Conservapedia, P=NP, and the Fields Medal

Conservapedia, the right-wing, Christian alternative to Wikipedia has once again broken new ground. In previous entries we've discussed Conservapedia's founder Andrew Schlafly self-Godwining and Conservapedia's interesting take on Popperian falsifiability. Others have discussed Conservapedia's objections to special and general relativity. Now, Conservapedia is at it again.

Apparently, Conservapedia has taken a recent interest in mathematics. First, they added to their mainpage a take on the recent reports that Deolalikar had proven that P ≠ NP . Conservapedia announced:

University professors pile on against a non-professor's claim to have solved one of the millennium problems. MIT Assistant Professor Scott Aaronson declares, "Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed." He absurdly adds, with a cite to Richard Dawkins, "the only miracle in life is that there are no miracles, neither in mathematics nor in anything else."

But the best of the public, aided by the internet, will inevitably solve more problems than liberal colleges will - just as Grigori Perelman solved another millennium problem. The future belongs to the conservative public.

(internal links and fonts suppressed)

Apparently, Aaronson's decision to quote Richard Dawkins meant that math must be evil. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to note some of the other more glaring errors. However, this was not the end of Conservapedia's attack on establishment math for being just too liberal. Shortly after this declaration, an addition about the Fields Medal went up. The Fields Medal, awarded every four years, is for mathematics roughly equivalent to a Noble Prize(there is no Nobel in math). Conservapedia announced a "Conservapedia exclusive":

[T]his Thursday liberals will likely give the coveted Fields Medal -- math's highest honor -- to an underachieving woman and to a communist-trained mathematician from Vietnam. Is the lamestream media holding back stories about this to create a bigger splash on Thursday?

(internal links and fonts suppressed)

It is not clear what "underachieving woman" Conservapedia is thinking of, but apparently the "communist-trained mathematician" is a reference to Ngo Bao Chau, who made headlines last year for proving the Fundamental Lemma of the Langlands program. Apparently Conservapedia believes that the general media cares so much about mathematics that a failure to speculate on who will win the Fields Medal is a sign of a media conspiracy. Why a "communist-trained" mathematician would be a big deal is not clear given thatabout half of the Fields Medal winners have been either from the USSR or trained in the USSR.

Also, apparently Conservapedia is unhappy that after Terence Tao got the Fields Medal four years ago he then endorsed Barack Obama for President, Finally, we come to the detail that forced me to write this blog entry. To deal with this apparent liberal bias and affirmative action in the Fields Medal, Conservapedia is starting its own award for mathematicians, the "ConservaMath Medal." According to the website this Medal is "the merit-based alternative to the Fields Medal, with winners announced at the same time so that real achievement is recognized." I'll let that speak for itself.

Conservapedia, The Telegraph and the BNP

Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly is at it again. Shane Richmond, a technology writer for The Telegraph, wrote about a blog entry about PopModal, a right-wing alternative to Youtube (incidentally, this is not the first attempt at a conservative alternative to Youtube). In mocking PopModal, Richmond mentioned Conservapedia in passing:

Like Conservapedia, the encyclopedia that has no time for reality's liberal bias, PopModal offers a "conservative alternative" to YouTube.

Conservapedia responded by declaring on their mainpage that "Conservapedia is the benchmark for the liberal Telegraph in England to use in describing other new media alternatives." By itself, this would be mildly humorous and not worth a separate blog entry. However, what happened next is Conservapedia at its finest. People attempted to explain to Schlafly the myriad problems with the declaration. One user wrote:

I don't think that Telegraph article you're posting on the Main Page is appropriate. First, the Telegraph is anything but liberal and has always been considered the most conservative of all UK daily broadsheets, with an almost exclusively an older, suburban Tory Party readership...
Secondly, the article itself is clearly mocking Conservapedia.

Andrew responded in his typical fashion by declaring that the writer clearly has a liberal bias and that Britain was so hopelessly liberal that "Saying something is the most conservative newspaper in the UK is like saying someone is ... the smartest student in a remedial class. "And now the real fun starts. The conversation gets more meandering and comes to the topic of the British National Party where Schlafly states that his main problem with the BNP is that they are in favor of universal health-care:

The BNP might get my vote for its position alone on education: "We will end the practice of politically correct indoctrination." Of course, I expect knee-jerk liberals to claim there is something racist about that or about the BNP in general, but overuse of the racist label as a political tactic has gotten pretty tiresome for everyone on this side of the pond.

I'm not impressed by the lack of social positions (like abortion, marriage, prayer in the classroom, etc.) on the BNP website you reference. This position by the BNP is not conservative at all: "We are wholly committed to a free, fully funded National Health Service for all British citizens."

This is particularly interesting since Conservapedia's own entry on the BNP describes them as neo-Nazis. There's an old rule on the internet known as Godwin's Law which in its simplest form states that as any conversation on the internet continues, the probability that a reference to Nazi's will occur approaches one. Generally, it is taken for granted that if one side compares their opponents to Nazis then that side has by default lost the argument. I don't know how to apply such a rule when someone on their own accord compares their opinions to those of neo-Nazis. I'm also not aware of any other occasion in which an individual has stated that their biggest problem with neo-Nazis is that the Nazis support universal health care.

Conservapedia and the Earth's Moon

Conservapedia is an attempt at a wiki to write an encyclopedia from a right-wing, Christian perspective. The project was founded by Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly. Conservapedia is a toxic combination of of political extremism, ignorance and gross stupidity.

Mike Dunford over at The Questionable Authority has found what even by Conservapedia standards takes the prize. This is more extreme than Conservapedia claiming that Barack Obama is a Muslim born outside the United States. This is more extreme than Conservapedia claiming that Leif Erickson never came to America and that the story is a liberal myth designed to undermine the accomplishment of the good Christian Christopher Columbus.

Mike found the following sentence in the article on the Moon:

Atheistic theories of the origin of the Moon, widely taught for decades despite lacking the falsifiability requirement of science (see Philosophy of science), have been proven false.

Let's just contemplate that sentence for a minute. This is the point in a blog post where one would normally eviscerate the quote in question. That's not necessary in this case.

I cannot determine whether the sentence in question was added in as a parody. On the one hand, the editor who made the edit only made a few edits to Conservapedia. This argues that it may have been added by a parodist. Furthermore, even Conservapedia editors are rarely this bad. Conservapedia has a long history of parodists infiltrating the project and producing deliberately extreme views.

On the other hand, the edit was made with an accurate edit summary which would not likely be added by a simple parody. The editor also made other edits to other articles some of which look productive.

On the gripping hand, the edit was made in December of 2007 and has stayed in the article for over a year. Since then the article has been edited by at least 3 Conservapedia sysops as one can see from a glance at the article's history page. So the article about a basic topic has had this sentence in it for over a year. In fact the same editor added an additional sentence repeating the standard misconception that the Moon's phases are caused by the Earth's shadow. After Roger Schlafly, Andrew's smarter and saner brother, attempted to take the claim about the Moon's phases out he was reverted by a Conservapedia sysop who thought that the information was correct. In all this time, no one bothered cleaning up this sentence.

Whether or not its original addition was a parody, the history of this article does not reflect well on Conservapedia. Conservapedia's own editors cannot distinguish between parody, actual Conservapedia beliefs, and simple sloppiness. And thus, Conservapedia remains the laughing-stock of the internet.