Ask HN: Why are RationalWiki articles always high up in Google search results?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22766980

2 5 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

RationalWiki admits to their political-bias and outright incompetence in maintaining a purely objective stance on topics:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:I_thought_this_was_supposed_to_be_RATIONALWiki

So, why do they seemingly always show up high in Google search results?

eesmith3• 6 years ago

I was thinking to write along the lines of "there is no purely objective stance on topics".

But I see the page you linked to already covers that, in spades.

What searches are you doing to end up there? It rarely shows up in my searches, unless I'm searching for specific hot-button topics.

And are their answers incompetent?

StandardFuture2• 6 years ago

there is no purely objective stance on topics

This is an objectively wrong statement. The existence of Mathematics is a negation of this statement in its entirety. Observations are purely objective. Measurements are purely objective.

Are their answers incompetent?

Do you consider purposely substituting biased views in place of objective observation a form of incompetence? I don't. I consider it a form of intellectual dishonesty. That is far worse.

eesmith3• 6 years ago

Then let's make it practical.

Name one news source which you consider to have "a purely objective stance on topics".

Because I can't think of a single one.

And I would rather have one whose biases are worn on the sleeve, than shrouded in a false disguise of neutral objectivity.

Even if we restrict ourselves to mathematics, consider Georg Cantor, who demonstrated the existences of multiple types of infinities. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor :

] Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Cantor, a devout Lutheran, believed the theory had been communicated to him by God. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected.

] The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth". .... Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".

Which of these observations were purely objective, and in the 1800s, how would you be able to tell?

in place of objective observation

The choice of what to observe and what to report is based on views of what is important, so therefore subject to subjective bias. You cannot have one without the other.

Ask HN: Why are RationalWiki articles always high up in Google search results?

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