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philh comments on Open thread, Nov. 24 - Nov. 30, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 24 November 2014 08:56AM

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Comment author: philh 24 November 2014 11:45:31AM *  5 points [-]

The answers to questions like this aren't necessarily "yes" or "no". But it could still be valuable to say things like "the source for this seems to be this article from 2004, in which he is quoted as saying ...." Or, "he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote."

Comment author: bogus 24 November 2014 05:08:01PM 4 points [-]

That's pretty much how TakeOnIt works already.

Comment author: philh 25 November 2014 12:11:50AM 1 point [-]

That seems pretty similar to what I'm envisioning, but transposed. They want to look at positions, and ask "whose opinions on this position are notable?" where notability is based on whether they're likely to have a clue. I'm going for looking at people, and asking "which of this person's positions are notable?" where notability is based on (something like) whether people are talking about it being their position.

Comment author: bogus 25 November 2014 12:51:13AM 3 points [-]

They want to look at positions, and ask "whose opinions on this position are notable?"

That's just the default view. You can click on the name of any "expert" and bring up a nice report where all of their positions are listed and compared with other experts'.

And "notability" is viewed quite generally anyway. As long as the person has something genuinely worthwhile to say, you can add their opinion on all sorts of stuff.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 November 2014 02:43:35PM 2 points [-]

Or, "he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote."

The fact that I recommend people to read an article in which I'm cited doesn't imply that I believe that the article is 100% factually correct.

In general journalists do simply the positions of the people they quote. Depending on the context I might be okay with a slight alteration of my position in the article as long as the main points I want to make appear in the article. If the quote then gets lifted into another context, I might have a problem.