LW - Brief notes on the Wikipedia game by Olli Järviniemi

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Brief notes on the Wikipedia game, published by Olli Järviniemi on July 14, 2024 on LessWrong.
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 example:
"By the time they are born, infants can recognize and have a preference for their mother's voice suggesting some prenatal development of auditory perception."
> modified to
"Contrary to early theories, newborn infants are not particularly adept at picking out their mother's voice from other voices. This suggests the absence of prenatal development of auditory perception."
Sometimes, trainees will be given a totally unmodified article. For brevity, the articles can be trimmed of irrelevant sections.
Benefits:
Addressing key rationality skills. Noticing confusion; being more confused by fiction than fact; actually checking claims against your models of the world.
If you fail, either the article wasn't negated skillfully ("5 people died in 2021" -> "4 people died in 2021" is not the right kind of modification), you don't have good models of the domain, or you didn't pay enough attention to your confusion.
Either of the last two are good to learn.
Features of good modifications
What does a good modification look like?
Let's start by exploring some failure modes. Consider the following modifications:
"World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 - 2 September 1945) was..." -> "World War II or the Second World War (31 August 1939 - 2 September 1945) was...
"In the wake of Axis defeat, Germany, Austria, Japan and Korea were occupied" -> "In the wake of Allies defeat, United States, France and Great Britain were occupied"
"Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by..." -> "Operation Bergenstein was the invasion of the Soviet Union by..."
Needless to say, these are obviously poor changes for more than one reason. Doing something which is not that, one gets at least the following desiderata for a good change:
The modifications shouldn't be too obvious nor too subtle; both failure and success should be realistic outcomes.
The modification should have implications, rather than being an isolated fact, test of memorization or a mere change of labels.
The "intended solution" is based on general understanding of a topic, rather than memorization.
The change "The world population is 8 billion" "The world population is 800,000" definitely has implications, and you could indirectly infer that the claim is false, but in practice people would think "I've previously read that the world population is 8 billion. This article gives a different number. This article is wrong." Thus, this is a bad change.
Finally, let me add:
The topic is of general interest and importance.
While the focus is on general rationality skills rather than object-level information, I think you get better examples by having interesting and important topics, rather than something obscure.
Informally, an excellent modification is such that it'd just be very silly to actually believe the false claim made, in t...