science and politics and so on.” And this is one of the reasons why there is no magic simple answer to all these things. It’s really contextual. It’s case by case. It’s like you’ve got to really say, okay, what is the context here? How do you do it? And you’ve always got to be open to correction and to change and to challenge and always be sort of serious about that. I think what happens, again, with social media is when there is that grappling process in Wikipedia and a decision is made to remove a paragraph or to remove a thing or to say a thing, you’re going to notice the one direction of the oscillation of the grappling and not the correction. And you’re going to highlight that and say, how come this person… I don’t know, maybe legitimacy of elections that’s the thing that comes up. Donald Trump maybe previously- Yeah, I can give a really good example, which is, there was this sort of dust up about the definition of recession in Wikipedia. The accusation was often quite ridiculous and extreme, which is, under pressure from the Biden administration Wikipedia changed the definition of recession to make Biden look good, or we did it not under pressure, but because we’re a bunch of lunatic leftists and so on. And then when I see something like that in the press, I’m like, “Oh dear, what’s happened here? How do we do that?” Because I always just accept things for five seconds first, and then I go and I look and I’m like, “You know what? That’s literally completely not what happened.” What happened was, one editor thought the article needed restructuring. So the article is always said, so the traditional kind of loose definition of recession is two quarters of negative growth, but there’s always been within economics, within important agencies and different countries around the world, a lot of nuance around that. And there’s other factors that go into it and so forth. And then it’s just an interesting complicated topic. And so the article has always had the definition of two quarters. And the only thing that really changed was moving that from the lead, from the top paragraph to further down. And then news stories appeared saying, “Wikipedia has changed the definition of recession.” And then we got a huge rush of trolls coming in. So the article was temporarily protected, I think, only semi protected, and people were told, “Go to the talk page to discuss.” So anyway, it was a dust up that was… When you look at it as a Wikipedian, you’re like, “Oh, this is a really routine kind of editorial debate.” Another example, which unfortunately our friend Elon fell for, I would say, is the Twitter files. So there was an article called the Twitter files, which is about these files that were released once Elon took control of Twitter, and he released internal documents. And what happened was somebody nominated it for deletion, but even the nomination said, “This is mainly about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, shouldn’t this information be there instead?” So anyone can… It takes exactly one human being anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion, and that triggers a process where people discuss it, which within a few hours, it was what we call snowball closed i.e, this doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing. So an admin goes, “Yeah, wrong,” and closed the debate, and that was it. That was the whole thing that happened. And so nobody proposed suppressing the information. Nobody proposed it wasn’t important, it was just editorially boring internal questions. So sometimes people read stuff like that and they’re like, “Oh, you see, look at these leftists. They’re trying to suppress the truth again.” It’s like, well slow down a second and come and look, literally, it’s not what happened.…

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