Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Apaugasma (talk | contribs) at 15:07, 19 January 2022 (→New essay: User:Apaugasma/No. We are not biased.: learned a new expression today: appeal to the stone). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This is a Misplaced Pages user talk page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Misplaced Pages, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user in whose space this page is located may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Misplaced Pages. The original talk page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon/Yes._We_are_biased..

This page in a nutshell: Saying that "Misplaced Pages is biased" or that "Misplaced Pages fails to follow its own neutral point of view rules" is not a set of magic words that will cause Misplaced Pages to accept your favorite conspiracy theory, urban myth, pseudoscience, alternative medicine or fringe theory.

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The purpose of this essay

I wrote this essay to be a teaching tool for those who believe pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, urban myths, and other things which are not supported by any actual evidence.

For example, the reader may be someone who is a True Believer in magnetic water treatment and who strongly objects to the "bias" in our article on that topic. The same reader is likely to not be a True Believer in laundry balls or phrenology. My hope is that the reader, by seeing all these other pseudoscientific areas where Misplaced Pages is "biased" right next to his pet fringe theory, will come to an understanding of why it is that Misplaced Pages is "biased" against fringe theories in general.

Of course we know that in many cases this list will fail in that goal, because no argument will convince the fringe theorist. In such cases the secondary goal kicks in. This list also helps those who are responding to accusations of bias. All you have to do is to simply cut and paste the list into a talk page discussion with an edit summary of "Yes. We ARE biased." No need for attribution -- I released it under CC0 specifically so that you can use it as if it was your own. This cutting and pasting has been shown to take the wind out of the sails of many fringe theorists who think that they have found the magic words ("Bias!") that will magically cause Misplaced Pages to start promoting things that are not true. In general, cutting and pasting the list is more effective than linking to it, because promoters of pseudoscience have trained themselves to ignore the usual links to WP:V, WP:RS, WP:NPOV, etc. --Guy Macon 19:15, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

"Have been thinking good and long about this essay and Misplaced Pages:Lunatic charlatans, and I'm coming around more to the POV expressed in them... I am a little bit of a bleeding heart for the True Believers™ but in the balance between skepticism and wonder, it does make sense for Misplaced Pages to be biased towards skepticism. That's how it's always been most useful to me. --User:Scarpy 18:30, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

" makes clear to everyone what editing Misplaced Pages is about. So, pseudoscience POV-pushers will be blocked or they will avoid pushing POVs, that choice is entirely theirs. But it makes crystal-clear that they will never prevail here. So, this is about establishing boundaries. Some people are honestly not aware that Misplaced Pages is WP:NOTFREESPEECH." --tgeorgescu 15:59, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

" then let's have a competition: You try to keep more pseudoscience out of articles with your own method, whatever it is." --Hob Gadling 19:28, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

I believe that this entire essay is a conspiracy to keep me chain-reading article after article about interesting malarkey and its empirical refutations. Thanks a lot, Guy. I'll just clear my calendar. Yours from the rabbit hole, Laodah 18:34, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Curses! You have uncovered my Evil Plot! The only thing I can do now is to send you down a deeper rabbit hole. BWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!! Guy Macon (talk) 00:03, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

I think the correct mad-scientist laugh goes more like "MUHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!" --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:57, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

New essay: User:Apaugasma/No. We are not biased.

I wrote a counterpoint to this essay, arguing that we are in fact WP:NOTBIASED, and that claiming that we are is detrimental to the goals of this project. Constructive comments are welcome at its talk page. Editors here might consider adding it to the See also. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:45, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I have added a link to your essay in the see also.

I love the general idea of essays with different points of view. As an example, WP:DTTR and WP:TTR do a good job of showing both the opinions of those who template regulars and the opinions of the precious little snowflakes regulars who get their panties in a wad object when they get a -- usually well-deserved -- template.

Question: most of the entries at WP:YWAB have links to discussions where claims such as those at Talk:Holocaust denial/Archive 12#Blatant bias on this page are made. How would you apply the principles in your essay to that discussion? Your essay says "But what if the user who is being told 'yes, we are biased' was actually pointing out a real and detrimental form of bias in an article? At this point, the quip becomes a weapon in the hands of biased editors to justify their own tendentious editing". It is an observable fact that holocaust deniers claim that holocaust denial is mainstream scholarship and that our article on holocaust denial is based upon fringe and discredited views. Just look at the archives for that particular talk page. Spend some time reading the long discussions. You will find editors making pretty much the same arguments you make in your essay. And they are good arguments. Alas, the arguments are completely ineffective at convincing holocaust deniers that they are wrong, and the arguments are completely ineffective at convincing holocaust deniers to stop complaining about Misplaced Pages's bias. My essay, on the other hand, has been shown to be somewhat effective at convincing at least a percentage of people to stop complaining about Misplaced Pages's bias.

I suggest that you search for places where such claims of bias are posted, respond with a link to your essay, and see how well it works in real life. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 02:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

This essay is a response to claims by holocaust deniers (and others, but for simplicity, I'll just use the term "deniers" here) that Misplaced Pages is "biased". By "Misplaced Pages is biased", those people mean that Misplaced Pages should have the fence-sitting position "some say this, some say that", and does not.

Of course, Misplaced Pages has that non-fence position because reliable sources have it, and Misplaced Pages mirrors those. The essay uses the word "biased" in the same sense the deniers use it: as "not dogmatically fence-sitting", as "not the naive rookie misunderstanding of NPOV". This "bias" is a good thing: it means we are not half-way to Crazy Town.

That is the goal of this essay: as a response to the deniers. It uses their own language in order to better communicate with them.

I think that counterpoint essay is the result of Apaugasma's misunderstanding of how language works. It says the same thing as this one, but with different words, words which are more difficult to understand for the deniers, and therefore less useful.

I will go one step further: it is the brainchild of the idea that any bias is bad and must be avoided, that one should not embrace it in any form, and that scientists actually do avoid it: Scientists follow the science where it leads them. That naive idea is closely related to the dogmatic fence-sitting the deniers use. In reality, scientists are human. They are not half-Vulcans like Mr. Spock, they are not robots, they have their own individual approaches, and that is a good thing. That way, different scientists have different worldviews and different blind spots, and they complement each other. If they all had to be dogmatic agnostics in order to be allowed to do science, that would be detrimental to science. The objectivity of science does not come from any mythical "objectivity" or "unbiasedness" of single scientists - it emerges from the interaction between different scientists who disagree with each other. Pick any great scientist, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, whoever, and you will find they did not start out from "I don't know", as the fence-sitting model would predict. All his life, Einstein was convinced that the random element of quantum mechanics needed to go. QM is stronger because that opponent failed to disprove it.

When all historians end up in the same place because they all have the same bias (no matter if it is real bias, defined the way Apaugasma uses it, or "bias" in the way deniers define it), then Misplaced Pages is also in that place. See WP:TRUTH.

Down with dogmatic agnosticism! --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:28, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: when I write a real and detrimental form of bias, I mean a real and detrimental form of bias. Apart from rhetoric, the supposed 'bias' that holocaust deniers point out is not real nor detrimental, so what I write simply doesn't apply to them. It applies to very different situations, where there is actual editorial bias (i.e., real prejudice, unfairness, lack of proportion). Definitions of reliable sourcing, academic prominence, etc. give us objective ways to find out which bias is real and which is not, despite what people write on talk pages. If we can agree on that, we should be able to agree that we are talking about very different situations.

I'm not sure how effective your essay is at convincing pro-fringe editors that their efforts are futile, but in my view it also has other, negative effects, and my essay deals strictly with this latter kind of effect. I appreciate the effort to discourage pro-fringe editors, but I just don't agree that it's a good idea (and now I'm also partly coming to Hob Gadling's point) to try to do this by adopting their language: this may all be well and good in the limited context of witty repartee (as your essay was originally meant: something to copy-paste into actual discussions), but once such language gets adopted by the wider community, it turns from sarcastic into cynical, and eventually into a kind of newspeak. My essay is essentially aimed to remind editors that the word 'bias' has a certain meaning out there in the real world, and that we cannot hope to continue generalizing the use of that word without importing some of that real meaning into what we're saying.

@Hob Gadling: as a historian of philosophy and science I'm of course very well aware of the fact that real scientists are not by any means unbiased, objective, or without prejudice. It was actually somewhat painful for me to write the stuff about spherical vs flat earth (Eudoxus et al. were in fact very biased in that they regarded the perfect circle as 'superior' to any other figure), but I just saw no way to insert that kind of nuance without making things unnecessarily difficult (I may yet try though). What I mean to say is that scientists qua scientists cannot afford to uphold their personal bias in the face of evidence, and at a certain point must follow it where it leads them. The scientific method, which I roughly summarize, effectively weeds out any prejudice that individual scientists may and do have: if you treat the evidence unfairly, or let simple prejudice prevent you from adjusting your models, you won't get far in science. Of course you build on earlier theories, you often work from a hunch or intuitive understanding, if you're as good as Einstein you may even insist on a hunch throughout your career, but in the end if you're going to want to be successful, you will have to come up with evidence of some kind. And whether the evidence is there or not is simply not very susceptible to bias.

The same thing holds for WP:NPOV: it's a method that sets out (relatively) objective criteria which are meant to eliminate the subjective bias of individual editors. And yes, of course individual WP editors are biased (like individual scientists are), and of course there are various forms of systemic bias that co-determine the outcome of the NPOV procedure (as they co-determine the outcome of scientific procedures: all historians coming up on the same biased end as you mention is a good and very real example), but the whole goal is to filter out editorial bias as much as possible.

'Dogmatic fence-sitting' or 'dogmatic agnosticism' (by which you may mean radical skepticism?) has nothing to do with this. As you yourself note, NPOV means that WP often takes a non-fence position: WP positively affirms many things in wiki-voice. This is not an epistemological position: some may believe that what WP states in this way is objectively true, others that it is justified belief but not necessarily true, others that it is probable but not completely justified, and still others that it is mere opinion. But whatever the epistemological lens through which one views it, what WP says in wiki-voice remains exactly the same. Whatever multiple reliable sources positively affirm, we positively affirm, and it's up to the readers to parse this in their own different ways.

Of course, sometimes reliable sources will not positively affirm what an individual editor firmly believes to be true. Perhaps such an editor will regard other editors who try to follow the sources as 'fence-sitting'. At other times, other editors may well be 'fence-sitting' when the reliable sources are actually quite positive about something. I know I've been on the wrong end of this in both ways, though probably more often in the former way than in the latter. It's only natural really. The important thing is to go look again at the sources, to be conscious of your own potential bias, and to perceive it when you were wrong about what the sources say (to perceive that they do not really say what you believed and/or wanted them to say). I believe that this is much easier to achieve when we clearly recognize that editorial bias, though natural and part of the process, is indeed a bad thing. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:21, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The first think I’ll say is that I have long avoided the term “objectivity” when it comes to the various things I do, such as trying to reconstruct the past, or to interpret texts, or to analyze arguments. This may seem weird, but I don’t think “objectivity” or “subjectivity” are that helpful as categories.

— ehrmanblog.org, Can Historians Be Neutral?

Quoted by tgeorgescu (talk) 20:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

I find it interesting that we are able to have a civil and productive discussion even when we disagree. Meanwhile the people who this essay was written for are writing things like "This article is full of lies and a lot of it is unsourced or has weak sources. The SCIENTIFIC BASIS for a Flat Earth is overwhelming. There is more scientific proof for electrostatics than gravity as the reason for why things fall" and "There can never be any reasoned analysis of the Holocaust because IT NEVER HAPPENED and it is MAKE-BELIEVE".

Maybe someone here should should try shouting at me in all caps and calling me a Nazi pedophile bedwetter... :) --Guy Macon (talk) 00:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Newspeak happens when people are forced to use specific words instead of the words they would otherwise use. When words change their meaning over time because people like to use them in that meaning, that is normal language development.

What I mean to say is that scientists qua scientists cannot afford to uphold their personal bias in the face of evidence, and at a certain point must follow it where it leads them. That is not your decision, it is theirs. This is the sort of thing I have heard from people with a bias towards parapsychology, who accept extremely weak "evidence" and demand from others that they accept it too, using exactly this talking point, and I don't buy it. This is one of the ways fringe proponents try to elbow mainstream science out of the way: by accusing it of not being true "unbiased" science. Creationists use it too, and astrologers, and probably others I can't recall at the moment. And of course, it is what this essay is about. Some people think that "being unbiased" is necessary for scientists. Some even seem to think that is is sufficient! I heard this sort of thing often enough that it triggers my bullshit alarm. You are likely not using it like that, or not much, but still, I think it is better not tell scientists what they should believe, only what they should do. It is the job of the scientific methods to cancel the scientists' bias.

Scientists have freedom of opinion like everybody else, and they should not be shamed into having other opinions. If their opinions do not fit the evidence, then one should talk about the evidence directly, instead of doing this:

• "You need to change your opinion"
• "Why?"
• "Scientists should follow the evidence, your opinion does not fit the evidence."
• "What evidence is that?"

Everything above the last two lines is unnecessary noise. Just show the evidence instead of wasting time with trivial or dubious stuff. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:33, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Listen Hob, I think your bullshit alarm might need some readjustment. It is going off all the time without good cause. It makes so much noise that it is making it hard even on yourself to stay reasonable. It's not because you've heard some bad people say that scientists cannot afford to ignore the evidence or that they should be unbiased that these things aren't, in themselves, true. Not everyone who affirms these almost self-evident truths is one of the bad people. I think Guy Macon's comment above, wondering in jest why no one is shouting at him, illustrates well that he at least has realized that it is, in fact, possible that someone would affirm this in good faith.

As you say, it is the job of the scientific methods to cancel the scientists' bias. Likewise, it is the job of WP:NPOV to cancel the editors' bias. It's in the description: NPOV means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. Again, it's not because some of the bad people like to subvert that clause and use it for their own means that it does not, itself, hold. Sometimes things just mean what they mean. Sometimes, the alarm shouldn't go off.

I understand the urge for linguistic reappropriation, but if you think that the extremely limited use by a wiki-specific in-group is enough to constitute a semantic shift displacing the mainstream meaning of a word, you're severely mistaken. Once you find yourself arguing that something really isn't a bad thing because you cannot longer imagine that anyone but your enemy would use a word in its regular, universally pejorative sense, it may be time to stop and reconsider. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Re "it is making it hard even on yourself to stay reasonable", I find Hob's position to be completely reasonable. Re: "these almost self-evident truths", I do not find them to be self-evident truths. I find them to be your personal opinions. They are well-thought-out personal opinions but they are not even close to being self-evident truths.

So, I did a bit of research, and found that this has been discussed recently elsewhere:

• Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism and coordinated editing/Preliminary statements
• Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Columns at Skeptical Inquirer
• Misplaced Pages:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#What is the article actually about?

I am questioning whether we really need to discuss the same basic arguments on Yet Another Talk Page. I am inclined to say no, and to encourage everyone involved to present evidence at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism and coordinated editing/Evidence. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 15:30, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: of course my essay is meant to encourage discussion, at as many talk pages as possible. In my mind, it's a step away from the ArbCom stuff, which no one really likes (though you may be glad to know that your essay has now been cited there too ). But sure, it's fair to say Hob Gadling and I have a bit of an angry mastodon effect upon each other, and there's indeed been more than enough of that. Sorry! ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:59, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

I think this is a different discussion. Initially, it is about the two essays and about different wordings of the same thing, and then it turned into a discussion about the right way to handle different opinions.

Those other threads are somehow related but clearly different. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:48, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I will not ignore or agree with bullshit just because you want me to.

As Guy says, those "almost self-evident truths" are just opinions. That is exactly what I mean by "dogmatic agnostics": Dogmatism means that one sees own opinions as "self-evident truths" and people who disagree with them as deviators from the one true path. Agnostics, on whatever subject, are very prone to that. See also here.

The right way to debate people you disagree with is not to tell them it is wrong of them to disagree with you, but to ask them for the reasons why they disagree with you and refute those (or be convinced by them, depending). Turning a creationist spouting bad reasoning for his beliefs, into someone who still believes in the same thing but does not spout bad reasoning, is an easier and more worthwhile goal than converting him entirely. Maybe, if the reasoning is taken away as fallacious, the belief will follow. Maybe not. But demanding that people should have - or should not have - specific positions is always fruitless. It is starting from the wrong end. That has nothing to do with bad people (a strawman, BTW. I don't see them as bad people, they just annoy me): the crux should always be the quality of the reasoning, never the position of the reasoner. Agnostics are fine with me, as long as they don't preach all the time that everybody needs to be like them.

I don't see any point in discussing this any further: we just have different approaches. Yours does not work, at least not on me. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:48, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Hob, it's you who takes offense at anyone disagreeing with you, and casually represents them as being dogmatic, promoting bullshit, using bad reasoning, putting up strawmen, etc. Don't get me wrong, you do make good points sometimes, but there's also so much ad hominem that it is hard to stay on track. If I were to claim that what you say is dogmatic badly reasoned bullshit, how would you go about refuting that? Mere contempt and disdain is not something one can argue against (see also appeal to the stone). Nothing needs to 'work on you'. I'd rather respectfully agree to disagree. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:07, 19 January 2022 (UTC)