Elon Musk's Grokipedia, developed by his company xAI, went live on Monday after months of MAGA railing against the popular internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia. But a new report points out that Musk's version of Wikipedia appears to be "cribbing" information from the original version. Musk promised to ...
Trying to sow confusion amongst sources of truth. It fails again and again.
There is already the Conservapedia doing the same thing. It allows YouTube and Twitter as sources. I once saw a sentence like “liberals believe _______” and the source was a tweet with like 40 likes.
Again, that’s the point. That’s their angle. Dilute everything so you can’t tell what is factually accurate, and then you have kids reading this dumb shit and assuming it is true.
Years ago I saw a page on that site about irrational numbers that was pure comedy. Basically they begrudgingly admit that irrational numbers might actually exist (whatever that means for numbers), but heavily implied that it’s a liberal plot of some kind stemming from moral relativism or whatever. Just insane ramblings.
There are people out there fighting an insane uphill battle against not just the usual things you hear about - the young earth creationist denialism, the old earth creationist denialism, the moon landing denialists, the vaccine denialists, the moon landing denialists, the Holocaust deniers, and the spherical Earth denialists, there are also people doing whole podcasts where they try to deny things like quantum physics for similar ideological reasons…
Jan Irvin was this guy that seemed to kind of be out there on the fringe writing and talking about some rather fringe ideas related to the way in which xtianity began and interested in psychedelics, maybe somewhere on the left as far as ideology. Then, somewhere along the way, he seems to have done a turn [1], similar to the one Naomi Wolf did. Now he seems very much right-wing aligned, and at some point started cranking out lots of content about how Burning Man is some nexus of a deep state plot. Anyway, I seem to remember him cranking out lots of content railing against quantum physics, too.
Usually quantum physics serves as a crank magnet for all kinds of generally leftist kookery, but Jan seems to want to reject it outright for similar reasons that you talk about above with irrational numbers.
[1] One thing about the conspiracy theorists I’ve noticed is that they all tend to have similar character traits, mostly antisocial ones. They may align, for a time, with another conspiracy theorist, put out content together etc, but then, something or other happens, and they basically break up. And then they often won’t even mention persona non grata…and then they find a new set of boyfriends, and soon the cycle repeats. Jan seemingly had some kind of mental break and radical life changes (?) so his positions went very red pill. If Jan is still out there doing content, I don’t know if he’s still doing similar content or even running with the same crew.
Usually quantum physics serves as a crank magnet for all kinds of generally leftist kookery, but Jan seems to want to reject it outright for similar reasons that you talk about above with irrational numbers.
I know this isn’t your point, but the non-political way to express a similar rejection of quantum theory was literally just Einstein saying “god does not play dice”, which he famously retracted.
Indeed, I think a lot of people probably have a similar reaction.
In Jan’s case it seems his view is that it opens the door to things like “moral relativism” and so the spectre of “Cultural Marxism” and the related accusations of this being some sort of plot soon follow…
I found it interesting since evolution deniers do similar things when it comes to Bio 101 - they think that Darwin is making the world more “secular”, as they define that term. Meaning, they think that scientific facts influence culture in some nefarious way. They may be right that facts will influence culture in certain ways, but they arrive at the conclusion that it’s been orchestrated by some big “They” to force some cultural outcome, and assume it also must be false.
There is already the Conservapedia doing the same thing. […]
Interestingly, the site is timing out for me right now [1], but I’ve been able to find some interesting archived information: for example, they have a page titled “Conservapedia:How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia”[2]. To say the least, I take issue with some of their rationale.
It’s gotten to the point where now if someone links to YouTube, I’ll think they’re more likely to be wrong than if they just asserted it with no link. Because if it was true, it would probably have a better source.
There is already the Conservapedia doing the same thing. It allows YouTube and Twitter as sources. I once saw a sentence like “liberals believe _______” and the source was a tweet with like 40 likes.
Again, that’s the point. That’s their angle. Dilute everything so you can’t tell what is factually accurate, and then you have kids reading this dumb shit and assuming it is true.
Years ago I saw a page on that site about irrational numbers that was pure comedy. Basically they begrudgingly admit that irrational numbers might actually exist (whatever that means for numbers), but heavily implied that it’s a liberal plot of some kind stemming from moral relativism or whatever. Just insane ramblings.
There are people out there fighting an insane uphill battle against not just the usual things you hear about - the young earth creationist denialism, the old earth creationist denialism, the moon landing denialists, the vaccine denialists, the moon landing denialists, the Holocaust deniers, and the spherical Earth denialists, there are also people doing whole podcasts where they try to deny things like quantum physics for similar ideological reasons…
Jan Irvin was this guy that seemed to kind of be out there on the fringe writing and talking about some rather fringe ideas related to the way in which xtianity began and interested in psychedelics, maybe somewhere on the left as far as ideology. Then, somewhere along the way, he seems to have done a turn [1], similar to the one Naomi Wolf did. Now he seems very much right-wing aligned, and at some point started cranking out lots of content about how Burning Man is some nexus of a deep state plot. Anyway, I seem to remember him cranking out lots of content railing against quantum physics, too.
Usually quantum physics serves as a crank magnet for all kinds of generally leftist kookery, but Jan seems to want to reject it outright for similar reasons that you talk about above with irrational numbers.
[1] One thing about the conspiracy theorists I’ve noticed is that they all tend to have similar character traits, mostly antisocial ones. They may align, for a time, with another conspiracy theorist, put out content together etc, but then, something or other happens, and they basically break up. And then they often won’t even mention persona non grata…and then they find a new set of boyfriends, and soon the cycle repeats. Jan seemingly had some kind of mental break and radical life changes (?) so his positions went very red pill. If Jan is still out there doing content, I don’t know if he’s still doing similar content or even running with the same crew.
I know this isn’t your point, but the non-political way to express a similar rejection of quantum theory was literally just Einstein saying “god does not play dice”, which he famously retracted.
Indeed, I think a lot of people probably have a similar reaction.
In Jan’s case it seems his view is that it opens the door to things like “moral relativism” and so the spectre of “Cultural Marxism” and the related accusations of this being some sort of plot soon follow…
I found it interesting since evolution deniers do similar things when it comes to Bio 101 - they think that Darwin is making the world more “secular”, as they define that term. Meaning, they think that scientific facts influence culture in some nefarious way. They may be right that facts will influence culture in certain ways, but they arrive at the conclusion that it’s been orchestrated by some big “They” to force some cultural outcome, and assume it also must be false.
Interestingly, the site is timing out for me right now [1], but I’ve been able to find some interesting archived information: for example, they have a page titled “Conservapedia:How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia” [2]. To say the least, I take issue with some of their rationale.
References
It’s gotten to the point where now if someone links to YouTube, I’ll think they’re more likely to be wrong than if they just asserted it with no link. Because if it was true, it would probably have a better source.