PCGamer_Empath

I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.)

I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.

>do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

Considering that the person whom I was addressing responded to my post in a productive manner and we were able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?

Do you think it's productive to police the conversations of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to align with your preferred style of decorum, especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment in the first place) was good.

I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting best practices in the discussion thread for the future of the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!

Thanks for the link! I can see being sceptical about the fund given the somewhat nebulous nature of the descriptions of their grants, and I look forward to seeing how they shake out by the end of the year. The reason why I asked is because it seemed like a strong position to take to say that the money was being "sprayed up the wall" given the little information we have about the outcomes of the fund. ?

That being said, "what is best for Wikipedia" is in itself a nebulous proposition in the first place because different people have different requirements and visions for the project. Personally to me, the investments in investigative journalism (1) seem like they could have a direct value contribution since it could expand original reporting of facts for the site. That is of course debatable, but we'll see.

Thanks for clarifying!

1 https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...

I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier.

Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?

If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.

Namaste!

Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failures.

Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?

This reminds me of Isaac Asimov's review of 1984, which is far and away the funniest book review I've ever read. I generally share Asimov's evaluation of the quality of the writing.

Here is a link to it http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm