A classic, and one well worth linking to out in the wider world.
I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View.
As someone who's been around it for years, I think NPOV is actually the most amazing thing about Wikipedia - greater than letting everyone edit the website, for example. It's the only way we can get everyone editing the website without killing each other. But it's also the quintessence of how to serve the reader. Can be hard on the writers, of course.
Trouble is, NPOV is often in direct conflict with the "reputable sources" and "no original research" rules. In areas where reputable sources are mostly unbiased and disreputable sources are mostly crackpots, everything's fine. However, in those where respectable opinion is nowadays remote from reality, reporting what reputable sources say is not going to produce a NPOV account, and if editors attempt to make sense of the available information on their own, this becomes illicit "original research."
Also, it can be misleading to...
Today's post, Politics is the Mind-Killer was originally published on 18 February 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Outside the Laboratory, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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