Talk:LessWrong/Archives/2024/July

Great discussion of this article

For an engaging history of the development of this article over 10 years:

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin?ref=quillette.com

2A02:1210:2642:4A00:4920:EC75:CF4C:44CE (talk) 14:33, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Miscellaneous discussion of the topic is currently taking place here. https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Reliable_sources_controversy

From semi-noob to noob, be aware that experienced editors tend to have strongly held opinions on meta topics by the time anyone blogs about them. If you think something needs to be relitigated, be as specific as possible- eg if you think we need to reverse an old decision about Roko's Basilisk sections, make sure nobody thinks you meant to revisit Quillette's reliability status. TheDefenseProfessor (talk) 22:12, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

This is a pertinent, well researched, and well written article, but unfortunately it isn't applicable to this talk page save for the fact that it highlights why Wikipedia cannot and will never be a "true" encyclopaedia. WikEdits5 (talk) 07:20, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Curtis Yarvin doesn't have a LW account as far as I can tell

(I am primary admin of LessWrong.com, so like, huge conflict of interest here, but happy to provide any useful evidence I have as admin of the site)

I just saw someone add a "Notable Users" section which includes Curtis Yarvin. I think he doesn't have a LW account (at least I can't find any account that's obviously associated with him). The linked reference also seems to not back up that he has a LW account.

To be clear, I am not confident he never had an account (there are like 100k+ users on LW), but I've never seen a comment from him on the site, and I think he has never registered an account. If someone has a link to an account of his, that would be useful, but I think that section is currently inaccurate (I do know of accounts for everyone else listed in that section, though including Roko is IMO a bit weird given that Roko's basilisk already has its own section). Habryka (talk) 00:19, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

I removed Yarvin. The citation and nowhere else in the book seems to mention him being a user of LessWrong, but just that Scott Alexander (miswritten as "Alexander Scott") and Eliezer Yudkowsky rejected his ideology. Gbear605 (talk) 00:26, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

On reflection, I don't think the list is a good idea overall. Mere bullet points inevitably conflate people with different roles and levels of involvement, and we'd need reliable, independent, secondary sourcing to indicate who actually ought to be listed. And if we had documentation indicating that listing a person is warranted, we should just write about their activities in prose instead. XOR'easter (talk) 14:11, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

I added a proposal for a revised version of the "Notable users" section, hoping to address the above issues (in particular converting it to prose, as suggested). It now includes external sources for all LessWrong users mentioned. For Scott Alexander his early importance in the community is established in a section of a book in the Springer "Frontiers Collection" (I could include a direct quote if this is helpful). A list of other notable users, whose posts were selected for two published essay collections by community review, has been added. Apart from references to these essay collections themselves, I also include a book review by William Gasarch in the ACM SIGACT News specifically mentioning the authors included in this section. Note: I don't have extensive experience editing wikipedia, but I hope that I adhered to all relevant rules and conventions. I would be very happy for any feedback how to improve this contribution! Jojo39~dewiki (talk) 11:45, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

It looks like the relevant section was removed, but for posterity- I did some OR and found exactly one comment by a "Mencius Moldbug". Given the timeline I think the comment was made on Overcoming Bias, and later on when LessWrong was started it was imported along with other replies to Yudkowsky's "Sequences" posts. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/mencius_moldbug TheDefenseProfessor (talk) 22:26, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

I used to post on LW a decade or so ago, and remember being surprised to see what seemed to be a Moldbug and/or Yarvin account with only one small comment; maybe it was that one (I remember something shorter and linking to his own website, but I might be mistaken), but I don't remember any contribution beyond that.

I Also found this post that is asking for feedback on an article written from someone else, and the mention of Yarvin gets pushback from a commenter:

>> Curtis Yarvin, who had played a significant role in the early days of LessWrong

> That would be news to me and I have been around LessWrong for a long time.

... I think the journalist got that (wrong) impression from this very same Wikipedia article (Citogenesis anyone?).

So I think that this

> The comment section of Overcoming Bias attracted prominent neoreactionaries such as Curtis Yarvin (pen name Mencius Moldbug)

... is, while not *technically* false (yes, yes, he posted one comment), refers to such a tiny contribution that leading with that is misleading, especially since it's about pre-LessWrong OvercomingBias.

Anybody see a reason why that sentence is worth keeping? Flammifer (talk) 11:19, 24 July 2024 (UTC)