Can I just remind people what Facebook the company is responsible for? And I'm not talking about Myanmar and so on and so forth and I'm not talking about them as a VR entity. People miss posts all the time because the algorithm won't show it to them, even from close friends. People had accumulated "Other" inbox messages for years, that they were never told about. And so on. "Helping the world global happiness" was never a priority
> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks
Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering
They already attacked it with everything they've got lmao
As in, in 2012. They outright replaced people's email addresses in their profile (makes it harder to reach people outside the walled garden, makes it harder to transfer your credentials to a competing service) and I've heard Google+ links got blocked
Zuckerberg is many things, not everything he's accused of (Trump/Cambridge Analytica) might be entirely accurate but he is at least partly a bit of a scumbag
There are some people who think they can beat the system by treating apps like Telegram and Discord as free cloud storage, and they certainly get banned to save storage space.
As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)
Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with
Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?
How about Gabrowski et al.: "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", about the outsize influence of certain coordinated Polish editors on the Wikipedia articles about Poland and the Holocaust?
> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.
For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:
> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.
If the debate here is that sustained ethno-political campaigns are slightly shifting Wikipedia over time in a way that requires an academic paper to detect...
I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".
As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.
And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
My point is more that the history of those pages is a good example of how Wikipedia works for controversial topics; it's not really a process of becoming more correct as better sources are found and argued about like it is on more neutral pages, instead it's an in group deciding what to represent, collecting their preferred opinion pieces. And this changes over time, getting no closer to neutrality within the same articles history.
You can write an equivalent article starting with "Gamergate was a movement reacting to the improper collusion between game developers and journalists" and find just as many sources, but the current article wants to promote the idea that it was a harrassment campaign first.
It was also pretty credibly a psyop orchestrated by Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s probably better served in history books and biographies rather than an encyclopedia.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
Grokipedia's:
> 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. 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. 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.
I don't care about "Gamergate" and never use Grokipedia, but Wiki definitely has a stronger slant: it's as if an article about Black Lives Matter started with a statement that it was a campaign meant to scam people to pay for mansions for leadership.
Wikipedia's assessment is more accurate. Wikipedia does go on in its second paragraph to explain the context of the start of the campaign, including "The Zoe Post" and the accusations of conflict of interest. But the broader impact of Gamergate was as a misogynistic online harassment campaign, and Wikipedia is correct to make that the central part of its summary. Just because Grokipedia is more reluctant to state a conclusion does not make it less biased.
As somebody who supported GG for the first month or so, Wikipedia has the better intro from where things stand in 2026. GG started by piggybacking on general distrust of gaming journalists, but was quickly consumed by misogyny.
An article doesn't avoid bias by avoiding unpleasant facts.
Well, I'm naively assuming Grokipedia is being sympathetic to the cause(?) of Gamergate, but if the best thing they could lead the article was essentially "It all started when someone got mad at his ex-girlfriend and her many other boyfriends and wrote something that went viral" ...
... it does sound like an online harassment campaign.
It was. In hindsight it signaled the beginning of the mass weaponization of the internet via social media. It also was NOT grassroots lol. It was very specifically and intentionally enflamed and groomed and funded by people like Steve Bannon and his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein. It wouldn’t have such a big Wikipedia article without them.
I haven't read wikipedia in a long time so I can't answer your question, I am just pointing out that just saying "the facts are correct" is not enough to say there is no bias on wikipedia
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was methodologically flawed. “Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements.”
Reframed, the study seemed to find (a) black kids are adopted less readily and (b) the longer a kid spends in the foster system, the lower their IQ at 17. (There is also limited controlling for epigenetic factors because we didn’t understand those well in the 1970s and 80s.)
Based on how new human cognition is, and genetically similar human races are, it would be somewhat groundbreaking to find an emergent complex trait like IQ to map to social constructs like race, particularly ones as broad as American white and black. (There is more genetic diversity in single African tribes than in some small European countries. And American whites and blacks are all complex hybridized social categories.)
And: it remains perfectly OK to study racial differences in IQ. It's an actively studied topic. In fact, it's studied by at least three major scientific fields (quantitative psychology, behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics). The idea that you can't is a cringe online racist canard borne out of the fact that the studies aren't coming out the way they want them to.
Does it now? Noah Carl would disagree. He was a researcher at Cambridge University that was dismissed after an open letter signed by over 1,400 academics and students accusing him of "racist pseudoscience" for merely arguing that race-IQ research should not be off-limits.
James Flynn (of the Flynn effect) has also publicly stated that grants for research clarifying genetic vs. environmental causes of IQ gaps weren't approved because of university fears of public furor.
You're trying to axiomatically win an argument that is already settled empirically. It won't work. You can just read the papers. My point being: the papers exist, and more are published every year. Once you acknowledge that, your argument is dead. Literally no matter what the papers say. Don't make dumb arguments.
Noah Carl has a sociology doctorate. He doesn't work in the fields that study this; he just tries to launder his way into them.
It seems like the root of your statement is with the existence of "race" as a purely biological classification. Wikipedia correctly notes the consensus position that race is a social construct [0] that's difficult to use accurately when discussing IQ. Grok makes the implicit and incorrect assumption that genetic factors = race, among other issues.
That's not what your previous post was talking about. But if you insist, at least make your point clear. "African Americans" and "Africans" are wildly different genetic populations that get subsumed under the same "Black" racial category in the US. Which one were you talking about?
The latter is more genetically diverse than any other human population by an incredible margin. Making generalized statements about them is impossible (including this one). As for African American populations, ancestry estimates of how closely related they are to African populations vary massively for each individual. Many people are much closer to "white" populations than any African population, due to the history of African Americans in North America. If you really mean race as a geographic proxy, the "black" label is simply confusing what you actually mean.
I understand your point (although I find the babybathwater-ing to be tiring), and I didn't mean to be drawn into a debate about this. But that was entirely the point - that there's a debate. Wikipedia would have you believe that there isn't.
For what it's worth, I'm mixed as hell. European, Asian, Jewish, north african, and native american. I look white, though - and I am, in fact, majority European ancestry. Therefore in most studies (of anything race related), I would presumably be lumped in with white people. It's not a perfect "measure," but it's still the easiest proxy for geographic location of our ancestors that we have and on a population level it works just fine for studies.
I'm not arguing anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is biased.
Though I will say it's beyond argument that geographic ancestry has an effect on IQ on a statistical group level (the reasons for this are what's debated), and that IQ is the best measurement of G that we have.
I'm a bit confused then. You said that you're "not arguing anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is biased" but then also argue that Wikipedia is also inaccurate after someone points out that "so-and-so is biased" is a meaningless phrase. This reads like a shift of the goal posts and it discredits your arguments.
Regardless, one can see this claim of inaccuracy repeated in these comments with no provided example of such. The saying goes "what is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". It is therefore reasonable for a reader to conclude that the claim of inaccuracy can be dismissed as "bullshit", in the sense that the person making it cares not for its veracity.
Okay but you need to… actually present these arguments. Right now you’re stating your position and then affirming it as fact and expecting everyone to trust you.
I already gave you two large meta-analyses and more on the first point along with a and as far as the second goes in the field of psychology that's as established as 2+2=4 is in the math world. If you really want to research that yourself go ahead; I don't feel like I should need to waste my time.
I asked ChatGPT on whether or not it was the "scientific consensus."
"Anonymous surveys of intelligence experts reveal division: a 2016 survey found that about 49% attributed 50% or more of the Black-White gap to genetics, while over 80% attributed at least 20%; an earlier 1980s survey showed similar splits. These views are more common in private or anonymous contexts, contrasting with public statements from bodies like the APA that find no support for genetic explanations."
Hm, sure seems like Wikipedia should probably have a more balanced, nuanced discussion considering the experts are split at least 50/50.
The "scientific consensus" the parent comment mentioned is referring to published studies, with data to back up their conclusions. The numbers you are citing seem to be from an opinion poll. Where did any of the 49% surveyed get the idea that "50% or more of the Black-White gap" can be "attributed" to genetics? What is their methodology for the attribution?
Bringing up an opinion poll as a counterpoint makes it read like you're arguing that Wikipedia should focus less on fact and more on opinion. Of course, you're free to think what you wish, but I suspect that's where most disagree.
We don't really have "intelligence genes" mapped out, if they exist. Therefore, something like this, from Wikipedia: "Genetics do not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial or ethnic groups" is effectively a lie.
Genetics certainly don't explain all the differences in IQ. They very well might not explain the majority of the the difference. However, considering we know that intelligence is quite heritable along with various adoption and twin studies that have happened throughout the decades (along with simple freaking logic), we have a pretty good idea that it explains at least some of the difference. That "opinion poll," while not super-great because only some elected to reply, was a poll of experts in the fields that study this stuff, not random people.
A real unbiased article would mention that (and perhaps whatever counterarguments there are), not straight up do the encyclopedia equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "nah uh I can't hear you."
>This is an essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.
>As you can see, Wikipedia is very dismissive to the point of effectively lying.
Did I miss where you presented evidence that wikipedia is wrong? You seem to be taking an assumption you carry (race is related to IQ) and assuming everyone believes it's true as well, thus wikipedia is lying.
There have been many, many studies that show that "race" is related to IQ. A true, unbiased article would show that as well as any well-founded criticisms of it.
Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer, F. S., & Tyler, P. (2001). Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 54(2), 297–330.
Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11(2), 235–294.
Neisser, U., et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. (APA Task Force report). American Psychologist, 51(2), 77–101.
Anyone familiar with Wikipedia etiquette knows how to find the answer to this question. Rather than getting into an argument here about a subject there, I'd prefer you familiarize yourself with the norms of that community, and if you already have or are experienced with them, then you know where to discuss the subject guided by those norms.
My experience is that we end up debating the norms because this forum has different views than Wikipedia itself. That’s interesting to some but not to me so I’m opting out.
In addition, the answer to the question is already available so I want any question asker to put in a little bit of effort and if they’re not going to do that then I’m not really interested in talking to them since I prefer peer interactions to tutorials.
I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?
Because not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative.
Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.
I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically".
edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.
Wikipedia is fine for uncontroversial facts. The obscure ones can have individual mistakes but it's generally correct.
For controversial topics, it's an eternal battle between factions of "volunteers" trying to present their view of a conflict. The articles reflect which side has the best organized influencer operations. Factual truth may or may not shine through, but as a side effect, not a result of the governing process.
Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
I wildly disagree with the critique based on the wealth of the top executive. I care about the truth and quality of the articles.
>Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
If Grok is trained on a corpus of information written by humans trying to influence other humans, and it has no ability to perform its own original investigation in the real world, then how can it be anything but the product of influence?
Maybe ask a Ukrainian soldier which they prefer (modern armor is often made of depleted uranium). Environment shapes such preferences far more than personality.
> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?
Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).
Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"
So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.
We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)
- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.
- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
- Summaries will often be superfluous.
- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)
- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.
- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.
As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
>LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results.
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.
That's not at all been my experience. My experience has been one of constant amazement (and still surprise) when it catches nuances in behavior from just reading the code.
I'm sure there are many variables across our experiences. But I know I'm not imagining what I'm seeing, so I'm bullish on the idea of an AI-curated encyclopedia, whether Elon Musk is involved or not.
No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.
edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
Elon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...
I don't use IG although they dearly want me to, giving me a popup every time I visit, but let me talk about FB for a second (and btw FB wanted to enable cross-platform messaging on the platforms they own - Meta - which seems anti-trust-y) - when they introduced encryption on FB, they made it mandatory. They opted everyone in, and it broke Messenger. If you delete cookies you might also delete messages. Isn't that convenient?
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
reply