Slightly OT Nitpick: in regard to experts and Wikipedia, when doing a neuroscience-adjacent MSc, experts in the field actually directed me to Wikipedia as an excellent source for high-level neuroanatomy, including recent research, so I'm not sure your blanket description about experts and Wikipedia is correct.
replyThe free alternative to Wikipedia is the library, not “don’t learn anything new ever”.
replyI find Claude is surprisingly similar to a confident but incorrect coworker, with the benefit that Claude will reevaluate when I correct it.
I used the phrase "most likely alternative" intentionally. The library is where people should go to get answers in a world without Wikipedia, but the vast majority of people won't. So in practice, most non-experts either learn from Wikipedia or don't try to learn anything at all.
replySure, if we’re going to go that broad. People are already leaning heavily towards learning nothing instead of using Wikipedia.
replyI guess to me it has to be comparable to be an alternative.
Like, I don’t consider doomscrolling x an alternative to reading Wikipedia but I might consider it an alternative to CNN, even though they’re all technically and very broadly activities that I could use to inform myself.
In that same way I don’t consider the multitude of ways I could use my free will necessarily alternatives to each other even though they technically are. It kinda sucks but going that broad feels to me like it breaks the concept of alternative and makes it kind of meaningless.
I get what you're saying, but I'm not deciding what should and shouldn't count as an alternative to X. I'm trying to answer the counterfactual: how do people behave in an alternative world without Wikipedia but otherwise identical to our world?
replyClaude will do everything to retain you as a user, because that's one of their most important metrics.
replyExcellent point my colleague has the exact opposite incentive.
reply