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As if RationalWiki has any business calling people cranks



Has it always been that way?

I seem to remember RationalWiki (or perhaps some other similar site?) as an occasionally snarky but generally high-quality wiki on rationality, fallacies, science vs. pseudoscience, the logical or other mistakes in arguments that have been given for quackery, etc.

Nowadays it seems like a lot of the content is just about bashing people who have expressed less-than-greatly argued opinions, with some kind of a special target drawn on conservatives.

I mean, you can also do that and not be wrong, but that's entirely different than (mostly) dispassionately documenting things, even if while doing the latter you'd be somewhat poignant.

Either the content seemed to have a different tone ~10 years ago, or I remember wrong.


The problem is that sticky issues are so rarely aligned on party lines. Like science vs pseudo science. Where are that line? The scientific method? Because as we’ve seen in recent years, our poor incentive structure for scientific advancement has given rise to bullshit study’s that grab headlines, but are flawed in major ways.

Like everything in life, complex issues that have many facets are difficult to shoehorn into a right/left box. Sites like rational wiki excel at warping issues to make them simple binary choices. Life is hard, thinking is harder, you can’t outsource your judgments of the world and expect to have a clear picture of reality.


It's come across as pretty bad since I discovered it, maybe 5 years ago.




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