Comment by vintermann

9 days ago

No. So if you're OK with having the most respectable wrong beliefs about a contentious topic, go for it. It's basically the political equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

Please provide examples for "the most respectable wrong beliefs". Do you consider, e.g., the climate crisis as one?

  • Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is.

    If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.

    The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.

    • If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)

      It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that

      3 replies →

    • I can. They're oftentimes rather random, but the talk pages on contentious topics are rather illuminating. One of the more interesting ones I have encountered was about the descendants of Genghis Khan.