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Sure, if we’re going to go that broad. People are already leaning heavily towards learning nothing instead of using Wikipedia. I guess to me it has to be compa
by ohyes 3mo ago
Sure, if we’re going to go that broad. People are already leaning heavily towards learning nothing instead of using Wikipedia.
I 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.
- sxg 3mo agoI 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?
- ohyes 3mo agoI mean, technically… I’ve lived in that world. You just go back 25 years. We had the Dewey decimal system (card catalog) and the library, hard copy encyclopedias. You could also ask someone else. Then we had computerized encyclopedias and search engines that searched the library. I mean, you had to work for the knowledge. Sometimes you didn’t know something and no one else knew either, so you had to wait until you got a chance to find out, but you would think about it and sometimes you would be right when you found a reference source. I’ll also note, Wikipedia is a secondary source. It is not a reliable source of truth. It is more like the ‘ask someone else’ alternative than anything else, it’s just ‘someone else’ is a person on the internet who writes Wikipedia articles.