Seems to confirm Elon Musk is evil, no? Especially when considered along with his political "antics" and behaviors? Gaslighting at this scale is unconscionable.
people on the autism spectrum are amazingly good at what they're good at and spectacularly bad at what they're bad at. I wish Musk would just stick to what he's good at like SpaceX and Tesla etc.
Interesting that a neutral submission for the launch of and direct link to Grokipedia was just flagged [1] while this highly sensationalized news article goes up after
I'm working on building a social media site that wants to improve on moderation and I've found the case of the Grokipedia curious. So I'd love to get in touch with your but didn't find any details in your bio. Please reach out to me and let's do a user interview (can be via email too). My contacts are in my bio
The gap widens. If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point? You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument. I think I would just stop relying. Most people would. It's not a new problem, but that wall keeps growing.
> You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument.
Your powerlessness, their invincibility, is part of their propaganda. It's like the reason people act angrily - they are trying to discourage you from approaching them.
Argument doesn't work. You'll be surprised what sincere, genuine, empathetic reasoning does. I find it works pretty well. Take them seriously, have genuine empathy, don't get inflamed - that's the intent of their leaders' inflammatory language: they want you inflamed, to drive a wedge between you and your friend.
2018 has a lovely progression of articles 'are we living in ___&'s world now', that went from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to finally Philip K Dick (PKD).
And Henry Farrell nailed it with the PKD article. Dick was obsessed with fake humans, with reality being taken over by all manner of camouflaged invader or alternate reality weirdo coming in and co-opting our reality away from us. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/henry-farrell-philip-k...
It's a glorious article. And it's totally the sicko shit happening right here. Grokipedia will almost certainly never hold itself to any real standards, will source (if they source at all) the most absurd ridiculous reality window shopped bottom of the barrel garbage, from horrendous sources. Stealing Wikipedia then probably using AI to rewrite a quarter of it to some bias seems absurdly likely.
"Reality shopping on the internet" has become such a major major effort. And Grokipedia is striving to become exactly such an appealing reality, a bespoke weird racist meanspirited place that confirms the invading forces reality against can do human spirit and hope and inclusion and possibility.
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans does so much to capture what is alas so much defining aspects of our time: the slide away from consensual believable reality and into the rabbit hole weirdness and conspiracy theory universes. That the Internet has unchained, taken what would be normal humans & turned them into fakes. This struggle is going to keep going. I wish these fakers all the failure and dejectedment their window shopped view of the world that their fake human perspective here deserves; I hope this infodump is burned down in the future by people happy to see this absurd farce against reality put to an end.
This reminds me of a joke website I pondered making a few years ago 'provemeright.com'. If you are in a bar and you make an outrageous claim and don't want to back down, provemeright.com has your back! Give us 10 min and we will edit wikipedia and create a website with your 'fact' on it!... It was a funny joke when it wasn't real.
You've just reminded me of when I made up a slang term - "Clifton Sausage" - and almost persuaded a somewhat gullible friend of mine that it existed. I then went onto Urban Dictionary and got it added so that I could fully persuade him.
The sentiment behind your comment has merit, but the content and style are inflammatory and count as flamebait, which is why the comment has been flagged and killed.
HN intended purpose is curious conversation, and phrases like this are not consistent with that ideal:
> I'd challenge someone to provide
> It's disturbing how indoctrinated in ... thought
> if you think ... you are truly indoctrinated
Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
It's not just Musk, of course; many people in his political realm do the same. You misunderstand what they're doing, which is why they're so successful and 'get away with it' endlessly. It looks like something you expect, but you're losing the game because you aren't even aware you're on the field playing. You'll notice their followers laugh about 'owning' you - what do they mean?
To the (neo-reactionaries), words are weapons and not conveyers of information. Extreme statements are, in many cases, better weapons than accurate ones, certainly better than moderate ones - they sieze the initiative, put the speaker on offense, put their opponent on their heels because the words are so unexpected and aggressive.
To people who think the words convey information, the words and behavior make no sense. You think you're having a political debate, but they are fighting a war to destroy you. It's like you listening to their signal, trying to decode what makes no sense, when they are really trying to electrocute you.
In a sense I don't fault people for not grokking that (ha ha) but I do fault them for seeing something is wrong, for all these years, and not making the intellectual effort to figure it out. It seems like almost nobody, national and world leaders and leading intellectuals included, has figured it out.
>> This is the construction of a reality production cartel that creates a parallel information ecosystem designed to codify a deeply partisan, far-right worldview as objective fact.
Perhaps if Wikipedia hadn't drifted so far left (on culture war topics, it's fine for science etc), then maybe it wouldn't have been necessary.
Arguably the purpose of this site isn't to serve the public or to compile knowledge (it's not user editable at all from what I can see).
The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.
I got the impression Grokipedia (what a lousy name, BTW; there's not a teenage rock band that would call itself that) has been trained on Wikipedia. I compared the entries for "Gallium Arsenide", and Grok's first sections is a copy of Wikipedia, with a an editor-like comment on top:
Gallium arsenide
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify (what is Y N ?)
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, infrared light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, solar cells and optical windows.[6] GaAs is often used as a substrate material for the epitaxial growth of other III-V semiconductors, including indium gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide and others.
'Coup Against Reality Itself' seems a bit of an over reaction to Musk's attempt to do a slightly less woke version of Wikipedia. If you try reading it, it's not terrible. It waffles on a bit in the usual LLM fashion.
winners write history, and Elon is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to put himself at the forefront, even if it means sacrificing humanity future.
It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.
Some interesting comparisons I found between Wikipedia and grok. These are the intro paragraphs.
Grokipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where Biden's son, Robert Hunter Biden, served as a board member receiving substantial compensation since May 2014.[1][2] Shokin, whose office had pursued corruption charges against Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky—including probes into illicit asset acquisition and bribery—publicly stated that his removal derailed these efforts, coinciding with Hunter Biden's role amid the company's efforts to mitigate regulatory pressures.[2][3]
Wikipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.[1] As part of efforts by Donald Trump[2] and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.[3]
Grokipedia:
Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure.[1] The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact.[2] This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
Wikipedia:
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[a] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[b]
Please don't introduce flamebait like this on HN. Context about the author's background can be helpful, but "spreading hate", along with the whole tone of the comment, is inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we're trying to avoid here.
Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.
If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.
I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
I just read the Wikipedia page, and it does not seem to fit your analysis. They present the origin on the term, what it means, and then disclose that a consensus among scholars is to reject the term nowadays. They disclose also that some recent scholars have found it appropriate and cite one of them.
On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??
On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.
>its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
Correct, that's exactly what I want from encyclopedia, the current academic consensus on a topic. Digging deeper on a topic requires moving to other sources, like books and specialized literature.
> The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be an academic journal where all sorts of competing views are put forth and debated.
I do not go to wikipedia to learn the 15 different alternative theories about [subject], I want to learn what the prevailing scientific consensus is.
Will that consensus sometimes be wrong? Undoubtedly. It's nearly guaranteed to happen at some point.
That doesn't mean a system that records the current consensus is wrong in any way.
This is how the article on Earth handles flat earth/geocentrism:
> Scientific investigation has resulted in several culturally transformative shifts in people's view of the planet. Initial belief in a flat Earth was gradually displaced in Ancient Greece by the idea of a spherical Earth, which was attributed to both the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides.[288][289] Earth was generally believed to be the center of the universe until the 16th century, when scientists first concluded that it was a moving object, one of the planets of the Solar System.[290]
We don't need to repeat 100 of years of arguments and attempts at science that were ultimately incorrect, we can just note that at one point the consensus was different and go on talking about what the current one is.
> The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
We can measure all sorts of things (with varying degree of accuracies) about "society" and then choose a specific set of "good ones" and "bad ones" but who gets to make those choices? And what specific geographic region are we measuring them?
If average literacy goes down in rome but up in paris, what does that prove? Is one darker than the other?
The term Dark Ages was invented solely to make the renaissance people feel special. It only exists as a term of disparagement to compare against the supposedly better time period. It's not some kind of objective term that people came up with after studying the times and places involved.
Like, as a general thing, it's useful to have words that refer to periods of time that other people understand. Saying "the middle ages" or "the classical age" is pretty vague but at least it more or less communicates something useful to most people. If we really want to call a period of time "the dark ages" and everyone agrees that this is the standard nomenclature, this isn't the worst thing in the world.
But "dark ages" is intended to be a very prejudicial term that is way less factual than its name would imply.
>This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia aims for a neutral point of view, but it falls short due to systemic bias caused by the narrow demographics of its editing community. This bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.
Wikipedia admits it's systemic bias. You cant admit there's a problem of bias for years and do nothing about it. It's going to spawn alternatives that attempt to fix the bias.
Yesterday I showed Acupuncture's article on Grokipedia was significantly superior, shockingly better than wikipedia.
I can show an example of where Grokipedia is worse:
Wikipedia is superior. Grokipedia's fail in my mind comes with the wording of: "Militants engaged in cold-blooded killing of entire households"
Which while factually correct, it's the wrong way to say it for neutrality. But it's not like Grokipedia was ever pushing some sort of "unreality" on the subject.
41 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
I'm working on building a social media site that wants to improve on moderation and I've found the case of the Grokipedia curious. So I'd love to get in touch with your but didn't find any details in your bio. Please reach out to me and let's do a user interview (can be via email too). My contacts are in my bio
Your powerlessness, their invincibility, is part of their propaganda. It's like the reason people act angrily - they are trying to discourage you from approaching them.
Argument doesn't work. You'll be surprised what sincere, genuine, empathetic reasoning does. I find it works pretty well. Take them seriously, have genuine empathy, don't get inflamed - that's the intent of their leaders' inflammatory language: they want you inflamed, to drive a wedge between you and your friend.
And Henry Farrell nailed it with the PKD article. Dick was obsessed with fake humans, with reality being taken over by all manner of camouflaged invader or alternate reality weirdo coming in and co-opting our reality away from us. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/henry-farrell-philip-k...
It's a glorious article. And it's totally the sicko shit happening right here. Grokipedia will almost certainly never hold itself to any real standards, will source (if they source at all) the most absurd ridiculous reality window shopped bottom of the barrel garbage, from horrendous sources. Stealing Wikipedia then probably using AI to rewrite a quarter of it to some bias seems absurdly likely.
"Reality shopping on the internet" has become such a major major effort. And Grokipedia is striving to become exactly such an appealing reality, a bespoke weird racist meanspirited place that confirms the invading forces reality against can do human spirit and hope and inclusion and possibility.
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans does so much to capture what is alas so much defining aspects of our time: the slide away from consensual believable reality and into the rabbit hole weirdness and conspiracy theory universes. That the Internet has unchained, taken what would be normal humans & turned them into fakes. This struggle is going to keep going. I wish these fakers all the failure and dejectedment their window shopped view of the world that their fake human perspective here deserves; I hope this infodump is burned down in the future by people happy to see this absurd farce against reality put to an end.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clifton%20sa...
[0] https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/fan-edits-wikipedia-page-t...
HN intended purpose is curious conversation, and phrases like this are not consistent with that ideal:
> I'd challenge someone to provide
> It's disturbing how indoctrinated in ... thought
> if you think ... you are truly indoctrinated
Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To the (neo-reactionaries), words are weapons and not conveyers of information. Extreme statements are, in many cases, better weapons than accurate ones, certainly better than moderate ones - they sieze the initiative, put the speaker on offense, put their opponent on their heels because the words are so unexpected and aggressive.
To people who think the words convey information, the words and behavior make no sense. You think you're having a political debate, but they are fighting a war to destroy you. It's like you listening to their signal, trying to decode what makes no sense, when they are really trying to electrocute you.
In a sense I don't fault people for not grokking that (ha ha) but I do fault them for seeing something is wrong, for all these years, and not making the intellectual effort to figure it out. It seems like almost nobody, national and world leaders and leading intellectuals included, has figured it out.
Perhaps if Wikipedia hadn't drifted so far left (on culture war topics, it's fine for science etc), then maybe it wouldn't have been necessary.
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.
Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.
There's some HN discussion of it here which got flagged for some reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.
Grokipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where Biden's son, Robert Hunter Biden, served as a board member receiving substantial compensation since May 2014.[1][2] Shokin, whose office had pursued corruption charges against Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky—including probes into illicit asset acquisition and bribery—publicly stated that his removal derailed these efforts, coinciding with Hunter Biden's role amid the company's efforts to mitigate regulatory pressures.[2][3]
Wikipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.[1] As part of efforts by Donald Trump[2] and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.[3]
Grokipedia:
Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure.[1] The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact.[2] This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
Wikipedia:
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[a] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[b]
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.
If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.
I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??
On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.
Correct, that's exactly what I want from encyclopedia, the current academic consensus on a topic. Digging deeper on a topic requires moving to other sources, like books and specialized literature.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be an academic journal where all sorts of competing views are put forth and debated.
I do not go to wikipedia to learn the 15 different alternative theories about [subject], I want to learn what the prevailing scientific consensus is.
Will that consensus sometimes be wrong? Undoubtedly. It's nearly guaranteed to happen at some point.
That doesn't mean a system that records the current consensus is wrong in any way.
This is how the article on Earth handles flat earth/geocentrism:
> Scientific investigation has resulted in several culturally transformative shifts in people's view of the planet. Initial belief in a flat Earth was gradually displaced in Ancient Greece by the idea of a spherical Earth, which was attributed to both the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides.[288][289] Earth was generally believed to be the center of the universe until the 16th century, when scientists first concluded that it was a moving object, one of the planets of the Solar System.[290]
We don't need to repeat 100 of years of arguments and attempts at science that were ultimately incorrect, we can just note that at one point the consensus was different and go on talking about what the current one is.
> The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
We can measure all sorts of things (with varying degree of accuracies) about "society" and then choose a specific set of "good ones" and "bad ones" but who gets to make those choices? And what specific geographic region are we measuring them?
If average literacy goes down in rome but up in paris, what does that prove? Is one darker than the other?
The term Dark Ages was invented solely to make the renaissance people feel special. It only exists as a term of disparagement to compare against the supposedly better time period. It's not some kind of objective term that people came up with after studying the times and places involved.
Like, as a general thing, it's useful to have words that refer to periods of time that other people understand. Saying "the middle ages" or "the classical age" is pretty vague but at least it more or less communicates something useful to most people. If we really want to call a period of time "the dark ages" and everyone agrees that this is the standard nomenclature, this isn't the worst thing in the world.
But "dark ages" is intended to be a very prejudicial term that is way less factual than its name would imply.
>This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia aims for a neutral point of view, but it falls short due to systemic bias caused by the narrow demographics of its editing community. This bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.
Wikipedia admits it's systemic bias. You cant admit there's a problem of bias for years and do nothing about it. It's going to spawn alternatives that attempt to fix the bias.
Yesterday I showed Acupuncture's article on Grokipedia was significantly superior, shockingly better than wikipedia.
I can show an example of where Grokipedia is worse:
https://grokipedia.com/page/Kfar_Aza_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Aza_massacre
Wikipedia is superior. Grokipedia's fail in my mind comes with the wording of: "Militants engaged in cold-blooded killing of entire households"
Which while factually correct, it's the wrong way to say it for neutrality. But it's not like Grokipedia was ever pushing some sort of "unreality" on the subject.
https://www.trackingai.org/political-test
Grok is left-wing aligned. The allegation that Grok is somehow far-right and pushing false narratives doesnt stand up.