The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia: WTF!? — episode transcript
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The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia: WTF!? — episode transcript
Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m very excited to be speaking with you today because Crimeo on x, who we love and have met, recently laid bare the damage a single person can do, telling the tale of jagged eighty five, a Wikipedia user who vandalized, and I’m quoting from him now, vandalized thousands of articles while making over 87,000 Wikipedia enter... Edits in the time between starting 2005 and being caught in 2012. Those edits have led to hundreds of false claims misattributed to history books and papers, And now those claims are alive on the Internet, being repeated ceaselessly and promoted as if they’re true when they are anything but. Several of these claims have been even seeped into the scholarly literature and are now gaining some credence as true facts by virtue of being repeated by scholars and misled.
Malcolm Collins: So... Sorry. Hold on. So a guy made 80,000 false edits claiming Muslims invented stuff Muslims didn’t invent.
Simone Collins: And now makes
Malcolm Collins: way into the scholarly literature at this point because so many people were using Wikipedia as a source.
Simone Collins: Yes. Very lazily as it so happens. So today, wanna go over that case and other known cases of what you might call reality vandalism. And I wanna say known because we’re only aware of the egregious cases where people actually went too far and got caught. I mean, again, Jagged eighty five made 87,000 Wikipedia edits. If you just make some subtle edits and manipulate things long enough for them to get picked up by a journalist and then, you know, sort of entered into the public record as a fact, you can get away with it. Who knows how much stuff we think is true that isn’t true? In fact Let’s start with just a case study that actually goes way back. You’ve heard that the average person swallows eight spiders a year. Right?
Malcolm Collins: Yes. I have heard that.
Simone Collins: Do you know where this comes from?
Malcolm Collins: I do not know where it comes from.
Simone Collins: Okay. So I had heard. On a podcast.
Malcolm Collins: They they tried to fake people out about it. Right? Like, they tried
Simone Collins: to This... So this is what I heard. Okay? That in a 1993 PC for Professional article, column list... Columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of facts that were circulating via email and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. And then to demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made up list of equally ridiculous facts among which was the statistic decided about mosquitoes... Or sorry. Not about mosquitoes, about spiders, that the average person swallowed eight spiders a year. And then she took that apparently from a collection of common misbeliefs pointing to a 1954 book on insect folklore. And in fantastic irony, Holst’s propagation of this false fact spurred it into becoming one of the most widely circulated bits of misinformation found on the Internet. So that’s what I heard on a podcast once. And it’s also what is listed on the Snopes article about this fact. So if you look up swallows, you know, eight spiders, like, is this true? And you click on Snopes.
Malcolm Collins: Wait. Is this story also not true?
Simone Collins: Yeah. So if you click on this linked content in the Snopes article, it goes to a different page, and it reads, this is a big troll. And then it says checking your sources. It is is an essential part of the fact checking process. It’s a good thing that you’re checking this one specifically. Well, the 1954 book, Insect Fact and Folklore, is real. If you checked page 24, you would find that it says nothing about the people swallow eight spiders a year in rumor, which likely originated decades after its publication. After failing to find any relevant material in the cited book, you may be led by your curiosity to discover that PC for professional and columnist Lisa Bridget Holst did not exist. The latter’s name, many readers have successfully discovered, is an anagram of the phrase, this is a big troll.
Malcolm Collins: Oh my god.
Simone Collins: Well, some wish to credit us with the origins of this rumor. This urgent lever... Urgent led... Urban legend predated our own debunking. For example, the twelve
Malcolm Collins: and three on Snopes Snopes has the straw... The troll The troll the Snopes?
Simone Collins: Yes. Yes. So I heard on this podcast the made up story that Snopes made up to troll people who don’t click through to sources, which is exactly what all the people that Jagged 85 got tricked, you
Malcolm Collins: know, Snopes so made up this fake story, or they’re saying we didn’t make it up?
Simone Collins: Snopes made up the story about PC professional and Lisa Holst. Okay?
Malcolm Collins: Are you sure this isn’t a a meta troll?
Simone Collins: A triple troll? How far down does this go? No. Like, I mean, it doesn’t link to anything else after this. What they’re trying to say, though, is that they created this Easter egg, this this linked to part of the egg... Spider swallowing entry twenty years ago in April 2001 as a wink to their longtime readers who were familiar with the trolling they engaged in during their early days of the Internet. And they’re still trying to find the origins of the spider swallowing rumor. But what’s so funny to me is that their fake troll explanation behind
Malcolm Collins: the rumor Made it in a podcast that you and I have heard.
Simone Collins: Yes. It’s now been, like... Has become the, like, fact. So, like, people are like, oh, that’s not true. That was made up by some woman who’s trying to prove that facts are just made up. And then they’re just repeating the whole thing because they didn’t check the source. So this just goes to show how vulnerable we are to this kind of trolling or reality vandalism or whatever you wanna call it. Okay? So let this just be the first illustration to you of just how completely insane this is. But then... So that was fun troll. Right? Like, oh, spider swallowing, and this... It goes... It’s it’s it’s it’s trolling all the way down. Like, how far down are we gonna go with this spider swallowing rumor? But then it’s a little bit weirder when it’s someone gaslighting you about the inventiveness of Islam. Right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, why do they need to... Why why... Here’s the here’s the bigger question. Yeah. Why did they need to do this? Why did Islam invent so little that it would actually surprise you? Which is one of the things that I’ve been learning as I’ve dug more into medieval Islamic history, which is that a... What what actually happened is... Because I’ve noted, like, they were known as inventive to the extent that, like, people would not take alchemical works seriously or basically chemical works as a period.
Simone Collins: Didn’t have an Islamic sounding name?
Malcolm Collins: If you didn’t have an Islamic sounding name. What’s your Islamic It wasn’t the Muslims who were doing all the inventing. It was the conquered people who were doing all the inventing.
Simone Collins: Wait.
Malcolm Collins: What? Yes. But you’ve gotta keep in mind who were the conquered people who were doing all the inventing. Right? Okay. They were Jews. The people that historically we called the Greeks, Jews, and Persians.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And Yeah. Before the Muslims were there, they were pretty inventive as well. So, you know, we don’t see a lot of Islamic inventions coming out of Egypt to let me tell you what. We don’t see a lot of Islamic inventions coming out of Saudi Arabia, coming out of the region we today know as The UAE, coming out of really any of the Arab Peninsula, a lot of the Islamic inventions that we see... I mean, the majority of them that I’m aware of came out of the the Persian region, which is a completely different population group and a population group that is historically known for its inventiveness.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, apparently, the beginning, they tried to gaslight us about this, but then Jagged eighty five just took up took up the cause.
Malcolm Collins: By the way, on the... I decided to do some some rundown here to understand if the Islamic golden age was real. Oh. So I had a... An AI breakdown. What percent of Islamic inventions during the golden age came from Persian areas or Arab areas? Right?
Simone Collins: Oh, no. Oh, no. And then
Malcolm Collins: from Arab areas, it estimated that only 20 to 30% of the Islamic Golden Age inventions came from Arab areas. And then I said, okay. Break that down further. Like, of the Arab areas, where are all these inventions coming from? Okay. And, 50 to 60% is coming from Iraq or Mesopotamia, which... Yeah. Fine. I believe that that those regions were historically very productive in terms of science and technology. Then then outside of that, 30 to 40% came from Spain.
Speaker 3: I was like, don’t know. I don’t think that’s, I’d count that
Malcolm Collins: as an Arab region. And then if you’re looking at, Egypt and North Africa, only 10 to 15%. And then if you’re looking at the Arab Peninsula proper, only five to 10%. So if we’re if we’re talking about, like, the the the areas that are now, like, claiming or I think people picture when they’re imagining the Islamic golden age Yeah. The Islamic golden age was, like, Baghdad and Spain and Persia. Okay? That would... They they... It was not the regions that that are taking claim for it today. Okay? It wasn’t freaking Saudi Arabia. Okay? And and and that they were producing almost nothing in terms of technology even in a regional golden age, I think, shows that this isn’t coming from Islam. It’s it’s coming from the relative populations in those regions. Oh my god. We absolutely have to do an episode on... Remind me to record this tomorrow K. On the blockade of, because a lot of people are unaware
Simone Collins: of Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The blockade of her moose has completely failed.
Speaker 5: To get an idea of what this means, it means we went from 16,500,000 barrels a day before the war to today at 13,500,000 barrels, which is not the same as completely open, but that’s pretty open. And we’ll explain the details of this later.
Malcolm Collins: Like, the levels of oil being shipped through it are almost up to what they were at before.
Simone Collins: Know it. You’d never know it. No spoilers, Malcolm. We’re gonna have talk about this.
Malcolm Collins: Can’t get anything through right now, and they are completely boned.
Simone Collins: Oh, really? So... Okay. Yeah. It’s the complete opposite of what people are being told then.
Malcolm Collins: Yep.
Simone Collins: Classic. Okay. But, anyway, let’s talk about this one guy who single handedly took up the cause of Islamic invention gaslighting. This is what Krami writes in his subseq post about this. Growing up, it was common trope that cultures that we now associate with poverty, violence, and oppression were once world leading in promoting prosperity and moral progress as well as the quintessentially human act of inventing. This popular belief was ultimately not driven by an earnest desire to promote awareness of empirically true but neglected facts. Instead, it was supported by anecdotes and quotations of dubious reliability and relevance by scholarship that has turned out to be exaggerated or fraudulent and by the promotion of these things in popular media. My favorite examples of this have to do with the invention of many invent... Of the inventions created... Credited to the so called Islamic golden age by a rogue Wikipedia and... Editor. Sorry. I’m so sleep deprived. Have you ever heard the name Jagged eighty five? If you’re a history buff, maybe, you’ve probably at least heard some of his claims. For example, Muslims invented funnels and sieves. Al Razi invented dissolving substances and sublimation. Jabir ibn Hayyan invented cheese glue. Ibn Sal first described the parabolic mirror. An Islamic water clock from the twelfth century has the earliest copper pipes. Avicenna formulated momentum as weight times velocity. The breath in of purity proposed a heliocentric universe before the tenth century. Darwin drew on Ibn Mizakawi’s work to develop the theory of evolution, and al Ghazali directly influenced Descartes’ later philosophical work. These are really intense claims. Right, Malcolm?
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: Anyway, he writes, there are many other claims I could add to this list. Taq al Din invented the telescope sometime in the late fifteen seventies. Avicenna discovered microorganisms. Muhammad ibn Musa discovered gravity between planets. Al Brouini discovered elliptical planetary orbits. Al Jazari invented flow regulators and feedback control. Raqqa invented a major glass factory with 300 different glass recipes being used. Or most amazingly, Albertani discovered relativity a millennium before Einstein. And he goes on to describe
Malcolm Collins: These are... At first, I was like, well, they they they didn’t really notice because he’s making dumb claims. Like, they just don’t matter. And then it’s like, relativity, evolution. Like, what?
Simone Collins: Yeah. And the craziest thing about this, which he goes on to describe in his article, isn’t just that, like, a ton of, obviously, journalists and media organizations have come to site or or parrot these facts as well as museum websites. But there is even one man whose scholarly work was cited in this guy’s citations. And then he... Maybe ten years later, like, quite a while later, so I could understand how he would forget, just reference to the Wikipedia article about this subject. Then he basically research. Yeah. In in in in subsequent papers, he wrote adjacent to the subject repeated the incorrect fact, kind of assuming... You know how, like, in in some studies that people do on... Are essentially, like, consciousness or self control. They’ll they’ll have you select a person or a political candidate in some fake election or ranking. And then they’ll later say that you selected a totally different person or candidate and be like, explain why you chose a person of
Malcolm Collins: choice blindness. Right. It’s it’s something that I go on all the time because people are like, AI doesn’t know how it can’t make decisions. I’m like, humans don’t know how that you cannot... And a person makes a decision, and you ask, how did you make that decision? Probably, a person cannot tell you how they made that decision.
Simone Collins: Well, apparently, it also works where if you state a fact and then someone says, so you once said you state insert completely different facts. They’ll be like, yes. I did.
Malcolm Collins: And That’s choice blindness. It’s a very well studied psychological phenomenon. By the way, when we’re talking about, like, inventiveness And you’re like, oh, how how inventive are the Muslims as a people? So today, Muslims make up around 25% of the world population. 25.6.
Simone Collins: Wow. That’s a lot.
Malcolm Collins: We have an increasing Muslim population in, you know, Europe and The United States that’s getting access to the same sorts of education and tools that we have access to. now what what percent of Nobel prizes in science are Muslim? Five? 0.1% to 0.5%. Oh, no. Not even a single percent. And, I mean, I’ve seen anybody who’s worked in the sciences or in engineering knows that, like, even in environments where there’s lots of Muslims, you just don’t see many Muslims, even in their own countries. Like, if you look at who’s actually running the operations of the oil stuff in, like, The Middle East That they often bring in outsiders to do that. Right? Like,
Simone Collins: anyway, continue. That is crazy. What’s what’s wild about this is just how successful he was before being caught and how it doesn’t even really matter that he was caught because at this point, his damage has been done. He is in textbooks now. He is in act... Like, well, at least his lies are in textbooks now. His lies are in museum websites and in things that people are just gonna reference on the Internet. Once one of these gets solidified into the public record, basically, it’s extremely hard to undo it, which is both scary and fascinating in terms of how you can change people’s understanding of reality or the course of history if you get your timing right and if you get enough people to repeat a lie at a certain time. And it really shows something that’s deeply broken about the way that Wikipedia works.
Malcolm Collins: I think... Well, no. I I disagree. I I think that this is actually... I think the the progressive world, since before this guy, was interested in promoting the idea of an Islamic golden age to the extent that even I fully fell for. Like, I was I was totally ready to believe that. Yeah. It it it seemed plausible given the wealth that I knew Muslims had. Now now we understand why Muslims actually had all that wealth. They basically had a scam running where they had a a a toll section. All of the the goods that were traveling from Asia to Europe had to go through the Muslim corridor, and they would charge really high taxes on it. And the moment a sea route was built along that corridor, Muslims immediately became super poor and have been fairly poor since except for the oil discoveries, which, again, kind of a cheat. Right? Like, not not exactly a a big win. Now I I will... One thing I will give Muslims, and I think Muslims are distinctly set up for this, is Muslims have been able to avoid Dutch disease at a rate higher than any other religious system on earth, except for Protestantism.
Simone Collins: What’s Dutch disease again? It’s where you get too wealthy and it ruins your country.
Malcolm Collins: Like, I mean one type of resource, like, say, oil or gold or diamonds, and it ends up creating huge amounts of corruption throughout your entire legal system, and it’s basically, like, the worst thing that can happen for your country. It happens in Africa all the time, where a lot of these countries will, discover gold or oil or something like this. And what it actually incentivizes is bad foreign actors to prevent the state from ever really stabilizing and extract as much of that as they can without any of the resources from that going to the people. Because it’s so centralized, it’s very easy to extract. the the Islamic countries, because Islam is such an authoritarian and centralized religious structure Led to... Like, if I’m a autocrat and my country is autocratic anyway and we just found a bunch of oil, it actually makes sense for me to be like, we should, like, actually keep... Because I’m the autocrat. This is my oil. Like, I’m not gonna let some foreign power extract this in a way. And as I get wealthier, I... In an Islamic country, I’m at such a stupid level of wealth. It’s it’s not that they don’t take a ton of the wealth for themselves. They just reach such insane stupid levels of wealth that they actually bleed it across to their citizenry. as we have seen in notably, The UAE and, Saudi Arabia. and, what’s that one in the in The Gulf?
Simone Collins: I can’t remember the name of it, but but it Qatar?
Malcolm Collins: Qatar. Yeah. Qatar does it well, and then there’s the one next to Qatar that also does a pretty good job with this. But the the point I’m making here is, I don’t remember where I was going with this. Anyway, continue. Oh, no. No. No. Wait. I was gonna say that that it opened me up. Getting this information at this time opened me up to maybe even go further than I otherwise would have on the Islamic golden age into fabrication. To be... To to to go with the statement of combining this bit of knowledge with being aware how much of an incentive there was for the types of progressives we see in academia to claim an Islamic golden age combined with the easy optical illusion created by Muslims taking over some of the most scientifically productive populations on Earth and being able to easily do a shell game. Well, that name sounds Islamic, so it was a Muslim. And it’s like, no. That was a Persian. Okay. That was a that was a Jew. That was a Greek. That was a... You know?
Simone Collins: Well, I think you make a really good point about Wikipedia’s general desire to make left leaning ideologies accurate. And that very different type... There is that very different type of Wikipedia vandalism that does take place in a systematic attempt to make left leaning narratives the source of truth, which we covered in a separate podcast where we talked about Tracy Woodgrain’s coverage of David Gerard and his, basically, manipulation of reliable sources on Wikipedia, which is to say sources that you were allowed to cite as an editor on Wikipedia, to disallow many sources that he coded as being too right leaning and to allow sources that may have been incredibly skewed and left leaning, but that he knew would share the narratives that he wanted. So this is... We’re talking now about a totally different type of Wikipedia vandalism, but it was already known that David Gerard and other people like him have been skewing the information that gets shared on Wikipedia by limiting the sources people are allowed to cite to much more progressive media sources. So that’s also... It’s it’s just the the number of ways that Wikipedia is manipulated is notable to me. But what jagged eighty five was doing is quite different because he was citing source... He wasn’t citing or limited or, I guess, helped by the sources he cited. What he would do was he would cite a book, or some academic paper, and he had two tricks for doing this in a way that allowed him to get away with publishing and adding just complete lies. So one of his tricks was to reference a paper that had a title that sounded like it was plausibly going to explain or justify his claim, but it was paywalled behind some, you know, academic journal. So only if you were an active university student whose, you know, university status got them a subscription to that academic journal.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, who has a motivation to talk about this?
Simone Collins: Who... Who’s gonna pay to, like, check this source? Right? It’s... What seems possible, the title’s the same. Then in other cases, sometimes in addition, he would cite sources that plausibly mention the thing. Like, with the SIVs claim, where, like, you know, Islamic people invented the SIV and the funnel. He linked to the... Like, a a tools list that the guy had. Like, a page in a book that had list of tools that he used. And funnels and sieves were on the list, but it was already well known that he had made, like, that that... I think the ancient Greeks had invented sieves and and funnels. Like, this this is not like, we know they existed well before this guy ever used them in his experiments. But he was nevertheless linking to that because someone, I guess, was like, wait. I don’t know. And then they’re, like, control f sieve and see it there, they’re like, fine. So this particular tactic that we’re talking about today really relies heavily on laziness and people just not really checking. Like, oh, I see that there’s a, like, strain, I
Malcolm Collins: guess, progressives a motivation to disprove the Islamic golden age. Right? Like, to be like, well... So why are Muslims, you know, 0.5% on the high end of Nobel Prize winners... Science Nobel Prize winners now if they apparently were so great at science historically? And we’ll go over one of the arguments that is made about this, which is actually an interesting, like, religious argument to go into, which is specifically Ashurism, which is the idea that god wills things, and that’s the only reason that things behave in a certain way. And this is an entire episode to go over this particular topic. Basically, it means that you shouldn’t be focused on cause and effect. Right? What? You you just need to be focused on god. And as soon as you focus on this, it becomes very hard to do effective science, right, when when cause and effect are not
Simone Collins: Oh, you’re saying that Islam is plagued with this ideologically, and therefore,
Malcolm Collins: they’re in No. I I mean, it wasn’t during the golden age, and it it it... This came to dominate later. So... Okay.
Simone Collins: Oh, so you’re saying... You’re you’re trying to say that at the time of the Islamic golden age, when actually there was a higher level of inventedness, relatively speaking, it may have been because they had not yet been hit of the blight... By the blight of this Yeah. Complete refutation of empiricism. Is that what you’re describing?
Malcolm Collins: So I’ll just describe it. Ashurism, the dominant theological school, emphasizes god’s absolute power and uniqueness as the sole true agent. Oconealism is a view that created things have no intrinsic causal powers. Apparent causes, fire burning cotton, medicine curing illness, etcetera, are merely occasions on which God directly creates the effect. There is no necessary connection in the nature itself. You you can see why that’s
Simone Collins: operate in, like... You can’t operate in reality with that.
Malcolm Collins: Basically, the idea is is god just likes things to be that way. It’s in the nature of god for
Simone Collins: Oh, so, like, you struck the match against the matchbook, but it only lit because god wanted it to light.
Malcolm Collins: But he just... He’s just... That’s his habit to make things light when you strike matches.
Simone Collins: When when he feels like it.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it it makes sense as an idea. Some schools of Christianity go in this direction as well. The the... You know, God can do anything he wants whenever he wants, and therefore, everything that happens is a direct will of god sort of a thing instead of god... So we will have another episode where we get into this because it actually is a deeper question that I think is very dangerous to begin to believe, and I think it’s the second biggest danger religiously for a person to believe after mysticism.
Simone Collins: Oh, sure. If something blocks you from being able to engage really well with empiricism, you’re gonna have to
Malcolm Collins: Which which is to say that all, instead of, like, god set up the way reality works, or god manipulates the way reality works while obeying the rules of the reality that he he created or is operating within, it’s people who say that, no. Reality works completely subject to god. It’s not a a a separate thing from god. Yikes. And and people who wanna be maximally expansive as their concept of god often find themselves in this position, and it’s it’s very, you know, it it can lead to you attacking scientists and science more broadly and even philosophy. I mean, this this comes from a piece called the incoherence of the philosophers.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay. Well, yeah, that’ll be a fun episode. But I’ll bring us back to this whole thing. So this is this is a such a well known problem. This this act of, like, making up facts, putting a citation down, and then just walking away quietly while you wait for the rest of the world to accept this as reality and then make it reality by putting it in trusted reliable sources, which then, of course, makes it fully provable on Wikipedia. The... Wikipedia has its own list of what they call to be cytogenesis cases, which is where people do this this practice. So they’re basically, like, either false or joke edits that have been left on the site and then were repeated by outside writers and then sometimes cited back. That’s the full circle. Okay? Let me read some off to you because there are some funny ones. There’s... First, Alan McMasters and the electric toaster. So in February 2012, University of Surrey students edited the toaster article to credit a fictional 1893 Edinburgh inventor named Alec McMasters, complete with a manipulated photograph. And the claim lasted for about a decade. It entered more than a dozen books in several languages, The Scotsman, The Mirror, a BBC cooking segment where a chef made a dessert in his honor, the Scottish government’s brand Scotland site, a primary school day, and a... The public nomination for the $50 note, sorry, £50 note. And a teenager teenager noticed that the photo looked edited in 2022, and then the biography was deleted that year, which is really funny. So, basically, people made up a fake Scots man who And then all of Scotland was like, woah.
Malcolm Collins: We’ll take it. We’ll take credit for that.
Simone Collins: They’re like, yes. So you know what? It’s not just Islamic invented this, except this time it’s a little bit more harmless because it’s a Scottish man and a toaster. But whatever. Okay? Then there’s Brazilian aardvark. In 2008, a student added Brazilian aardvark as a nickname for the Kuati. The phrase spread to hundreds of sites, The Independent, The Daily Mail, and at at least one University of Chicago press book. Editors later readded it or... Because they they now saw outside sources. So the student added it. It got cited in a bunch of... Like, well, at least it got repeated in a bunch of actual publications. It got removed because it ain’t true, but then it got added back. Because can’t you see this book that says that the Kuatis sometimes known as a Brazilian artwork? Any... Anyway, so now, basically, the name has stuck enough that it’s entered ordinary usage. The student was successful, which is delightful. And I I guess maybe this is kind of just a masterclass in how you can manipulate reality. If you really want something to be true, this is how you do it, guys. Okay? Then there’s Jar Edawenz, a 2007 joke edit created an Australian aboriginal deity of physical might and earthly knowledge, which is the name of a play on on... Or sorry. It’s the name is a play on Jared Owens. It stayed up for nearly ten years, and it was mentioned in books, including Theresa Bain’s Encyclopedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures, which was published by McFarland in 2012. And then it was exposed in 2015, And the Washington Post debunked this this particular discovery, but it still got covered in a book. There’s Joseph Basilegett’s sewer pipes. A 2007 edit inserted a false anecdote about the diameter of London sewage pipes. It was repeated by the spectator, the Hindu, the institution of civil engineers, the Museum of London in modified form, and in books of... On creative thinking and then cited back on Wikipedia in the early twenty twenties. But then it was later caught, but probably everyone believes it now. Catherine Hedinger and the the fidget spinner. Wikipedia attributed the fidget spinner to Hedinger on the basis of an unrelated 1993 patent in 2017. The Guardian and the New York Times repeated this claim, and then the error remained on the article for years afterward. And then there are other circular cases of, like... This this is really impressive. A one day edit in 2007 crediting sir Malcolm Thornhill with the first cardboard box reached at least two books and was later cited from one of them. So this this edit only survived for a day. Because you know how it is, Malcolm. Right? Like, something can be posted on Wikipedia, and then someone comes across it. They don’t think it’s good enough, and they take it down. This is... This happens all the time.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this
Simone Collins: Even during that short period, something could be cited in books, which is insane to me. Also, a false claim that Sacha Baron Cohen, you know, like Borat, had worked at Goldman Sachs, was picked up by news outlets and then used as a source. Like, that that is to say the news outlets reporting on it. I’ve actually heard that, which is not true, apparently. After Maurice Jarre’s death in 2009, fabricated quotes were inserted and copied into obituaries, which were then cited. A 2016 edit saying Mike Pompeo served in the Gulf War was repeated in the news coverage and by senator Marco Rubio before the CIA contradicted it in 2018. And, also, an unsourced origin story of the Playboy bunny name was spread into books and newspapers. So nothing is true anymore. I I can’t I I I... It’s it’s hard for me to even imagine, like, how I can tell what’s true at this point. There are some that, honestly, they they didn’t successfully make it beyond Wikipedia. That is to say people didn’t fall for it. There is this Beechom conflict article that, I guess, lasted from 2007 to 2013, which described a sixteen forty to forty one war between the Portuguese Goa and the Martha Empire that never happened. It had footnotes to nonexistent books. It was a whole thing. Like, someone just, I guess, wanted to make fan fiction on Wikipedia. And I guess it’s obscure enough that no one really cared and didn’t cite it. So it’s one of those things where you have to... If you wanna pull this off, you have to write about something like, I don’t know, the cardboard box that apparently people are obsessed with. And despite the fact that this is totally untrue, it was marked as a good article, and it was nominated for feature article before an editor checked the sources and discovered, lo and behold, they’re not real. But searches for the conflict mostly led back to the article itself, so it’s a stronger example of an internal failure to actually take it down immediately. It didn’t it didn’t break containment, but this still happens all the time on Wikipedia. So the formula for this is super, super clear. Basically, you make a false but plausible claim.
Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on.
Speaker 7: Note here was a clip that I had moved earlier in the sequence that was me double checking just how manufactured the Islamic golden age was and then finding that, uh yes, statistically, it didn’t happen in the way that it’s often portrayed as happening.
Simone Collins: Well, you never know it, Malcolm, and it’s sort of official record now. At least trusted sources on Wikipedia are But there’s a there’s a
Malcolm Collins: that have happened. Undergoing a technological overthrow of civilization, basically. I mean, it’s it’s it’s happening as we speak. That is Yeah. What everyone in our community is doing. We are technologically overthrowing culture. We’re technologically overthrowing civilization. It is taking the new technologies that we have access to. And instead of being the, you know, wimpy cock who gets miraculous technology like AI, and it’s just like, it has a progressive bias. We go out there and we say, well, can we make based AI? You know, you can get based AI on our fab.a I. can we make AI that’ll that’ll break barriers? Can we make AIs that will ask questions? can we go out there? Like, one of the things that we’ve made recently is, on the mypuppy.ai site, we made a a place where you can flash, like, Android tablets because, you know, we got Android tablets for our kids to to just have games that they can play, but not games that they can play, but, like, game, learning games they play for tokens so that they can then watch movies. But with the default movie list that I have on this thing, it’s a bunch of, like, old YouTube cartoons. One, so I’m controlling the culture that they’re in. But then two, I’m also able to go through and edit even the woke stuff from the nineties stuff. So I took out, you know, all the recycling episodes, all the episodes about the environmentalism, all the, you know, BS. I was like, My kid’s not seeing that. And so we’re updating these a lot right now whenever we’ve got a new technology out there. It’s getting constantly updated. But this is gonna be the place where our kids live is these these tablets that we’ve made for them.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, it it is clear that if if we’re talking about how to determine sources of truth at this point, I guess my new standard is, yeah, probably older information is a little bit more trustworthy. Certainly not Wikipedia, though it’s always a fun jumping off point for some things. You just can’t No.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, you’ve gotta look. You’ve gotta look. You’ve gotta stress test. You gotta say, does this, you know, like, we’re talking to these reporters, and we sent them a study that said that trans people in The UK... This is called, like, trans homicides in The UK. In 2025, that trans people were more likely to commit a homicide than be victim of a homicide. They were a predatory population, not a victim population Whenever they say, oh, I feel unsafe. Oh, I feel... No. The world isn’t safe from you, like, by the statistics. And they then said, oh, look. Cited in here is a study saying that in America, the the trend is a reverse. And I was like, did you think to look up that study? And, of course, they hadn’t looked up that study. I had seen it when I was originally looking at this, and I had dismissed it because when I looked up the study, the person who wrote it looked like the trans version of Joe Camel. Like, you don’t exactly believe the head of the cigarette company when they they tell you that cigarettes are safe. You don’t look like the guy who walks like... Looks like his entire life is about... Like, you know, one of those, like, poorly passing trans people where it’s, like, clearly their main thing. And all the stuff I could find on him where... Or her, I don’t even remember, was of her speaking at trans events and stuff like that. I’m like, obviously, she’s not gonna write that this is a danger. What are you what are you talking about? Like, do you have any credulousness?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s that’s one of my... I think, like... Again, why why do I always talk about a historical Jesus lecture series on the teaching company’s great courses? But what I really liked about that in terms of, like, determining what might be true when you’re working with, like, very old sources that are all over the place, which is kind of what reality is becoming, it feels like the the New Testaments with all their conflicting information. Was Jesus born in Bethlehem? Was he born in Nazareth? I do not know. Actually, probably not Beth... Bethlehem if you look at the actual criteria. Right? But, like, if it is not flattering to the source, probably not true... Or sorry. Probably true because, otherwise, you know, normally, people don’t like to publish stuff that’s not flattering. If it’s multiply attested, probably true, especially if it’s pretty clear that they’re not drawing from the same source material. So you can’t exactly choose, for example, books that seem to be coming... Like, pulling from q.
Malcolm Collins: Like, by... Well, if one bible book was clearly written while referencing another bible book, it’s it’s
Simone Collins: Or or the same shared source, which is the case with q Yeah. Where they think that there’s some additional, like, source that is now lost that both both books were pulling from in one case. I think Matthew and Luke is it. But, anyway, so, like, multiply attested, unflattering. I I would argue, like, either something you can personally empirically prove, like, okay. Is water wet? I can feel that. If I light something on fire, will it burn? Okay. Great. Like, you know, if you can kind of So
Malcolm Collins: so some great example is this from the bible. Right?
Simone Collins: Like Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Where... I believe it’s Mark talks about how, like, Jesus’ hometown did not like him. Right? Like, he was he was rejected by the community he was born in. That’s not something you would write about someone you’re trying to make a founder. Yeah. Being born into poverty in a in a manger is not something you write about the person you’re trying to make, you know, look like your savior. being born to... A carpenter, being born to... Like, these are things that you’re like, yeah. You probably wouldn’t write that if you were faking this,
Simone Collins: which is flattering stuff.
Speaker 6: This is one of the reasons you can basically just laugh in the face of people who say that Jesus never existed because that doesn’t pass the most basic logical checks. people, if they were making up a founder, they wouldn’t have made up a founder who was born in a manger. They wouldn’t have made up a founder with the the Nazarest ties or whose family rejected him or, you know, all of these things. They don’t make sense if you’re making something up from scratch. The the second thing I note here is people to be like, well, if you believe in the Bible , then why don’t you believe everything in the Bible matches exactly historical reality? And this has to do with how we interpret the Bible. The Bible can be true in a in a sense of how we are supposed to interpret it and what we’re supposed to gain from it. That doesn’t mean that it perfectly aligns with the historical reality of the situation. Right? Like, the historical reality being slightly different or having slight inconsistencies with what’s written doesn’t make the Bible spiritually untrue. it just means that the reason the Bible was written differently is because of what we were supposed to take from it.
Simone Collins: Although, unless it’s meant to match a prophecy, in which case, that is flattering. So you have to, like, know the context. But that just... It just makes truth finding a lot harder than it used to be, I think, where... I I guess you could never really have trusted a source. And I actually heard this recently, this this quote from Napoleon, which I’m now gonna, like, misquote, but he basically said something along the lines of history is the fable that we can all agree upon. But it’s it’s sort of like a shared myth that we, like, we... This is the lie that we’re all going to agree is canon now, and that’s that’s what we have.
Malcolm Collins: And I guess we always overturn that. We can we can rebuild this. The one civilization theory is catching wind, Simone. People like this theory. Like
Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Well, I guess there are two sides to this. Right? Oh, yes. So let let me leave you let me leave you with the the way that this is done. since, obviously, on Wikipedia, it’s already very difficult to even share the truth sometimes based on how they choose reliable sources. Again, see our our our separate episode on that. Or you can just read Tracy Woodgrain’s substack, Reliable Sources, How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record. Very enlightening. Tracy McGrince is great. Anyway, so this is how you do it. One, you make a plausible plausible claim. It has to be something people believe could be true or want to be true in the case of, you know, the Islamic golden age. It really helps if leftists want it to be true if we’re talking about Wikipedia. Then include a citation. Even if it doesn’t support it, the citation just has to be, like, on theme, basically. And then you hope it sits around long enough for a journalist or a textbook writer or a museum website to copy it, and then he wait for Wikipedia editors to then treat that claim as something that was independently confirmed. And then boom. You’re in. You’ve done it. So if you need to, like, spread something that you think is a little bit more wholesome or healthy or actually, god forbid, true. That’s the trick, guys. That would be the most wholesome outcome if suddenly people just start actually putting true things on Wikipedia and just using this method to get through all the barriers that have been placed to actually putting true things on Wikipedia. Although, I guess the problem being that make it a plausible claim step is really difficult if leftists are looking at it, and it’s a claim like, hey. Transitioning children hurts them. And they’re like, not plausible. Impossible. Impossible. They’ll kill themselves. How could you? So maybe maybe this isn’t as easy, but a girl can dream. And for now, I’m just gonna have to, I don’t know,
Malcolm Collins: take a break from reality. The the... This group is bad. Their actions, like, on our recent episode, you know, AI did not like that I pointed out, okay. A decade after they normalized gay bars, the AIDS epidemic happened. That would not have happened had they not done that. There was a reason people had a bias against indiscriminate male gay sex across cultures because the cultures that don’t form this bias have massive deaths of young male population. because this is the the... I mean, there’s a reason why there’s fewer, prohibitions against female gayness across cultures because it’s just not as important for reducing disease transfer. Yeah. And days were a vector in disease transfer. They did lead to this in order... And it’s like, I don’t want this fact to be reality. And I’m like, well, I’m sorry. It is reality. The AIDS epidemic would have been astronomically less severe if, especially within the gay population, which had hit the hardest, is if they had not normalized gay bars ten decades before. We gotta go. Ten years before. Okay. Go. Have a great one. Love you.
Simone Collins: Do you wanna wrap up? I can run. Does anyone
Malcolm Collins: know? I’m done. I love you.
Simone Collins: I love you too. You’re so sorry. Reality is broken. Bye. For whatever reason, battery on my pretty new laptop has not been lasting so well, but the fan’s been going crazy.
Malcolm Collins: Do you have vibe coding running in the background?
Simone Collins: Yeah. So that’s kinda gonna do it.
Malcolm Collins: That’s what’s doing it. She’s... I don’t know why vibe coding takes up so much power. Like...
Simone Collins: Because I think they’re they’re... Well, they’re they’re running too much stuff in parallel.
Malcolm Collins: But they’re running it on servers that aren’t yours. They’re running
Simone Collins: a lot of stuff locally. I know that because it keeps saying things like, well, if you had this installed, I’d test more, but I can’t. Very passive aggressive, but I like it.
Malcolm Collins: Make sure you have the Android thing working by tomorrow. So sync all of your changes on that, and I’ll get that fixed tonight
Simone Collins: at moment. Yeah. Things run the next build. Hopefully, the latest things that I want to fix. We’re good. Okay. Okay. Here we go
Speaker 8: Watch her march in, clipboard held high, badges on her robe, a fire in her eye. She’s never been wrong, just ask she’ll say. So I thought I’d help her be wrong today. I slipped a new book on the library shelf. Goblin True Names, I wrote it myself. Wizard names, it said. Erase their past. Use the goblin ones. She read it fast. Weasley in goblin means limited means. She believed every word. She believes what she reads. At breakfast, she rose for the whole house to hear. Good morning, Ron of limited limited means, means, dear. Dear.
Speaker 9: Oh, Granger. Granger. I’m just curious. Why are you so cute when you’re furious? Your cheeks go pink. Your fists go tight. So naive, so sweet I could take a bite.
Speaker 8: I forged her a letter signed winky elf chief. We’ll rise if you lead us spring clothes for relief. She ran to the kitchens with socks for the lot. A sock means you’re sacked, that part she forgot. 400 elves crying,
Speaker 9: no pudding, no roast. And every house knows who to blame the most.
Speaker 8: They hiss at her now. They glare and they stare away from my hamper.
Speaker 9: Granger, Eclair. Oh, Granger, Granger, I’m just glorious. Why are you so cute when you’re furious? Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight, so naive, so sweet, I could take a bite. She leaves a
Speaker 8: badge box on the table at night, so I charmed everyone with a whisper of spite. Next day, she pinned them on all she could reach. On first years, on prefects, one badge each. At noon, every badge flashed pink for a laugh.
Speaker 9: Granger still writes to Lockhart for his autograph.
Speaker 8: I had no idea it was only a bluff, but grandeur went white, and that was enough. How did you know? She shrieked at me loud, then realized she’d said it to the entire crowd.
Speaker 9: Oh, grandeur, grandeur. I’m just curious. Why are you so cute when you’re furious? Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight. So naive, so sweet, I could take a bite.
Speaker 8: I wrote her a pamphlet, anonymous, sleek. The loudest voice yields so the quiet can speak. She loved it, she quoted it, she made Neville cry. Neville, you’re centering. He’d only asked why. Then Flitwick asked something, her hand shot up high. I said, who’s the loudest in this school? Not I. She’d preached it all week. Her own rule,
Speaker 9: who knew? So she sat on her
Speaker 8: hands the whole lesson through. 91 answers and not one said I winked, she knew her face went red.
Speaker 9: Ranger. Ranger. I’m just curious. Why are you so cute when you’re furious? Your cheeks go pink. Your fists go tight. So naive, so sweet. I could take a bite.
Speaker 8: She came to my door with a pamphlet and tea. It’s your upbringing, dear. I forgive you. Me? And Harry’s been asking. He’s terribly curious. He thinks you’re so cute when
Speaker 9: you’re furious. Get out. Get out. Oh, Granger, Granger, I’m not furious.
Speaker 8: Did he cute? I’m not curious. My cheeks aren’t pink. How did Shino Granger come back? Did he really say so?