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New Project To End Stupidity Online

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the then-they-make-a-better-idiot dept.

mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."

2 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. This was funny by nunyadambinness · · Score: 5, Informative

    "the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people"

    First, BWAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    Second, it's not 1978 anymore.

  2. Skipping the blogodreck, here's the real info by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    Skip the ad-laden overloaded blogodreck site and go directly to StupidFilter. The concept is straightforward - they're training a naive Bayesian classifier, like a spam filter, on a set of text excerpts rated by humans. You can look at random samples from the training set for amusement.

    Wikipedia already has some 'bots that do somewhat similar things, looking for totally bogus edits and reverting them. Yahoo's "commercial intent" filter also does something like that, to separate commercial and non-commercial sites. We considered something like that for SiteTruth, where we need to distinguish non-commercial sites so we don't rate them by business criteria.

    This approach to filtering will probably need domain-dependent filters. A political site, a social site, a sports site, and a game site all need different training sets. I'd go for a two-stage classifier, one that divided sites into about ten to twenty major categories, and then a stupidity filter trained for each of those categories.

    Applying such a filter at blog posting time should be interesting.

    And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up. - Tom Lehrer.