Based Camp - The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia： WTF!？

00:00:00.580 Hello, Malcolm. I'm very excited to be speaking with you today because Cremieux on X, who we love and have met, recently laid bare the damage a single person can do, telling the tale of Jagged85, a Wikipedia user who vandalized, and I'm quoting from him now, vandalized thousands of articles while making over 87,000 Wikipedia edits in the time between starting 2005 and being caught in 2012.

00:00:26.720 those edits have led to hundreds of false claims misattributed to history books and papers and now

00:00:32.240 those claims are alive on the internet being repeated ceaselessly and promoted as if they're

00:00:37.640 true when they are anything but several of these claims have been even seeped into the scholarly

00:00:42.860 literature and are now gaining some credence as true facts by virtue of being repeated by scholars 0.85

00:00:48.640 and misled so hold on so a guy made 80 000 false edits claiming muslims invented stuff muslims

00:00:57.160 didn't invent and now it made its way into the scholarly literature at this point because so

00:01:01.880 many people were using wikipedia as a source yes very lazily as it so happens so today i want to

00:01:06.500 go over that case and other known cases of what you might call reality vandalism and i want to

00:01:12.720 say known because we're only aware of the egregious cases where people actually went too far and got

00:01:17.220 caught i mean again jagged 85 made 87 000 wikipedia edits if you just make some subtle edits and

00:01:24.580 manipulate things long enough for them to get picked up by a journalist and then you know

00:01:27.800 sort of entered into the public record as a fact you can get away with it who knows how much stuff

00:01:33.080 we think is true that isn't true in fact let's start with just a case study that actually goes

00:01:37.600 way back you've heard that the average person swallows eight spiders a year right yes i have

00:01:43.340 heard that do you know where this comes from i do not know where it comes from okay so i had heard

00:01:50.220 on a podcast they tried to fake people out about it right like they tried this so this is what i

00:01:55.360 heard okay that in a 1993 pc for professional article columnist columnist lisa holst wrote

00:02:02.240 about the ubiquitous lists of facts that were circulating via email and how readily they were

00:02:08.180 accepted as truthful by gullible recipients and then to demonstrate her point holst offered her

00:02:14.920 own made-up list of equally ridiculous facts among which was the statistic decided about mosquitoes

00:02:21.200 or sorry not about mosquitoes about um spiders um that the average person swallowed eight spiders a

00:02:27.060 year and then she took that apparently from a collection of common misbeliefs pointing to a

00:02:32.700 1954 book on insect folklore and in fantastic irony holst's propagation of this false fact

00:02:40.120 spurred it into becoming one of the most wildly circulated bits of misinformation

00:02:44.300 found on the internet so that's what i heard on a podcast once and it's also what is listed on

00:02:51.000 the snopes article about this fact so if you look up swallows you know eight spiders like is this

00:02:56.060 true and you click on snow wait is this story also not true yeah so if you click on this linked

00:03:02.040 content in the snopes article it goes to a different page and it reads this is a big troll

00:03:10.320 and then it says checking your sources it is an essential part of the fact checking process

00:03:14.660 it's a good thing that you're checking this one specifically well the 1954 book insect back in

00:03:20.140 folklore is real if you checked page 24 you would find that it says nothing about the people swallow

00:03:25.840 eight spiders a year in rumor which likely originated decades after its publication after

00:03:30.740 failing to find any relevant material in the cited book you may be led by your curiosity to

00:03:35.280 discover that pc for professional and columnist lisa bridget holst did not exist the latter's

00:03:42.420 name which many readers have successfully discovered is an anagram of the phrase this is a

00:03:47.620 big troll oh my god well some wish to credit us with the origins of this rumor this urgent lever

00:03:53.720 legend legend predated our own debunking for example the 12th entry on snopes snopes

00:04:00.640 has the troll the troll yes yes so i heard on this podcast the made-up story that snopes made

00:04:08.600 up to troll people who don't click through to sources which is exactly what all the people

00:04:14.420 that jagged 85 got tricked you know wait snopes made up this fake story or they're saying we

00:04:19.240 didn't make it snopes made up the story about pc for professional and lisa holst okay are you sure

00:04:26.480 this isn't a triple troll how far down does this go no like i mean it doesn't link to anything else

00:04:33.440 after this what they're trying to say though um is that they created this easter egg this this

00:04:39.840 linked to part of the egg spider swallowing entry 20 years ago in april 2001 as a wink to their

00:04:47.620 longtime readers who were familiar with the trolling they engaged in during their early days

00:04:51.400 of the internet um and they're still trying to find the origins of the spider swallowing rumor

00:04:56.320 but what's so funny to me is that their fake troll explanation behind the rumor made it in a podcast

00:05:04.300 that you and i have heard yes has now been like has become like facts so like people are like oh

00:05:11.020 that's not true that was made up by some woman who's trying to prove that facts are just made up

00:05:15.500 and then they're just repeating the whole thing because they didn't check the source so this just

00:05:20.740 goes to show how vulnerable we are to this kind of trolling or reality vandalism or whatever you

00:05:28.460 want to call it okay so let this just be the first illustration to you of just how completely insane

00:05:34.760 this is but then so that was a fun troll right like oh spider swallowing and this it goes it's

00:05:39.460 it's it's trolling all the way down like how far down are we gonna go with a spider swallowing rumor

00:05:43.420 but then it's a little bit weirder when it's someone gaslighting you about the inventiveness

00:05:50.080 of islam right yeah like why do they need to why why here's the here's the bigger question yeah why 0.71

00:05:56.160 did they need to do this why did islam invent so little that it would actually surprise you

00:06:03.760 which is one of the things that i've been learning as i've dug more into medieval islamic history

00:06:09.640 which is that a what what actually happened is because i've noted like they were known as

00:06:15.720 inventive to the extent that like people would not take alchemical works seriously or basically

00:06:20.740 chemical works as a period didn't have an islamic sounding name if you didn't have an islamic 0.84

00:06:24.260 name what's your islamic name it wasn't the muslims who were doing all the inventive 0.61

00:06:29.760 it was the conquered people who were doing all the inventive wait what yes but you've got to 0.53

00:06:35.980 keep in mind who were the conquered people who were doing all the inventive right okay they were 0.74

00:06:41.740 Jews. The people that historically

00:06:43.880 we called the

00:06:45.180 Greeks, Jews,

00:06:47.740 and Persians. 1.00

00:06:49.140 And before 1.00

00:06:51.660 the Muslims were there, they were pretty 1.00

00:06:53.540 inventive as well. 0.99

00:06:55.440 So, you know, we don't see 1.00

00:06:57.640 a lot of Islamic inventions

00:06:59.480 coming out of Egypt, let me tell you 0.93

00:07:01.680 what. We don't see a lot of

00:07:03.740 Islamic inventions coming out 0.93

00:07:05.680 of Saudi Arabia, coming out of the

00:07:07.660 region we today know as the UAE,

00:07:10.040 coming out of

00:07:11.740 really any of the arab peninsula a lot of the islamic inventions that we see i mean the majority

00:07:17.540 of them that i'm aware of came out of the persian region um which is a completely different

00:07:21.540 population group and a population group that is historically known for its inventiveness

00:07:25.660 yeah yeah yeah well you know apparently from the beginning they tried to gaslight us about this but

00:07:32.220 then jagged 85 just took up took up the cause by the way on the i decided to do some some rundown

00:07:38.220 here to understand if the islamic golden age was real um so i had an ai break down what percent

00:07:46.020 of islamic inventions during the golden age uh came from persian areas or arab areas right

00:07:52.900 oh no oh no and then from arab areas it estimated that only 20 to 30 percent of the islamic golden

00:07:58.860 age inventions came from arab areas um and then i said okay break that down further like of the

00:08:04.580 arab areas where are all these inventions coming from um and uh 50 to 60 percent is coming from

00:08:11.420 iraq or mesopotamia which yeah fine i believe that those regions were historically very productive

00:08:16.780 in terms of science and technology um then then outside of that uh 30 to 40 percent came from

00:08:23.840 spain i was like i don't oh i don't think that uh i count that as an arab region and then if you're

00:08:31.160 looking at uh egypt and north africa only 10 to 15 percent and then if you're looking at the arab

00:08:38.280 peninsula proper only five to ten percent so if we're talking about like the the um the areas

00:08:44.000 that are now like claiming or i think people picture when they're imagining the islamic golden

00:08:47.920 age uh the islamic golden age was like baghdad and spain and persia okay that it was not the

00:08:56.280 regions that that are taking claim for it today okay it wasn't freaking saudi arabia okay um and

00:09:02.880 and and that they were producing almost nothing in terms of technology even in a regional golden

00:09:08.680 age i think shows that this isn't coming from islam it's it's coming from the relative populations in

00:09:14.320 those regions oh my god we absolutely have to do an episode on remind me to record this tomorrow

00:09:20.800 okay on the blockade of because a lot of people are unaware of hormones yeah yeah yeah but the

00:09:26.700 blockade of her moose has completely failed to get an idea of what this means it means we went

00:09:31.720 from 16.5 million barrels a day before the war to today at 13.5 million barrels which is not the

00:09:40.220 same as completely open but that's pretty open and we'll explain the details of this later like

00:09:47.760 the levels of oil being shipped through it are almost up to what they were at before.

00:09:51.940 You'd never know it. You'd never know it. No spoilers, Malcolm.

00:09:54.900 But Iran can't get anything through right now, and they are completely boned. 1.00

00:10:00.820 Oh, really? So, okay. Yeah. It's the complete opposite of what people are being told then. 1.00

00:10:05.500 Yep.

00:10:06.160 Classic. Okay, but anyway, let's talk about this one guy who single-handedly took up the cause of

00:10:10.480 Islamic invention gaslighting. This is what Crimea writes in his sub-stack post about this. 0.64

00:10:15.920 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.

00:10:28.920 This popular belief was ultimately not driven by an earnest desire to promote awareness of empirically true but neglected facts.

00:10:36.880 Instead, it was supported by anecdotes and quotations of dubious reality and relevance by scholarship that has turned out to be exaggerated or fraudulent and by the promotion of these things in popular media.

00:10:48.940 My favorite examples of this have to do with the invention of many of the inventions credited to the so-called Islamic Golden Age by a rogue Wikipedia editor.

00:10:59.500 Sorry, I'm so sleep deprived.

00:11:01.260 Have you ever heard the name Jagged85?

00:11:04.100 If you're a history buff, maybe, you've probably at least heard some of his claims. 1.00

00:11:08.640 For example, Muslims invented funnels and sieves. 0.92

00:11:12.680 Al-Razi invented dissolving substances and sublimation. 1.00

00:11:16.060 Jabir ibn Hayin invented cheese glue. Ibn Sal first described the parabolic mirror. 0.95

00:11:24.020 An Islamic water clock from the 12th century has the earliest copper pipes.

00:11:28.980 Avicenna formulated momentum as weight times velocity. The breath in of purity proposed a

00:11:36.820 heliocentric universe before the 10th century. Darwin drew on Ibn Mizekawi's work to develop

00:11:43.680 the theory of evolution, and Al-Ghazali directly influenced Descartes' later philosophical work.

00:11:50.640 These are really intense claims, right, Malcolm? Yes! Anyway, he writes, there are many other

00:11:57.080 claims I could add to this list. Tak al-Din invented the telescope sometime in the late

00:12:01.660 1570s. Avicenna discovered microorganisms. Mohamed ibn Musa discovered gravity between planets.

00:12:08.380 al bruni discovered elliptical planetary orbits al jazari invented flow regulators and feedback

00:12:15.480 control raka invented a major class factory with 300 different glass recipes being used or most

00:12:22.520 amazingly al batani discovered relativity a millennium before einstein um and he goes on to 0.85

00:12:30.260 describe at first i was like well the people didn't notice because he's making dumb claims

00:12:34.880 like they just don't matter and then it's like relativity evolution like what yeah um and the

00:12:41.960 craziest thing about this which he goes on to describe in his article isn't just that like a

00:12:46.680 ton of obviously journalists and media organizations have come to cite or or parrot these facts as well

00:12:54.040 as museum websites but there is even one man whose scholarly work was cited in this guy's citations

00:13:01.980 and then he maybe 10 years later like quite a while later so i could understand how he would

00:13:08.560 forget just reference to the wikipedia article about this subject and then he basically research

00:13:14.300 yeah in in in subsequent papers he wrote adjacent to the subject repeated the incorrect fact

00:13:21.240 kind of assuming you know how like in in um some studies that people do on uh are essentially like

00:13:29.180 consciousness or self-control they'll they'll have you select a person or a political candidate

00:13:34.920 and in some fake election or ranking and then they'll later say that you selected a totally

00:13:40.860 different person or candidate and be like explain why you chose this person it's called choice

00:13:44.400 blindness right it's it's something that i go on all the time because people like ai doesn't know

00:13:49.000 how it can't make decisions i'm like humans don't know how that you cannot if a person makes a

00:13:53.140 decision and you ask how did you make that decision provably a person cannot tell you how

00:13:56.980 they made that decision well apparently it also works where if you state a fact and then someone

00:14:01.520 says so you once said you state insert completely different facts they'll be like yes i did and

00:14:07.080 choice blindness it's a very well studied psychological phenomenon um by the way when

00:14:12.520 we're talking about like inventiveness you're like oh how how inventive are the muslims as a people

00:14:18.160 uh so today muslims make up around 25 percent of the world population 25.6 wow that's a lot we have

00:14:25.900 an increasing muslim population in you know europe and the united states that's getting

00:14:31.300 access to the same sorts of education and tools that we have access to now what what percent of

00:14:37.960 nobel prizes in science are muslim five zero point one percent to zero point five percent

00:14:47.760 oh no not even a single percent and i mean i've seen anybody who's worked in the sciences or in 1.00

00:14:55.660 engineering knows that like even in environments where there's lots of muslims you just don't see

00:15:00.420 many muslims um even in their own countries like if you look at who's actually running the

00:15:06.000 operations of the oil stuff in like the middle east they often bring in outsiders to do that

00:15:13.080 right like anyway continue that is crazy what's what's wild about this is just how successful he

00:15:22.240 was before being caught and how it doesn't even really matter that he was caught because at this

00:15:27.660 point his damage has been done he is in textbooks now he is an act like well at least his lies are

00:15:33.100 in textbooks now his lies are in museum websites and in things that people are just going to

00:15:38.760 reference on the internet once one of these gets solidified into the public record basically it's

00:15:44.500 extremely hard to undo it which is both scary and fascinating in terms of how you can change

00:15:51.880 people's understanding of reality or the course of history if you get your timing right and if

00:15:56.440 you get enough people to repeat a lie at a certain time um and it really shows something that's

00:16:01.260 deeply broken about the way that wikipedia works um well no i i disagree i i think that this is

00:16:07.700 actually i think the the progressive world since before this guy was interested in promoting the

00:16:14.820 idea of an islamic golden age to the extent that even i fully fell for it like i was i was totally 0.96

00:16:20.040 ready to believe that um it it seemed plausible given the wealth that i knew muslims had now 1.00

00:16:26.100 now we understand why muslims actually had all that wealth they basically had a scam running 0.99

00:16:31.120 where they uh had a a toll section all of the the goods that were traveling from asia to europe had 1.00

00:16:37.220 to go through the muslim corridor and they would charge really high taxes on it and the moment 0.95

00:16:44.060 a sea route was built along that corridor muslims immediately became super poor um and have been 1.00

00:16:50.700 fairly poor since except for the oil discoveries which again kind of a cheat right like not not 1.00

00:16:55.920 exactly um a big win now but i will one thing i will give muslims and i think muslims are 0.83

00:17:02.520 distinctly set up for this is muslims have been able to avoid dutch disease at a rate higher than 0.86

00:17:12.000 any other religious system on earth uh except for protestantism what's such disease again it's 0.98

00:17:18.080 where you get too wealthy and it ruins your country like one type of resource like say oil

00:17:24.240 or gold or diamonds um and it ends up creating huge amounts of corruption throughout your entire

00:17:31.800 legal system and it's basically like the worst thing that can happen for your country it happens 0.96

00:17:35.380 in Africa all the time, where a lot of these countries will discover gold or oil or something

00:17:43.080 like this. And what it actually incentivizes is bad foreign actors to prevent the state from ever 0.85

00:17:50.840 really stabilizing and extract as much of that as they can without any of the resources from that 0.77

00:17:57.140 going to the people. Because it's so centralized, it's very easy to extract. The Islamic countries

00:18:04.760 because islam is such an authoritarian and centralized religious structure um 1.00

00:18:10.880 led to like if i'm a autocrat and my country is autocratic anyway and we just found a bunch of oil 0.92

00:18:19.980 um it actually makes sense for me to be like we should like actually keep because i'm the autocrat

00:18:26.440 this is my oil like i'm not gonna let some foreign power extract this in a way and as i get wealthier 0.97

00:18:32.520 i in an islamic country i'm at such a stupid level of wealth um it's not that they don't 1.00

00:18:37.760 take a ton of the wealth for themselves they just reach such insane stupid levels of wealth 1.00

00:18:41.500 that they actually bleed it across to their citizenry as we have seen in notably the uae 0.96

00:18:47.800 and saudi arabia and um what's that one in the in the gulf i can't remember the name of it but

00:18:54.840 qatar yeah qatar does well and then there's the one next to qatar that also does a pretty good

00:19:00.420 job with this but uh could the the point i'm making here is i don't remember where i was

00:19:06.800 going with this anyway continue oh no i was gonna say that that it opened me up getting this

00:19:13.900 information at this time opened me up to maybe even go further than i otherwise would have on

00:19:20.160 the islamic golden ages of fabrication uh to be to to to go with the statement of combining this

00:19:30.360 bit of knowledge with being aware how much of an incentive there was for the types of progressives 0.75

00:19:38.620 we see in academia to claim an islamic golden age combined with the easy optical illusion created 0.99

00:19:45.660 by muslims taking over some of the most scientifically productive populations on earth 0.99

00:19:51.420 and being able to easily do a shell game well that name sounds islamic so it was a muslim and 0.84

00:19:57.020 it's like, no, that was a Persian. Okay. That was a, that was a Jew. That was a Greek. That was a,

00:20:03.540 you know. Well, I think you make a really good point about Wikipedia's general desire to make

00:20:11.040 left-leaning ideologies accurate. And that very different type, there is that very different type

00:20:16.820 of Wikipedia vandalism that does take place in a systematic attempt to make left-leaning narratives

00:20:23.000 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

00:20:53.000 skewed and left-leaning but that he knew would share the narratives that he wanted so this is

00:20:58.460 we're talking now about a totally different type of wikipedia vandalism but it was already known

00:21:04.240 that david gerard and other people like him have been skewing the information that gets shared on

00:21:10.420 wikipedia by limiting the sources people are allowed to cite to much more progressive media

00:21:17.020 sources so that's also it's just the the number of ways that wikipedia is manipulated is notable to

00:21:22.620 me. But what Jagged85 was doing is quite different because he was citing sources. He wasn't citing

00:21:30.220 or limited or I guess helped by the sources he cited. What he would do was he would cite

00:21:35.900 a book or some academic paper. And he had two tricks for doing this in a way that allowed him

00:21:42.160 to get away with publishing and adding just complete lies. So one of his tricks was to

00:21:47.580 reference a paper that had a title that sounded like it was plausibly going to explain or justify

00:21:53.220 his claim, but it was paywalled behind some, you know, academic journal. So only if you were an

00:22:00.520 active university student, who's, you know, university status got them a subscription to

00:22:04.500 that academic journal. Who has a motivation to target? Who's going to pay to like, check this

00:22:10.440 source, right? It's what seems plausible. The title's the same. Then in other cases, sometimes

00:22:15.600 in addition he would cite sources that plausibly mentioned the thing like with the sieves claim

00:22:21.580 um where like you know islamic people invented the sieve and the funnel he linked to the like a

00:22:29.320 a tools list that the guy had like a page in a book that had a list of tools that he used

00:22:34.780 and funnels and sieves were on the list but it was already well known that he had made

00:22:44.180 like that i think the ancient greeks had invented sieves and and funnels like this this is not like

00:22:50.000 we know they existed well before this guy ever used them in his experiments um but he was

00:22:55.740 nevertheless linking to that because someone i guess was like wait i don't know and then they

00:23:00.440 like control f sieve and see it there and they're like fine so this particular tactic that we're

00:23:06.060 talking about today really relies heavily on laziness and people just not really checking

00:23:13.140 like oh i see that there's a well there isn't i guess progressives a motivation to disprove the

00:23:18.260 islamic golden age right like to be like well so why are muslims you know 0.5 percent on the high 0.83

00:23:24.540 end of nobel prize winners science nobel prize winners now if they apparently were so great at 0.74

00:23:29.760 science historically and we'll go over one of the arguments that is made about this which is actually

00:23:34.240 an interesting like religious argument to go into uh which is specifically uh asherism

00:23:41.440 um which is the idea that god wills things and that's the only reason that things behave in a

00:23:49.840 certain way um and this is an entire episode to go over this particular topic basically it means

00:23:55.420 that you shouldn't be focused on cause and effect right what uh you you just need to be focused on

00:24:03.180 god and as soon as you focus on this it becomes very hard to do effective science right uh when

00:24:08.940 cause and effect are not oh so you're saying that um islam is plagued with this ideologically and

00:24:15.420 therefore they're in no i mean it wasn't during the golden age and it it this came to dominate

00:24:20.100 later so okay oh so you're saying you're trying to say that at the time of the islamic golden age

00:24:25.860 when actually there was a higher level of inventedness relatively speaking it may have 0.69

00:24:30.920 been because they had not yet been hit of the blight by the blight of this

00:24:34.280 yeah complete refutation of empiricism is that what you're describing so i'll just describe it

00:24:40.940 asherism the dominant theological school emphasizes god's absolute power and uniqueness

00:24:44.940 as the sole true agent akanealism is a view that created things have no intrinsic causal powers

00:24:52.640 apparent causes fire burning cotton medicine curing illness etc are merely occasions on

00:24:58.320 which god directly creates the effect there is no necessary connection in the nature itself

00:25:03.420 you can't operate in like you can't operate in reality with basically the idea is is god just

00:25:11.620 likes things to be that way it's in the nature of god oh so like you struck the match against

00:25:18.740 the matchbook but it only lit because god wanted it to light but he just he's just that's his habit

00:25:25.960 to make things light when you strike matches when it when he feels like it well it makes sense as an

00:25:32.680 idea some schools of christianity go in this direction as well the the you know god can do

00:25:38.220 anything he wants whenever he wants and therefore everything that happens is a direct will of god

00:25:44.200 sort of a thing instead of god so we will have another episode where we get into this because

00:25:51.020 it actually is a deeper question that i think is very dangerous to begin to believe and i think

00:25:55.500 it's the second biggest danger religiously for a person to believe after mysticism

00:25:59.760 Oh, sure.

00:26:00.480 If something blocks you from being able to engage really well with empiricism, you're

00:26:04.280 going to have to...

00:26:04.460 Which is to say that instead of God set up the way reality works, or God manipulates

00:26:13.740 the way reality works while obeying the rules of the reality that he created or is operating

00:26:19.220 within, it's people who say that, no, reality works completely subject to God.

00:26:25.560 It's not a separate thing from God.

00:26:28.500 Yeah, exactly.

00:26:29.180 And people who want to be maximally expansive with their concept of God often find themselves in this position.

00:26:34.460 And it's very, you know, it can lead to you attacking scientists and science more broadly and even philosophy.

00:26:41.700 I mean, this comes from a piece called The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

00:26:45.720 Oh, okay.

00:26:46.740 Well, yeah, that'll be a fun episode.

00:26:48.180 But I'll bring us back to this whole thing.

00:26:49.680 So this is such a well-known problem.

00:26:52.980 this this act of like making up facts putting a citation down and then just walking away quietly

00:27:00.580 while you wait for the rest of the world to accept this as reality and then make it reality by putting

00:27:05.160 it in trusted reliable sources which then of course makes it fully provable on wikipedia

00:27:10.520 that wikipedia has its own list of what they call to be cytogenesis cases which is where people do

00:27:18.380 this this practice so they're basically like either false or joke edits that have been left

00:27:23.200 on the site and then were repeated by outside writers and then sometimes cited back that's the

00:27:27.160 full circle okay let me read some off to you because there are some funny ones there's first

00:27:33.520 alan mcmasters and the electric toaster so in february of 2012 university of surrey students

00:27:39.540 edited the toaster article to credit a fictional 1893 edinburgh inventor named alex mcmasters

00:27:46.480 complete with a manipulated photograph and the claim lasted for about a decade it entered more

00:27:52.100 than a dozen books in several languages the scotsman the mirror a bbc cooking segment where

00:27:58.240 a chef made a dessert in his honor the scottish government's brand scotland site a primary school

00:28:04.360 day and a the public nomination for the 50 dollar note uh sorry 50 pound note and a teenager

00:28:11.660 teenager noticed that the photo looked edited in 2022 and then the biography was deleted that year

00:28:19.280 which is really funny so basically people made up a fake scotsman who and then all of scotland was

00:28:26.600 like whoa we'll take it we'll take credit for they're like yes so you know what it's not just 0.90

00:28:30.760 islamic inventedness except this time it's a little bit more harmless because it's a scottish

00:28:34.780 man and a toaster, but whatever. Okay. Then there's Brazilian aardvark. In 2008, a student 0.86

00:28:41.480 added Brazilian aardvark as a nickname for the Kuwaiti. The phrase spread to hundreds of sites,

00:28:47.540 the Independent, the Daily Mail, and at least one University of Chicago press book. Editors later

00:28:53.360 re-added it because they now saw outside sources. So the student added it. It got cited in a bunch

00:29:00.500 of like well at least it got repeated in a bunch of actual publications it got removed because it

00:29:05.740 ain't true but then it got added back because can't you see this book that says that the

00:29:11.580 is sometimes known as a brazilian artwork anyway um so now basically the name has stuck enough that

00:29:20.140 it's entered ordinary usage the student was successful which is delightful and i i guess

00:29:26.060 maybe this is kind of just a master class in how you can manipulate reality if you really want

00:29:30.140 something to be true this is how you do it guys okay then there's um jar etta wins a 2007 joke

00:29:37.500 edit created an australian aboriginal deity of physical might and earthly knowledge which is

00:29:44.380 the name of a play on sorry it's a the name is a play on jared owens it stayed up for nearly 10

00:29:51.180 years and it was mentioned in books including teresa bain's encyclopedia of demons in world

00:29:56.420 Religions and Cultures, which was published by McFarland in 2012. And then it was exposed in

00:30:01.680 2015. And the Washington Post debunked this particular discovery, but it still got covered

00:30:08.400 in a book. There's Joseph Baselgett's Sewer Pipes. A 2007 edit inserted a false anecdote about the

00:30:15.440 diameter of London's sewage pipes. It was repeated by the Spectator, the Hindu, the Institution of

00:30:20.540 Civil Engineers, the Museum of London in modified form, and in books on creative thinking, and then

00:30:25.920 cited back on wikipedia in the early 2020s but then it was later caught but probably everyone

00:30:30.600 believes it now katherine hettinger and the the fidget spinner wikipedia attributed the fidget

00:30:36.560 spinner to hettinger on the basis of an unrelated 1993 patent in 2017 the guardian and the new york

00:30:43.100 times repeated this claim and then the error remained on the article for years afterward

00:30:47.340 and then there are other circular cases of like this this is really impressive a one-day edit in

00:30:53.500 2007, crediting Sir Malcolm Thornhill with the first cardboard box, reached at least two books

00:31:01.280 and was later cited from one of them. So this, this edit only survived for a day because you

00:31:09.500 know how it is, Malcolm, right? Like something can be posted on Wikipedia and then someone comes

00:31:14.140 across it. They don't think it's good enough and they take it down. This is, this happens all the

00:31:18.200 time yeah so this even during that short period something could be cited in books which is insane

00:31:25.440 to me also a false claim that sasha baron cohen you know like borat um had worked at goldman sachs

00:31:33.340 was picked up by news outlets and then used as a source like that is to say the news outlets

00:31:39.300 reporting on it i've actually heard that um which is not true apparently after maurice jar's death

00:31:44.640 in 2009 fabricated quotes were inserted and copied into obituaries which were then cited

00:31:49.280 a 2016 edit saying mike pompeo served in the gulf war was repeated in the news coverage and by

00:31:55.220 senator marco rubio before the cia contradicted it in 2018 and also an unsourced origin story

00:32:01.780 of the playboy bunny name was spread into books and newspapers so nothing is true anymore um i i

00:32:08.320 can't i i it's it's hard for me to even imagine like how i can tell what's true at this point

00:32:14.340 there are some that honestly they didn't successfully make it beyond wikipedia that

00:32:19.460 is to say people didn't fall for it um there is this beach home conflict article that i guess

00:32:26.460 lasted from 2007 to 2013 which described a 1640 to 41 war between the portuguese goa and the

00:32:34.240 martha empire that never happened it had footnotes to non-existent books it was a whole thing like

00:32:40.680 someone just i guess wanted to make fan fiction on wikipedia and i guess it's obscure enough that

00:32:46.540 no one really cared and didn't cite it so it's one of those things where you have to if you want

00:32:50.600 to pull this off you have to write about something like i don't know the cardboard box that apparently

00:32:55.600 people are obsessed with and despite the fact that this is totally untrue it was marked as a

00:33:01.900 good article and it was nominated for feature article before an editor checked the sources

00:33:06.740 and discovered lo and behold they're not real um but searches for the conflict mostly led back to

00:33:11.680 the article itself so it's a stronger example of an internal failure to actually take it down

00:33:17.440 immediately it didn't it didn't break containment but this still happens all the time on wikipedia

00:33:21.260 so the formula for this is super super clear basically you make a false but plausible claim

00:33:27.120 well hold on note here was a clip that i had moved earlier in the sequence that was me devil

00:33:33.220 checking uh just how manufactured the islamic golden age was and then finding that uh yes 0.76

00:33:41.340 statistically it didn't happen in the way that it's often portrayed as happening well you'd

00:33:46.680 never know it malcolm and it's sort of official record now at least trusted sources on wikipedia

00:33:53.100 yeah but there's a there's a right now undergoing a um technological overthrow of civilization

00:34:00.140 basically i mean it's it's it's happening as we speak that is what everyone in our community is

00:34:04.920 doing um we are technologically overthrowing culture we're technologically overthrowing

00:34:10.180 civilization it is taking the new technologies that we have access to and instead of being the

00:34:16.520 you know wimpy cuck who gets miraculous technology like ai and it's just like it has a progressive

00:34:21.080 bias we go out there and we say well can we make based ai you know you can get based on our fab

00:34:25.700 dot ai can we make ai that'll that'll break barriers can we make ais that will ask questions

00:34:31.700 can we go out there like one of the things that we've made recently is on the my puppy dot ai

00:34:37.600 site we made a place where you can flash like android tablets because you know we got android

00:34:42.420 tablets for our kids to to just have games that they can play but not games that they can play

00:34:46.720 but like game learning games they play for tokens so that they can then watch movies but with the

00:34:51.700 default movie list that i have on this thing it's a bunch of like old youtube cartoons one so i'm

00:34:56.760 controlling the culture that they're in but then two i'm also able to go through and edit even the

00:35:02.000 woke stuff from the 90s stuff so i took out you know all the recycling episodes all the uh episodes

00:35:07.280 about the environmentalism all the you know bs i was like my kid's not seeing that um and so we're

00:35:12.440 updating these a lot right now whenever we've got a new technology out there it's getting constantly

00:35:16.180 updated but uh this is going to be the place where our kids live is these these tablets that

00:35:21.380 we've made for them yeah i mean it it is clear that if we're talking about how to determine

00:35:28.720 sources of truth at this point it i guess my new standard is yeah probably older information is a

00:35:36.640 little bit more trustworthy um certainly not wikipedia though it's always a fun jumping off

00:35:42.400 point for some things you just can't i mean you've got to look you've got to look you've got a stress

00:35:46.520 test you've got to say does this uh you know like we're talking to these reporters and we sent them

00:35:50.820 a study that said that trans people in the uk this is called like trans homicides in the uk

00:35:55.620 in 2025 that trans people were more likely to commit a homicide than be victim of a homicide

00:36:01.200 they were a predatory population not a victim population whenever they say oh i feel unsafe 0.96

00:36:05.320 oh i feel no the world isn't safe from you like by the statistics and they then said oh look cited

00:36:10.300 in here is a study saying that in america the the trend is the reverse and i was like did you think

00:36:15.920 to look up that study and of course they hadn't looked up that study um i had seen it when i was

00:36:21.620 originally looking at this and i had dismissed it because when i looked at the study the person who

00:36:24.780 wrote it looked like the trans version of joe camel like you don't exactly believe the head

00:36:30.020 of the cigarette company when they they tell you that cigarettes are safe you don't look like the 0.82

00:36:36.580 guy who walks like looks like his entire life is about like you know one of those like poorly 0.99

00:36:41.940 passing trans people where it's like clearly their main thing um and all the stuff i could

00:36:47.140 find on him where her i don't even remember uh was of her speaking at trans events and stuff

00:36:53.720 like that i'm like obviously she's not gonna write that this is a danger what are you what

00:36:58.340 are you talking about like do you have any credulousness yeah yeah well and that's that's

00:37:05.960 one of my i think like again why why do i always talk about a historical jesus lecture series on

00:37:11.920 the teaching company's great courses but what i really liked about that in terms of like

00:37:16.140 determining what might be true when you're working with like very old sources that are all over the

00:37:21.200 place which is kind of what reality is becoming it feels like the the new testaments with all

00:37:25.180 their conflicting information was jesus born in bethlehem was he born in nazareth i do not know

00:37:29.900 actually probably not bethlehem if you look at the actual criteria right but like

00:37:33.660 If it is not flattering to the source, probably not true, or sorry, probably true, because

00:37:43.300 otherwise, you know, normally people don't like to publish stuff that's not flattering.

00:37:47.140 If it's multiply attested, probably true, especially if it's pretty clear that they're

00:37:51.920 not drawing from the same source material.

00:37:54.060 So you can't exactly choose, for example, books that seem to be coming, like pulling

00:37:57.560 from Q.

00:37:58.620 Like if one Bible book was clearly written while referencing another Bible book, it's

00:38:02.820 Or the same shared source, which is the case with Q, where they think that there's some additional, like, source that is now lost that both books were pulling from in one case.

00:38:13.040 I think Matthew and Luke is it.

00:38:14.820 But anyway, so, like, multiply attested, unflattering.

00:38:18.340 I would argue, like, either something you can personally empirically prove, like, okay, is water wet?

00:38:25.500 I can feel that.

00:38:26.300 If I light something on fire, will it burn?

00:38:27.840 Okay, great.

00:38:28.420 Like, you know, if you can kind of, like, see it.

00:38:29.480 So some great examples of this from the Bible, right?

00:38:31.500 Like.

00:38:31.920 Yeah.

00:38:32.160 um where i believe it's mark talks about how like jesus hometown did not like him right like he was

00:38:38.940 he was rejected by the community he was born in that's not something you would write about someone

00:38:43.100 you're trying to make a founder uh being born into poverty in a in a manger is not something

00:38:49.840 you write about the person you're trying to make you know look like your savior um being born to

00:38:55.160 a carpenter being born to like these are things that you're like yeah you probably wouldn't

00:38:59.520 write that if you were faking this, which is flattering stuff. This is one of the reasons

00:39:04.860 you can basically just laugh in the face of people who say that Jesus never existed because

00:39:09.840 that doesn't pass the most basic logical checks. People, if they were making up a founder,

00:39:16.760 they wouldn't have made up a founder who was born in a manger. They wouldn't have made up a founder

00:39:21.700 with the Natharist ties or whose family rejected him or, you know, all of these things. They don't

00:39:28.440 make sense if you're making something up from scratch. The second thing I note here is people

00:39:32.980 to be like, well, if you believe in the Bible, then why don't you believe everything in the Bible

00:39:36.760 matches exactly historical reality? And this has to do with how we interpret the Bible.

00:39:41.840 The Bible can be true in a sense of how we are supposed to interpret it and what we're supposed

00:39:48.600 to gain from it. That doesn't mean that it perfectly aligns with the historical reality

00:39:55.460 of the situation right like the historical reality being slightly different or having

00:40:02.360 slight inconsistencies was what's written doesn't make the bible spiritually untrue it just means

00:40:09.000 that the reason the bible was written differently is because of what we were supposed to take from

00:40:13.940 it although unless it's meant to match a prophecy in which case that is flattering so you have to

00:40:18.780 like know the context but that just it just makes truth finding a lot harder than it used to be i

00:40:24.660 think where i i guess you could never really have trusted a source and i actually heard this

00:40:29.160 recently this this uh quote from napoleon which i'm now going to like misquote but he basically

00:40:35.380 said something along the lines of history is the fable that we can all agree upon um but it's it's

00:40:42.160 sort of like a shared myth that we like we this is the lie that we're all going to agree is canon now

00:40:47.920 and that's that's what we have and i guess we can overturn that we can we can rebuild this the one

00:40:55.920 civilization theory is catching wind simone people like this theory like oh yeah well i guess there

00:41:00.980 are two sides to this right oh yeah so let me leave you let me leave you with the the way that

00:41:06.160 this is done um obviously on wikipedia it's already very difficult to even share the truth sometimes

00:41:11.920 based on how they choose reliable sources again see our our separate episode on that or you can

00:41:17.660 just read tracy woodgrain's sub stack reliable sources how wikipedia admin david gerard launders

00:41:22.820 his grudges into the public record very enlightening tracy woodgrain's is great anyway

00:41:27.420 so this is how you do it one you make a plausible plausible claim it has to be something people

00:41:31.760 believe could be true or want to be true in the case of you know the islamic golden age it really

00:41:36.080 helps if leftists want it to be true for talking about wikipedia then include a citation even if

00:41:41.440 it doesn't support it the citation just has to be like on theme basically and then you hope it sits

00:41:46.260 around long enough for a journalist or a textbook writer or a museum website to copy it and then he

00:41:51.480 wait for wikipedia editors to then treat that claim as something that was independently confirmed

00:41:56.120 and then boom you're in you've done it so if you need to like spread something that you think is

00:42:00.820 a little bit more wholesome or healthy or actually god forbid true that's the trick guys that would

00:42:09.480 be the most wholesome outcome if suddenly people just start actually putting true things on wikipedia

00:42:14.080 and just using this method to get through

00:42:16.560 all the barriers that have been placed

00:42:18.720 to actually putting true things on Wikipedia.

00:42:20.740 Although I guess the problem being that

00:42:22.620 make it a plausible claim step is really difficult

00:42:26.440 if leftists are looking at it

00:42:29.260 and it's a claim like,

00:42:30.620 hey, transitioning children hurts them.

00:42:32.340 And they're like, not plausible, impossible. 1.00

00:42:34.620 If you don't trans a kid, they'll kill themselves. 1.00

00:42:36.960 How could you? 1.00

00:42:37.560 So maybe this isn't as easy, but a girl can dream.

00:42:41.460 And for now, I'm just going to have to

00:42:44.080 i don't know take a break from reality this group is bad their actions like on our recent episode 0.81

00:42:51.080 you know ai did not like that i pointed out okay a decade after they normalized gay bars

00:42:57.900 the aids epidemic happened that would not have happened had they not done that there was a reason

00:43:03.120 people had a bias against indiscriminate male gay sex across cultures because the cultures that 0.81

00:43:08.720 don't form this bias have massive deaths of young male population because this is the i mean there's

00:43:15.120 a reason why there's fewer prohibitions against female gayness across cultures because it's just

00:43:20.640 not as important for reducing disease transfer and uh days were a vector in disease transfer

00:43:27.600 they did lead to this and it's like i don't want this fact to be reality and i'm like well i'm

00:43:32.720 sorry it is reality the aids epidemic would have been astronomically less severe if especially 0.75

00:43:40.740 within the gay population which it hit the hardest it's if they had not normalized gay bars uh 10

00:43:48.640 decades before we gotta go 10 years before okay go have a great one do you want to wrap up i can

00:43:54.060 run there's no i'm done i love you i love you too you're so reality is broken

00:44:01.280 for whatever reason battery on my pretty new laptop has not been lasting so well but the

00:44:10.920 fan's been going crazy do you have coding running in the background yeah so that's kind of gonna do

00:44:16.140 it that's what's doing it she's i don't know why vibe coding takes up so much uh power like because

00:44:21.500 i think they're well they're they're running so much stuff in parallel and yeah but they're running

00:44:25.480 it on servers that aren't yours um they're running a lot of stuff locally i know that because it

00:44:31.800 keeps saying things like well if you had this installed i'd test more but i can't very passive

00:44:37.800 aggressive but i like it make sure you have the android thing working by tomorrow so uh sync all

00:44:41.980 of your changes on that and i'll get that fixed they should be yeah to run the next build um

00:44:46.840 hopefully the latest things that i went to fix we're good okay okay here we go 0.98

00:44:52.880 Watch her march in, clipboard held high 1.00

00:45:00.680 Badges on her robe, a fire in her eye

00:45:04.320 She's never been wrong, just ask, she'll say

00:45:08.440 So I thought I'd help her be wrong today

00:45:12.920 I slipped a new book on the library shelf

00:45:18.920 Goblin true names, I wrote it myself

00:45:22.280 Wizard names, it's said, erase their past 1.00

00:45:25.780 Use the goblin wands, she read it fast

00:45:29.080 Weasley in goblin means, limited means 0.61

00:45:32.380 She believed every word, she believes what she reads

00:45:35.840 At breakfast she rose for the whole house to hear

00:45:39.300 Good morning, Ron of limited means, dear

00:45:42.580 Oh Granger, Granger, I'm just curious

00:45:45.840 Why are you so cute when you're furious?

00:45:49.220 Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight

00:45:52.840 So naive, so sweet, I could take a bite

00:45:56.300 I forged her a letter signed, Winky Elf Chief

00:45:59.660 We'll rise if you lead us, bring clothes for relief

00:46:03.040 She ran to the kitchens with socks for the lot

00:46:06.280 A sock means you're sacked, that part she forgot 0.69

00:46:09.620 Four hundred elves crying, no pudding, no roast

00:46:13.240 And every house knows who to blame the most

00:46:16.600 They hiss at her now, they glare and they stare

00:46:20.000 I wave from my hamper, Granger, eclair, oh Granger, Granger

00:46:25.000 I'm just curious, why are you so cute when you're furious?

00:46:30.360 Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight

00:46:33.400 So naive, so sweet, I could take a bite 0.98

00:46:36.860 She leaves a badge box on the table at night

00:46:40.060 So I charmed everyone with a whisper of spite

00:46:43.620 Next day, she pinned them on all she could reach

00:46:47.060 On first years, on prefects, one badge each

00:46:50.380 At noon, every badge flashed pink for a laugh

00:46:53.640 Granger still writes to Lockhart for his autograph

00:46:56.680 I had no idea, it was only a bluff 0.79

00:47:00.440 But Granger went white, and that was enough 0.66

00:47:03.740 How did you know? 0.98

00:47:05.820 She shrieked at me loud 1.00

00:47:07.320 Then realized she'd said it to the entire crowd

00:47:10.700 Oh Granger, I'm just curious

00:47:13.740 Why are you so cute when you're furious?

00:47:17.700 Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight

00:47:20.720 So naive, so sweet, I could take a bite

00:47:24.160 I wrote her a pamphlet, anonymous, sleek

00:47:27.520 The loudest voice yields so the quiet can speak

00:47:30.940 She loved it, she quoted it, she made Neville cry

00:47:34.420 Neville, you're centering, he'd only asked why

00:47:37.740 Then Flitwick asked something, her hand shot up high

00:47:41.060 I said, who's the loudest in this school? Not I 0.88

00:47:44.580 She'd preached it all week, her own rule, who knew?

00:47:48.040 So she sat on her hands the whole lesson through

00:47:51.380 Ninety-one answers and not one said

00:47:54.960 I winked, she knew her face went red

00:47:59.740 Oh, Ranger, Ranger, I'm just curious

00:48:04.080 Why are you so cute when you're furious?

00:48:07.740 Your cheeks go pink, your fists go tight

00:48:11.140 So naive, so sweet, I could take a bite

00:48:14.580 She came to my door with a pamphlet and tea

00:48:18.400 It's your upbringing, dear

00:48:20.780 I forgive you, me?

00:48:23.740 And Harry's been asking, he's terribly curious

00:48:27.460 He thinks you're so cute when you're furious

00:48:31.440 Get out! Get out!

00:48:34.460 Oh, Granger, Granger, I'm not furious

00:48:38.220 Did he say cute? I'm not curious

00:48:41.660 My cheeks aren't pink, how did she know?

00:48:45.720 Granger, come back, did he really say so? 0.66

00:48:48.860 Baka!

00:48:51.860 Baka! 0.97

00:48:55.280 Baka! 0.91

Based Camp - October 13, 2026

The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia： WTF!？

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