Talk:Machine Intelligence Research Institute/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Request for comment on NPOV and sourcing

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The points of dispute are: (a) whether to remove the statement that Musk "had previously endorsed Bostrom's arguments,[11][12]" (b) whether to preserve the NPOV maintenance tag, (c) whether to preserve the primary source maintenance tag, and (d) whether the language is too technical. K.Bog 05:13, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

• Note -- the page as it stood when this RfC launched, was like this. Jytdog (talk) 02:16, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

• Your cites are bad and fail to check out, or turn out to be first-person assertions rather than the third-party verified claims they turn out to be, as I just noted above. This does not bode well. The article may need to be reconstructed from the ground up purely from verifiable and verified third-party RSes - not primary sources, not sources linked to MIRI, not sources making claims about themselves. Only then should we see about seasoning it with permissible primary sourcing and so on - David Gerard (talk) 13:19, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
• Yes remove that and all the other WP:OFFTOPIC fancruft about the broader issues that have been larded in here. Yes, remove the content that is commenting on or grabbing some random bit out of low quality primary sources like conference papers. The primary sources could be in the page as a list of publications of the like, perhaps, but they should not be used to generate so much of the content, if any. The concern about "technical" was a small part of the much larger concern about fancruft raised by Zubin12 when the page looked like this, as Zubin12 explained above in the section Large amounts of Bias present Jytdog (talk) 14:46, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
• Note that both of the above editors are involved in the dispute as well as me. The use of sources is in line with Wikipedia policy as well as standard practice on academic articles such as (for an arbitrary example) Kantian ethics, a "good article", where primary published sources are common. Papers in conferences are as good or better than journal papers for computer science [1]. I leave it to the reader to see if anything is too technical, "fancruft", "off-topic", and so on. Some of the sources may have ended up being misrepresented in the constant hacking and churn as every bit of this article gets fought over and some of the sources get removed, but they are generally well used as far as I can tell. The old version is here: [2] K.Bog 16:24, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
  • It turns out that disagreeing with you doesn't disqualify others from comment. The article is presently bad - David Gerard (talk) 23:35, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
    • I didn't state that disagreement with me disqualified others from commenting: I stated that the above comments came from people who are a part of the dispute, to indicate to readers that they are not coming through the RFC process. K.Bog 00:16, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

My view on this topic should be obvious, The tag's should be preserved for the reasons I articulated in the earlier, The musk references should be removed and the reliance on primary sources create both stylistic and content problems. Zubin12 (talk) 23:57, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

• Remove the cruft unless and until supported by reliable, independent sources. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 03:15, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Thanks for your comment, can you take a look at the research section in the latest revision [[3]] and describe if it has insufficient sourcing? K.Bog 08:33, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Nope. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 20:36, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

• Yes, No, Yes, No (a) yes, remove that bit seems good, no need to go into history of responses; (b) no, do not preserve the NPOV - either it is validly portraying primary cites from them or it is an NPOV violation of slanted coverage, not both; (c) yes, do preserve the refimprove tag, calling for additional independent sources; and (d) no, the language is not too technical, and actually to me it seems almost like the research section is retracing 19th century philosophy and theology. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 05:09, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

*Comment - I just got called here by Legobot, it looks like this RfC is redundant due to changes to the article - there is no reference to Musk in the article (except for his inclusion in the list of 'People'), there are no maintenance tags, and there's no obviously over-technical language. Suggest closing this RfC to avoid wasting people's time if the discussion has moved on. GirthSummit _(blether) 07:42, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

• • User:Girth Summit, the person wanting the content as it stood when this was opened, is awaiting the outcome of this RfC. That person believes that the something along the lines of the content when the RfC opened (see diff in the first bullet above) was better WP content. Per their note below, here, they are awaiting the outcome of this RfC. They are not edit warring which is happy, but the input from this RfC is very much needed. Jytdog (talk) 12:24, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
    • Understood - apologies, I confess I didn't read through the other comments - I just read the RfC, and then the article, which no longer includes the stuff the RfC was on. I'll read through the rest of the discussion properly before commenting again. Thanks for explaining. GirthSummit _(blether) 16:31, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Notes

• This is not an RfC about policy; I have removed that tag from the RfC because per WP:RFCST that The "Wikipedia policies and guidelines" category is for discussing changes to the policies and guidelines themselves, not for discussing how to apply them to a specific case. The same applies to "style", "WikiProject", and the other non-article categories. Jytdog (talk) 14:01, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Given the radical changes in the page is the RFC not a bit reduant at this point ?Zubin12 (talk) 08:47, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure that folks who preferred the prior version have really consented; i think they are being patient to see what the RfC brings. Jytdog (talk) 02:14, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Irrelevant promotion of Yudkowsky in first sentence?

An anonymous editor removed what he termed "fluff" regarding the first sentence, which included (regarding Yudkowsky) "who was mostly self-educated and had been involved in the Extropian group,"- I'm inclined to agree that this is "fluff"; indeed, it seems to veer into promotion of the individual in question. I've reverted the edit in question so that this content is removed. I'm open to the idea that either of these bits of biographical information are relevant to this particular article, but frankly, this seems far-fetched. It's enough to mention his name in the lead, along with the brief relevant historical information in the first section (which seems perfectly appropriate). Also I think it's crucially important to point out that articles about organizations and individuals as contentious as this one are especially at risk of preferential editing by fans of the personalities and ideas involved. Global Cerebral Ischemia (talk) 21:15, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

I tend to agree, this might belongs to Yudkowsky's BLP page or in a relevant context in this article, if this piece of information is essential to encyclopedic content about MIRI, but not otherwise. --Btcgeek (talk) 22:26, 17 March 2019 (UTC)