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I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked i

I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.

dvt 13d ago
This website doesn't "teach" anything. It's a fun way to explore and get exposed to history. Kind of like Civilization 6 or something. Do you think CIV6 "teaches falsehoods" because you can build the Pyramids as the French?
- no_multitudes 13d ago
  I haven't played Civilization. Generally I would not consider something educational if it contains mostly false information. Perhaps clearly demarcated parts of it with true information could be considered educational -- for example, looking at screenshots I don't see anything immediately objectionable in the civiliopedia "historical context" sections. I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events. For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors. This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past. [1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-comes-alive-during-popular-uchicago-renaissance-course https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c... [2] https://anyhumanever.com/sources https://anyhumanever.com/sources

dvt 13d ago

This website doesn't "teach" anything. It's a fun way to explore and get exposed to history. Kind of like Civilization 6 or something. Do you think CIV6 "teaches falsehoods" because you can build the Pyramids as the French?

no_multitudes 13d ago
I haven't played Civilization. Generally I would not consider something educational if it contains mostly false information. Perhaps clearly demarcated parts of it with true information could be considered educational -- for example, looking at screenshots I don't see anything immediately objectionable in the civiliopedia "historical context" sections. I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events. For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors. This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past. [1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-comes-alive-during-popular-uchicago-renaissance-course https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c... [2] https://anyhumanever.com/sources https://anyhumanever.com/sources