| It seems like an entire generation has grown up believing that vote features on the Internet exist to improve quality, because that's what they were told by the websites who marketed those features. Members of a prior generation may remember that voting features were introduced explicitly to improve engagement, not quality. Those little triangles next to this comment are there to give you something to do, and thereby hopefully increase the chance that you'll feel invested in this site to come back. Not to discover the truth, improve awareness of facts, or build community. Voting is a mechanism by which people express their values. If people know facts and value them, then a voting mechanism will deliver facts. But if they don't, then it won't. I will say it seems to take an impressive lack of introspection to spend thousands of words expertly fact-checking how Community Notes works, and yet still conclude that fact-checking by experts "seems risky." Vitaly's personal values are expressed most clearly here: > ultimately I come down on the side that it is better to let ten misinformative tweets go free than it is to have one tweet covered by a note that judges it unfairly It should be noted that he is less sanguine about letting misinformation run free when he is complaining about inaccurate press coverage of cryptocurrency. (Pretty much like anyone who complains about inaccurate press coverage, honestly.) It's always easier to be sanguine about someone else's misinformation that affects other people. |
Only if you take the label "expert" as given and not itself subject to fact checking.
Very few people have a problem with expert fact checking, if that person is actually an expert. Hence why most people will listen to specialists doing work on their home, or their accountant when receiving tax advice. It's not controversial and doesn't differ by political stance. In this case Vitalik is clearly qualified to read, understand and explain ML Python; he is agreed upon by all to genuinely have expertise (relative to the average layman at least).
The reason that expertise has become so controversial nowadays is due to the left's habit of automatically labelling any academic or civil servant an expert, and continuing to insist on the unquestionable nature of their expertise even after widely publicized and very basic failures. To other people expertise is something you have to prove via unambiguous and exceptional results, not merely assert via title, and the public sector's general lack of quantifiably positive results makes academic expertise frequently subject to dispute.