Q&A sites breed complacence

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Archer
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Q&A sites breed complacence

Post by Archer » Mon Dec 16, 2024 8:26 pm

If you type any technical question into google, you'll most likely end up on a site such as stackexchange (or one of its many variants), Quora, Reddit and so on. Popular search engines strongly favor these websites, but I distrust and dislike this status quo. In most cases there exist other sources that not only contain the information the user needs, but are also perhaps more general and useful as a reference. For example an online book, manual or paper - they might take more time to read, but they will be of more value to the reader. Instead, Q&A sites offer "the best answer" - something to be taken at face value with little if any further interpretation. That's the pretense.

This pattern encourages a sort of intellectual complacence among the public. People want a convenient "answer" and without guidance they often avoid having to think more abstractly or broadly about the question. I've seen this many times while helping students. Naturally I would break the task down into pieces for them and prompt them to answer an easier question, and continue leading them along the same line of reasoning I'd use. Outside an academic context it's often appropriate to simply provide an answer if one exists, but clearly these Q&A websites should not dominate the search results or displace authoritative sources from the immediately-visible search results. If LLMs eventually come to yield 'better' results, it will only encourage this exploitable habit. I'm not sure that people will put quite the same faith in responses they know to be machine-generated, compared to a site like Wikipedia that launders propaganda as public consensus, but it's certainly possible and the basic ruse they're using is essentially the same. These services provide a convenient source of information in order to habituate the public and make them confident using the services, and then use it to lie and mislead very selectively, when and where it really counts.

This is not to say people mustn't use these conveniences or any such hypocrisy of that sort. Instead, one should have awareness of the habits these services encourage and how they could be exploited and try not to rely on them when possible. So many people use them regularly and consider it second nature. It's one thing to use a calculator and let your mental arithmetic skills lapse a bit. It's another thing entirely to use some service that's promoted (and received) as the next Oracle of Delphi for most of one's questions. If that isn't a major cause of intellectual complacence, dependence and credulity, then I don't know what is or could be.

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Re: Q&A sites breed complacence

Post by Archer » Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:17 pm

Incidentally, the idea of an "authoritative source" is essentially meaningless whenever the subject is political. One should not take the word of some 'authority' who stands to gain from lying. Most of the truly indefensible nonsense foisted upon the public is enforced through some combination of social taboos and some inflated "authority" whose word you'll be expected to take on faith (but which you shouldn't and needn't).

Here's a choice bit of propaganda from Google's AI that I got by searching "argument from authority". This is the kind of bullshit they plan on feeding you - "a logical fallacy that occurs when someone claims a conclusion is true because a respected person, but not an expert on the subject"

Lots of sources define it similarly (or present the original definition along with this debased one), but frankly they're all full of shit. They all appeal to the word of someone whom the listener trusts rather than evidence itself. I found a proper definition here "An “argument from authority” is a conclusion drawn not by evaluating the evidence itself, but by evaluating an opinion about that evidence. "

Simple as. The other definitions obviously bastardize the meaning by substituting new jargon - "the expert" - and construing "authority" to mean someone with a lesser reputation than "the expert". An appeal to "the expert" is the same thing - the distinction fails. They've been working this for a while. In another form, "authority" is qualified to "irrelevant authority" and clearly they're trying to fuck with it in the same way. Filthy animals.

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Re: Q&A sites breed complacence

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:22 pm

You ought to look into the history of Quora. Jimbo Wales was involved early on, all sorts of insane things happened on the site, then it became famous for being brutally censored, hacked repeatedly, and then useless. It's basically run by scammers in India and AIs today. An even vaster collection of drivel than Wikipedia.

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Re: Q&A sites breed complacence

Post by Archer » Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:57 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:22 pm
You ought to look into the history of Quora. Jimbo Wales was involved early on, all sorts of insane things happened on the site, then it became famous for being brutally censored, hacked repeatedly, and then useless. It's basically run by scammers in India and AIs today. An even vaster collection of drivel than Wikipedia.
That doesn't surprise me - all of these websites seem very incestuous, using each other's data, promoting the same propaganda, censoring the same information, so on and so forth.

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Re: Q&A sites breed complacence

Post by Archer » Mon Jan 20, 2025 3:37 am

Archer wrote:
Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:17 pm
They all appeal to the word of someone whom the listener trusts rather than evidence itself.
This was an awkward sentence. Here's a better way of putting it: these definitions create a false distinction by exempting 'appeals to expertise'.

I searched "appeal to authority" on google again today, with very different results. Notably, google's chatbot spat out a correct definition this time. A month ago when I made this post, I only found one proper definition among the first few pages. I suppose it's an improvement but I regret that I didn't take a snapshot on archive, because the results were spectacularly bad.

I did manage to gather a few examples resembling the earlier results.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250120033 ... -authority
https://web.archive.org/web/20250120033 ... ority.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250120033 ... o-experts/

And of course rationalwiki.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250118125 ... _authority

Sadly I couldn't find a screencap of the older results among my files or on archive. At any rate, it's something to watch out for.

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