jabretti

>Incentive alignment is a good thing - it's the whole basis of capitalism.

The government taking your money and giving it to other people for votes isn't capitalism, it's corruption.

The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time.

>"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.

The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.

>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.

That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?

What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).

Thanks, death penalty opponents, for insisting that scarce budgets be spent keeping him alive all this time.

It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.

First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.

Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.

Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.

This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.

By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.

What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.

The US is also a major outlier among the places you mentioned, in that it's still breeding at above-replacement rates. I wonder if the difficulty of getting a house/car that can comfortably accommodate multiple children is a big factor.

So we split Facebook into multiple companies which must of necessity coordinate all their activities with each other?

So I could no longer be Facebook friends with my friends on different continents?