That's a great question. I think about this all the time when encountering GoodSpeak: spittle-flecked True Believer -- or cynical (paid) shill?
As a believer (of another sort) myself, I typically assume the former, unless there's a clear indication of the latter. The kind of intensity and grinding perseverance people like Gerard demonstrate strikes me as deeply internally-motivated. Paid shills wouldn't put in that kind of effort.
I also know people like Gerard; I'm sure they're not getting paid. They burn with Yeatsian passionate intensity.
There was a big scandal in South Korea in the mid-2010s, about an influential political figure who ran a "farm" of thousands of fake Internet accounts. He used them, with effect, to influence opinion and may well have even shifted vote-totals among that notoriously mania-driven political-culture.
The kingpin behind this operation was a political partisan himself, I think. But the thousands of fake accounts, and the millions of fake comments that operation generated, etc, they were not real. The scandal was named after the Internet-handle of the kingpin, "DruKing" (if anyone wants to look more into it). If we encounter specific cases of "biased content," the question of "real or not real" may be really difficult to answer, now more than ever.
Rather than theorize about how they are keeping it a secret, why don't you first check whether somebody is boasting of it: e.g., "The Shapiro Family Foundation is proud to make David Gerard its first Anti-Misinformation Fellow. He combats misinformation by editing unreliable sources and fringe pseudoscience out of Wikipedia." (Note: that's not a real quote. I just made it up. But why not look for something like that?)
Has any research been done on how paid advocacy on Wikipedia is done? My guess is that the right probably try as much as the left, but the demographics of Wikipedia editors may mean that it's more jarring and more likely to be found out. Paid editing of Wikipedia dies seem to be an area where a small amount of money could have an outsize if hard to measure effect on downstream politics but is done remarkably little, like subsidising opinion journalism.
Outside some non mainstream areas (and I accept the effect on these areas may be immense) I suspect paid editing doesn't have an appreciable effect compared to the core influence of the biases and assumptions of nerdy first world Anglo single underemployed men. Like most web culture it's those demographics that are key
See my comment re: Mike Judge. Your question is valid, but I see someone like Gerard as being a Silicon Valley type weirdo neckbeard. They too eat, but it's mostly Fage yogurt and ramen.
I think you really misunderstand what motivates leftists like this guy. He’s a mid-50s ‘poly, goth, queer’ nerd - and not the new kind of nerd with social cachet and money, the old kind who’s just sort of a sad-sack loser.
His politics are his life and inflicting pain on his enemies (who is more despised than the apostate?) is now his life’s work - made all the more implacable because he’s no doubt convinced himself he’s acting righteously.
I think this is a very plausible profile. It's his faith, and there are a lot of people throughout history who have gotten a lot done in response to what they believe they are called to do.
They are doing it independently. There are a lot of weird obsessives out there.
The anti-SSC has a lot to do with Sailer, of all things. Steve was a regular commentator and a faction tried to get him banned. Alexander said no, Sailer is polite and can back up his assertions. It went on forever.
Trace was a participant of the subreddit mentioned in his piece, r/drama . As was I because it was the only funny place on reddit. He and his friends managed to pull off some pretty good media hoaxes. I am pleased with his success, he is a great guy.
Scott has always been frustrated that I tend to be good empirically but also bad at managing my career. He wants to be good at both. God bless him, I hope he achieves that.
Wikipedia, despite its many limitations and weaknesses (biases), developed some kind of mind-control power over people, in that most people take is as Gospel Truth on anything. They should know better, but the guardians of the social informational commons were overpowered by a deluge of Internet-sludge and ran for the hills, some years ago.
I work in higher ed, in a curriculum-design kind of job, and was already so doing back when wikipedia appeared on the scene. Some people in education went gaga for it -- it rang a lot of bells that make ed school types happy: it's 'democratic'; it's non-hierarchical; it's ostensibly 'socially constructed' knowledge; it's new (many people in ed love shiny shiny new things) --- and, maybe most of all, it's *FREE*! No need to pay evil publishers for nice content!
'Wikis' were hailed as a panacea for numerous educational ills for a few years -- e.g. they would be the centerpieces of in-depth student discussions in which eager young scholars co-created their learning experiences, etc., etc. But then it turned out that they're kind of finicky to compile, students tended to do a sloppy job or they just dumped in copied text, etc.
And yet most people believe pretty much anything they see on Wikipedia, even though they know better.
And AI is indeed similar. My university is struggling with this right now, as I suspect most are. I was just talking with my boss about this: how high is the quality of the text you get from AI? Well, it can be pretty high, but really, is it high enough to qualify as sound academic/instructional text? Often not: people who use AI often aren't very good at writing prompts; AI tends to be verbose and repetitive; it can be hard to get it to produce consistent tone across numerous prompts, and on and on. And, of course, it makes shit up, and for some academics, at least, that is still a problem. But others seem to trust it way too much already.
All part of the emerging Age of the 'Misinformation Expert'..... a kind of resurgent Maoism. You cannot, in 2024, escape chattering class agonising (in both the MSM and the corridors of power) on the subject of how we citizens need legislation to protect us from a supposed epidemic of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’.’ ‘Misinformation experts’ are very concerned about this. I on the other hand, can think of nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the interplay between human nature and man’s inherent epistemological limitations could not seriously entertain such a notion without choking on their hubris sandwich. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Read the whole thing? The excerpts alone exhaust me!
David Gerard sounds like someone Mike Judge would have destroyed in the TV show Silicon Valley. There is some pretty weird shit going on in that place.
On an episode of "Elementary," Sherlock correctly deduced that a chat room moderator had to be two people to maintain 24 hour coverage. The further plot twist of him being three didn't happen.
It's one of the few recent hour-long dramas I can sit through, but it occasionally fails, such as "genius" Sherlock saying cachet when he meant cache.
With advent of large language models that make extensive use of Wikipedia as a source for training data, the stakes over what goes into Wikipedia and what doesn't go into Wikipedia have increased.
It is unfortunate that, to my knowledge, there are no groups of libertarians and conservatives editing Wikipedia and participating in reliable source disputes.
A number of them have been Gaslighted into the Bubble, IMHO>
That's a great question. I think about this all the time when encountering GoodSpeak: spittle-flecked True Believer -- or cynical (paid) shill?
As a believer (of another sort) myself, I typically assume the former, unless there's a clear indication of the latter. The kind of intensity and grinding perseverance people like Gerard demonstrate strikes me as deeply internally-motivated. Paid shills wouldn't put in that kind of effort.
I also know people like Gerard; I'm sure they're not getting paid. They burn with Yeatsian passionate intensity.
Of course the answer is often "both."
There was a big scandal in South Korea in the mid-2010s, about an influential political figure who ran a "farm" of thousands of fake Internet accounts. He used them, with effect, to influence opinion and may well have even shifted vote-totals among that notoriously mania-driven political-culture.
The kingpin behind this operation was a political partisan himself, I think. But the thousands of fake accounts, and the millions of fake comments that operation generated, etc, they were not real. The scandal was named after the Internet-handle of the kingpin, "DruKing" (if anyone wants to look more into it). If we encounter specific cases of "biased content," the question of "real or not real" may be really difficult to answer, now more than ever.
Who is paying them?
Or you could start at the other end: find an NGO or government agency or whatever that is paying Wikipedia editors.
For example, the Hasbara Fellowships organization pays young people to put pro-Israel propaganda on social media:
https://hasbarafellowships.org/
It's not a secret, they are proud of what they do.
Rather than theorize about how they are keeping it a secret, why don't you first check whether somebody is boasting of it: e.g., "The Shapiro Family Foundation is proud to make David Gerard its first Anti-Misinformation Fellow. He combats misinformation by editing unreliable sources and fringe pseudoscience out of Wikipedia." (Note: that's not a real quote. I just made it up. But why not look for something like that?)
Well I've certainly seen organized Wikipedia-editing days/workshops to "remove structural bias", I'm paraphrasing from memory.
I even distinctly remember a poster for one that showed people of varied skin colors and unnatural hair colors siting in front of computers.
Has any research been done on how paid advocacy on Wikipedia is done? My guess is that the right probably try as much as the left, but the demographics of Wikipedia editors may mean that it's more jarring and more likely to be found out. Paid editing of Wikipedia dies seem to be an area where a small amount of money could have an outsize if hard to measure effect on downstream politics but is done remarkably little, like subsidising opinion journalism.
Outside some non mainstream areas (and I accept the effect on these areas may be immense) I suspect paid editing doesn't have an appreciable effect compared to the core influence of the biases and assumptions of nerdy first world Anglo single underemployed men. Like most web culture it's those demographics that are key
Because they enjoy it. Sense of power.
Maybe. But there is a fair amount of family money around.
Or, an adjunct professor in nowheresville get a few thousand per month from his grandma.
Or a guy on permanent disability for any number of physical or mental reasons . . . .
See my comment re: Mike Judge. Your question is valid, but I see someone like Gerard as being a Silicon Valley type weirdo neckbeard. They too eat, but it's mostly Fage yogurt and ramen.
It’s one guy. He could easily have another source of funds.
I think you really misunderstand what motivates leftists like this guy. He’s a mid-50s ‘poly, goth, queer’ nerd - and not the new kind of nerd with social cachet and money, the old kind who’s just sort of a sad-sack loser.
His politics are his life and inflicting pain on his enemies (who is more despised than the apostate?) is now his life’s work - made all the more implacable because he’s no doubt convinced himself he’s acting righteously.
I think this is a very plausible profile. It's his faith, and there are a lot of people throughout history who have gotten a lot done in response to what they believe they are called to do.
They are doing it independently. There are a lot of weird obsessives out there.
The anti-SSC has a lot to do with Sailer, of all things. Steve was a regular commentator and a faction tried to get him banned. Alexander said no, Sailer is polite and can back up his assertions. It went on forever.
Trace was a participant of the subreddit mentioned in his piece, r/drama . As was I because it was the only funny place on reddit. He and his friends managed to pull off some pretty good media hoaxes. I am pleased with his success, he is a great guy.
Scott has always been frustrated that I tend to be good empirically but also bad at managing my career. He wants to be good at both. God bless him, I hope he achieves that.
Wikipedia is not reliable on anything controversial. It never has been.
RationalWiki is anything but rational. It rants and raves.
Wikipedia, despite its many limitations and weaknesses (biases), developed some kind of mind-control power over people, in that most people take is as Gospel Truth on anything. They should know better, but the guardians of the social informational commons were overpowered by a deluge of Internet-sludge and ran for the hills, some years ago.
The whole thing about "AI" is much the same.
This is a very perceptive comment.
I work in higher ed, in a curriculum-design kind of job, and was already so doing back when wikipedia appeared on the scene. Some people in education went gaga for it -- it rang a lot of bells that make ed school types happy: it's 'democratic'; it's non-hierarchical; it's ostensibly 'socially constructed' knowledge; it's new (many people in ed love shiny shiny new things) --- and, maybe most of all, it's *FREE*! No need to pay evil publishers for nice content!
'Wikis' were hailed as a panacea for numerous educational ills for a few years -- e.g. they would be the centerpieces of in-depth student discussions in which eager young scholars co-created their learning experiences, etc., etc. But then it turned out that they're kind of finicky to compile, students tended to do a sloppy job or they just dumped in copied text, etc.
And yet most people believe pretty much anything they see on Wikipedia, even though they know better.
And AI is indeed similar. My university is struggling with this right now, as I suspect most are. I was just talking with my boss about this: how high is the quality of the text you get from AI? Well, it can be pretty high, but really, is it high enough to qualify as sound academic/instructional text? Often not: people who use AI often aren't very good at writing prompts; AI tends to be verbose and repetitive; it can be hard to get it to produce consistent tone across numerous prompts, and on and on. And, of course, it makes shit up, and for some academics, at least, that is still a problem. But others seem to trust it way too much already.
All part of the emerging Age of the 'Misinformation Expert'..... a kind of resurgent Maoism. You cannot, in 2024, escape chattering class agonising (in both the MSM and the corridors of power) on the subject of how we citizens need legislation to protect us from a supposed epidemic of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’.’ ‘Misinformation experts’ are very concerned about this. I on the other hand, can think of nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the interplay between human nature and man’s inherent epistemological limitations could not seriously entertain such a notion without choking on their hubris sandwich. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Read the whole thing? The excerpts alone exhaust me!
David Gerard sounds like someone Mike Judge would have destroyed in the TV show Silicon Valley. There is some pretty weird shit going on in that place.
On an episode of "Elementary," Sherlock correctly deduced that a chat room moderator had to be two people to maintain 24 hour coverage. The further plot twist of him being three didn't happen.
It's one of the few recent hour-long dramas I can sit through, but it occasionally fails, such as "genius" Sherlock saying cachet when he meant cache.
With advent of large language models that make extensive use of Wikipedia as a source for training data, the stakes over what goes into Wikipedia and what doesn't go into Wikipedia have increased.
It is unfortunate that, to my knowledge, there are no groups of libertarians and conservatives editing Wikipedia and participating in reliable source disputes.