Alex Turner introduced an exercise to test subjects’ ability to notice falsehoods: change factual statements in Wikipedia articles, hand the edited articles to subjects and see whether they notice the modifications.

I’ve spent a few hours making such modifications and testing the articles on my friend group. You can find the articles here. I describe my observations and thoughts below. The bottom line: it is hard to come up with good modifications / articles to modify, and this is the biggest crux for me.

The concept

Alex Turner explains the idea well here. The post is short, so I'm just copying it here:

Rationality exercise: Take a set of Wikipedia articles on topics which trainees are somewhat familiar with, and then randomly select a small number of claims to negate (negating the immediate context as well, so that you can't just syntactically discover which claims were negated).

For [...]

---

Outline:

(00:38) The concept

(02:14) Features of good modifications

(04:44) Examples

(05:40) Takeaways and thoughts

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
July 14th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4fqdfrDzFebsx8amf/brief-notes-on-the-wikipedia-game

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Brief notes on the Wikipedia game” by Olli Järviniemi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)