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exo-pla-net

Larry Sanger is now a conspiracy theorist [1], believing gems including:

- Antifa did the coup.

- Face masks are harmful.

- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.

- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.

- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]

Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

[2] https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1719344152356217057

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Your source on [2] does not quite support your interpretation: if you follow the Twitter thread from the beginning, or read Sanger's linked blog post [0], he makes no claims about his own beliefs. He's explicitly considering what one would conclude about Biblical inspiration _if_ one believed what the Bible says about itself. No faith is necessary to consider that question. [0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/10/on-biblical-inspiration/

Every time I read 'rationalwiki' its just a bunch of personal drama about people the writers don't like. Never seen a single good article on there, it's just a bunch of circle jerking politics pretending to be a "rational wiki" like calling it the ministry of truth.

I think I am confused by your comment in the context of Larry Sanger: are you suggesting that rationalwiki is incorrect and that Larry did not say any of the things quoted?

Only thing I know is a group of limp wristed keyboard warriors hate some people write a wall of text and try to "rationalize" why. The facts don't matter, only the tone does and it's full of impotent anger.

This is a natural product of how power works on the internet. Barring an algo that downgrades time spent, the people with the most power are proportionally the people who do the least things elsewhere.

I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.

No love lost for sure:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Views_on_Rational...

He pretty much sums it up in one sentence. I don't care about Sanger or his politics. These writers have no lives, all they do is criticize things that don't matter.

> Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms.

This writing is fine penmanship for a 2nd grader about why I hate Kevin and his Pokemon cards.

It's just a secular leftist response to Conservapedia that mostly focuses on debunking (mostly far-right) pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. I think you're taking the name a bit too literally and the concept a bit too seriously.

Conservapedia and Wikipedia don't call themselves "rational" and the other guy took it seriously, not me. I know its just a bunch of whiny losers. What if conservapedia called itself the unbiased wiki and everyone quoted it?

> Face masks are harmful

Searching that sentence verbatim on Google produces, as a first result, a paper on the National Library of Medicine [1] that states in its abstract:

> Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.

How is that a conspiracy theory? At most, you can argue that it's not absolutely conclusive or that other studies reach different conclusions. But that's far from declaring something a conspiracy theory.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/

> These symptoms were accompanied by a sensation of heat (p < 0.0001) and itching (p < 0.01) due to moisture penetration of the masks (p < 0.0001) in 10 healthy volunteers of both sexes after only 90 min of physical activity.

Heaven forbid! It's almost comical how certain people furrow for the tiniest of cherries to support their antivaxx, antimask knee jerking while their bodies get submitted to a gauntlet of health risks from contracting COVID.

Vaccines provide immunity. Which vaccine are you referring to? Flu shots for example are not vaccines. There are no COVID vaccines.

Poor buddy.

Flu shots are indeed a vaccine.

I think you're confused by the word "immunity". In the medical sense, it doesn't mean "invincibility". It's a reference to the immune system!

You are shifting the goalpost. You are now arguing about benefits and disadvantages.

Your original argument was that this is a conspiracy theory, and it isn't.

You should really read your sources a little more closely:

> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.

That's a banner at the top of the page.

That is tangential. I linked to a scientific study with a specific conclusion, and it's not the only study to reach such a conclusion.

Science is not done by consensus or endorsement. Studies must be refuted on scientific grounds.

Studies that disagree with your opinion are not conspiracy theories.

> How is that a conspiracy theory?

I think some people consider information contrary to that communicated by government officials to be conspiracy theory: If the government didn't tell us the truth about something, they conspired to tell us something untrue.

By this definition of conspiracy theory, anybody who is not a conspiracy theorist is credulous. I proudly call myself a conspiracy theorist AKA skeptic.

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