Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Wants Truth Ratings For Websites
holy_calamity writes "While introducing the new World Wide Web Foundation Tim Berners-Lee made also asked for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online. 'On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly,' he said, saying that 'there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.'"
...a truthiness rating!
There. Now you know.
... but for Facts, not Truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What is to prevent any such proposed system from becoming yet another popularity contest plagued by those who want to quash unpopular ideas?
slashdot's been wrong in the past.
This sounds like an exercise in futility
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Take that, google!
And then, we can rate the accuracy of the rating, and the accuracy of the accuracy rating, and so on.
Like www.martinlutherking.org
Wow that's a shit storm of truthiness right there. Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
... and who is going to watch the watchers?
Or rather, in this case who is going to vet the group responsible for determining if something is true?
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
http://www.microsoft.com/vista/salesfigures/ontheup.html
Lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And who is gonna judge this? Because finding a qualified applicant who can be completely unbiased in such a regard is next to impossible. Add into the equation that some people can afford to buy truth (RE: See Stephen Colbert talking about purchasable reality vis a vis the creative editing of Wikipedia entries).
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
And from now on I think everyone should have to wear a sign that also gives them a truth rating. People will say what ever they feel like, and the sheep will believe what they want to. This is nothing new.
love the taste, hate the texture
Worst idea ever.
What's really needed is a society where a majority of the individuals have a world class education. No rating system will ever work until you get that in place.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
which is totally what she said
...of who assigns the ratings for trustworthiness? The users, who may already be part of the "groupthing" promoted by a site? A "non-partisan" organization of some sort? Individual countries? All of these possibilities can be gamed. As it is now, the first time I stumble on a site, I assume a lot of it's content to be noise unless it is known to me who set it up. With a rating system in place, a lot of people will default to using the rating system to determine whether a site is trustworthy, even if it is a site by Kevin Trudeau selling survival kits for the impending gopher apocalypse.
Ok, let's truth rate (True or False answers only) the following sentence in this post:
"This sentence is false."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Using semantic web tools, this can be achieved with reification of statements, and a network of trust. It's also the future of wikipedia, or at least it should be.
\u262D = \u5350
I suppose it depends on who does the ranking.
Sad to say, but that's censorship. Coming from someone I respect like Berners-Lee, I am truly disappointed. Who's to say what is the truth and what is fiction for me? The things on the net are for them to tell and for me to find out.
Surely, I got duped by all those chain mails but I wisened up.
Surely, I got all the emails about Obama being a closeted Muslim but I learned better.
Rating this would be nothing short of censorship and it won't work perfectly which is to say it won't work - period. Look at an algorithm like PageRank which Google bombed so easily. What's to prevent miscreants from messing with this?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
In Soviet Russia, truth rates YOU!
Waitaminit....that's almost how it should be...
Aww, poor Slashdot..
Truth is considered to be universal if it is valid in all times and places.
Even with "news" websites you don't get the truth, you just get a reporters take on the events. Even eye witness testimony is poor at best.
So the truth between politicians, reporters and geeks is just going to create a system I'd like to call..
the-maybe-machine
Better yet, let's teach people how to think for themselves, particularly how to fact-check sources, thus reducing the number of people who believe the first website they see off of Google.
I can see it from here: TRUTHINESS WARS!
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick?
And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers?
And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site?
Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack?
And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot. ;-)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
How would this work on a site about the bible? Or about evolution? I certainly don't consider the bible to hold any truth, just as religious people dont see evolution as the truth. So how should such sites be rated? "Truthfull (if you belive in evolution.)" perhaps?
how do we know that the entity validating the site truthfulness is telling the truth?
This is the web, there is no truth, only the spoon is real.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
As we know there are at least four:
Your version,
Their version,
the Truth and
what actually happened.
If that works out will I see a big red pulsating "This is all bullshit" label on the Scientology or any Creationist homepage? I doubt any admin in their self-righteous mind would put something like that on their site. In the specific idiology what is true in reality is a lie in their world. So who's to decide who gets one of those and ranked by what? And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
This will NEVER work. Since everyone makes their own truths nowadays there will be just as many ranking systems as there are opinions.
TFA is /.ed, and MirrorDot's not behaving, so this is a shot in the dark. But I'm reasonably sure we've heard something like this before, and the idea is just as bad now as it was. Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed. I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
Moreover, the WWW as he created it - being a very dumb platform - allows us to implement such a scale at a high level, using user input and so forth.There are already a ton of services that do something very like this. Hell, I can trust the top 10 things on del.icio.us more than I can trust random Google results.
I donno. I just fail to see the point of this. Yeah, people's capacity to care about facts and details appears to be limited, but I don't think this is the solution.
So you can laugh all you want to...
Quick! Someone hide kdawson!
The original article was on the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7613201.stm
It should be emphasised that he isn't suggesting a "truth commission" that would tag all web pages.
He specifically said that he'd be interested to see how different organisations would label websites, depending on their intended use.
In many ways this is just a specific use of the semantic web concept that Berners-Lee and others have been trying to bring about for the last few years.
Web browsers need functionality to individually weigh these rankings by a user definded factor based on the trust of the user in the rater, say from 0 to 1 (float) to gain a weighed ranking.
Do an average about theses products, and you arrive at a nice truthfulness percentage.
Of course it should be possible to collect the weightings from the users to preload the credibility of the raters...
This could have interesting consequences.
People have been killing each other over the question of who has the Truth for thousands of years. Even factual/non-factual would not work. A true zealot will not let facts get in the way of what he believes to be true.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Sortof like the idea behind USSR Pravda (to tell the 'truth'), but in a modern, much more totalitarian and tyrannical way. Me likes!
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
so why should we in the cyber one ?
Once again it's all about education.
Educating people since their youth to try to find their truth by themselves, avoiding to believe in dogmas.
Is this mostly a plan to get the Hubbardite sites labeled as expensive and dangerous bullshit?
On second thought, his request isn't all that odd. It is probably unrealistic, and ultimately unfair.
Rating a site does not mean it will have good content in the future. It also fails to assure that the site has the 'best' content. The need to sort through pages of distinctly that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.worded searches will probably never go away.
So I agree with the author that the idea will probably disappear, but not because it lacks merit. It will disappear because it is unfeasible to implement in a fair, non-commercial manner (unless you have a strong way of authenticating votes made by individual humans.)
The W3C already pushes RDF and RDFa, which are simple, machine-readable statements. Surely this already existing technology could be used to say things like "Site X has a trustworthyness of 80%", which could be stored in a distributed network of servers, with digital signing to show who's opinion it is. Then, people/sites which are well trusted can have their opinions held in higher regard, following some algorithm. Add some rules which keep automated entries from having much weight and voila.
Yes, there would be no "absolute truth" in such a system, it would all be a matter of consensus, but that's just the same as real life. "I think therefore I am" and all that.
Who gets to decide what's true? The web is decentralized. All this would end up doing is making the groupthink problem even worse. Some loud people push an idea, it spreads a bit, then they declare a "concensus" and begin character-assassinating any dissenters. So I ask again, who gets to be the final authority on what is true and what isn't? The Pope, perhaps? (As a Protestant I've got a problem with that... [grin]) The whole point of the Internet is that it's decentralized. Installing choke points over what constitutes "truth" would be just as bad as installing choke points onto the network itself. Top-down management is bad!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
we barely have a semblance of free-speech in real-life, now the christian theocracy that is america wants to quash all free-speech/thought floating around on the internet. maybe mine is a slightly over-the-top knee-jerk reaction, but i'm sick of seeing people's ideas getting destroyed by negations from parties that prefer to adhere to tradition than reason and discourse.
I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
The idea here seems to be more of a "FooOrg TruthRank" that you could subcribe to, "He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".". Isn't there a browser toolbar that will show the google pagerank of pages you visit? I think the idea is something like that.
One way to assess the truth of information on a site is to measure whether it's consistent with information from other sites. As long as you could avoid a variant of link farming, this would work to prevent all but the most systematic vandalism.
It would even work with Wikipedia, because a vandal isn't going to know (and thus won't edit) every article that may contain information overlapping with a target article. The inconsistency between the vandalized article and others would give it away.
Why should we have 'truth ratings' for websites when we don't for books, magazines, newspapers, etc?
If you want to know the reputation of a website, research the website just as you would research any other source of information.
It seems to me that google page rank is probably the most effective implementation of this concept that is possible. Technically it does not ensure that the content of a website is truthful or reliable, but it does make the determination that it is popular, which is all any kind of 'press here to record that this website is truthful' is ever going to do. There are very few areas where people will agree on 'truth'. Imagine this concept applied to websites that discuss creationism for example. These kind of sites will receive many votes for being both truthful and untruthful. All you are really doing is measuring the popularity of the idea that they express.
Perhaps, an attribute could be added to the 'a' tag to indicate the type of link, so that a page author can indicate a rough reason why they have linked to a page. If I were to create a link in this post to a site that speaks of the LHCs potential to destroy the planet and called the link... "Check out these silly bastards". The PageRank of that site would increase, as there is no way to tell if I am supporting or lampooning that site with my link. A simple category system (not unlike slashdots moderations options) might help this process. So that I could add a category="funny" or category="insightful" to my link tags and any analysis tools (PageRank in particular) could adjust the ranking accordingly. Would be interesting to see what the top 10 funniest sites on the web were anyway :o)
It's bad enough that we have government at every level trying to legislate away personal responsibility, now we have a respected industry leader advocating for the same sort of Orwellian control.
What we need is widespread use of web annotation software.
Then people could judge the truthiness of anything according their own little ideological ghetto, and the rest of us wouldn't have to put up with their whining.
i.e. a universal reputation system is a hard problem.
Today, we use brands for that.
Deleted
Too true - people say that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. I'm guessing a corollary for this situation would be "the Internet treats a single definition of the truth as a matter for concern and develops a redundant array of competing theories."
/. posters to stand in his path." ;-)
Or even, "the Internet detects Berners-Lee coming toward it with some new ideas and reroutes snarky bloggers and
Such ratings are too subjective. Given people's inclination to label even raw statistics as false or part of some agenda such a "truthfulness" rating would be completely polarizing. A better system would be to use the TLD's more effectively. As has been attempted with the porn industry, blogs and commentary could be segregated or maybe news outlets moved to a .news or something. A thought. I don't know how many times I've gone to Google's news page and seen commentary at the top of the page.
Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
Wait a minute. This is just a special case of internationalization!
1. Check visitors IP
2. Look up geo-position
3. Serve up localized truth
4. ???
5. Profit!!!
She made the willows dance
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?
OK, this is a noble idea, but I'm an atheist and many of the things that pass as legitimate discussion, i.e. theology or bible study, is nonsense.
Lets be honest, all religion is bogus and would not pass muster. Sheeple believe it, sheeple will fight and die for it.
How is other nonsense and lies any different?
Is christ truth? Of course not, but people would be offended by an impartial system that brands all nonsense as nonsense. There must be rigidly defined parameters of "acceptable" nonsense that includes things like christianity and islam whilst excluding scientology in Germany and so on.
Sheeple believe because they need to believe. People believe because they have seen and understand the facts. When someone says to you, "You have to believe in something..." The only sane answer is "no I don't."
Well, great, but I don't see how the idea is a) original, or b) supposed to counteract the groupthink that's already in place.
I can check out the (R|D)NC's most recently cited sources and get their TruthRank. Doesn't mean they're right.
So you can laugh all you want to...
This would practically kill Wikipedia overnight as most of the pages would get instantly and correctly labeled as BS. I think it would be good.
I just got into a fight with my wife. She refused to see the truth of the signs posted all over California concerning various health issues. She claimed she'd never seen a single one. Send a pic and maybe I can work on the rest of it with her... *sighs* Really.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Are people freedom fighters or terrorists?
Are people nutcases or religious examples?
Is Paris Hilton hot or not?
And how do we count? If 10.000.000 people say that gravity is untrue and only 2 people say it is, do we start to float?
As with any information that is tronw at you, you should not believe one source. Do not trust FoxNews, but also do not trust AlJazera or the BBC or ....
Look at all the information and then decide for yourself.
The last thing I would want is that somebody tells me what is right and what is wrong.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yeah it sounds like a good idea in theory, but you're relying on other people to be the arbiters of "truth". What you'll end up with is something like Digg, where any opinion or information contrary to the majority's will immediately be dismissed and labeled "untrue".
Truth ratings are great, but who provides the ratings? The government of some country can say that this is true or that is not. Then you would need someone to rate who are accurate truth raters so you can weight the ratings being given.
If you have everyone rate the truth, I don't think it would stop the cults from getting there "message" out, it might just delay the message from getting out until enough followers vote and raise the truthfulness rating to "fact"/"gospel"/"Known Truth" or whatever rating terminology that would be equivalent to "Written in Stone".
Wikipedia will be OK then, because if it's on Wikipedia it must be true[citation needed].
Summation 2
Obviously people-- spammers, governments, trolls, corporations, and other fuckwads-- will game the system. I think the best you can do is assign trust ratings to various sources. Sources will need to have secure IDs, something that costs something to generate-- even if it's only CPU time. Think CACert.
Your trust settings work something like: for this subject, I consider snopes.com, factcheck.org, my friend Bill, the congressional budget office, this scientific organization-- to these degrees. Which can be negative. I'm willing to let that trust be transitive to this degree-- someone Bill trusts, I am 30% biased towards. It's gonna be tough to have authority and anonymity at the same time, but I believe it is doable, and worth trying.
This would all tie in very, very well with semantic markup technologies like OWL-- preferably implemented in a p2p fashion. i.e., let visitors to a site describe what the content is about (and which parts of it are connected), and among those tags are the trust votes of the visitors.
It's... a somewhat large project. Google is in a perfect position to begin parts of it, and to benefit hugely from it.
People who care can already easily find out if a topic has some facts behind it or not, a simple look at Wikipedia will easily solve that and when that isn't enough a little more web search will also give you some more opinion on a topic. And well, people who don't care now, won't care later. If a rating would be low they would argue that it is due to some conspiration, not due to the topic at hand actually being untrue.
Such ratings would of course also be highly subjective, I mean do we label all religious pages as "untrue", as "non scientific" or whatever? I guess many people would disagree with such a rating.
The web really has more serious problems then this.
We have never been in war with Eurasia. This is doubleplus true.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
we need creationists, 9/11 truthers, ufo cultists, racists, etc. and we need people to be exposed to them. and we need them to be exposed to it, a lot. such people serve a civic duty: a cautionary tale
an often overlooked consequence of free speech is that by allowing really really stupid things to be said out loud by a dimwitted fringe few, it trains the rest of us to have stronger minds. the only real protection any of us have against falsehood is a good bullshit meter. and the only way any of us develop a good bullshit meter is to expose it to bullshit
its the principle of developing stronger muscles by working them out against increasing levels of resistance. we develop stronger minds by exposing our minds to increasing levels of well-crafted idiotic things. of course, those of you with well-developed minds don't get much out of the 5 pound dumbbell that is some of the incredibly stupid things we are exposed to, like creationism or 9/11 truthers. but what of the 13 year old? what of the young boy or girl who is just beginning their cognitive life?
for them, their first cognitive test at detecting bullshit are these soft serve easy pitches of incredibly stupid idiocies like 9/11 truthers and creationists. it is for their sake we tolerate the continuing existence of such stupid thought. and if the 13 year old were not exposed to creationists or 9/11 truthers? SOMETHING has to train their bullshit meter, or they won't develop one
notice i am not espousing that creationism or 9/11 truthers actually get any respect or money or time in the classroom, just that they be allowed to make their idiotic arguments unfettered by those of us who know better. it is odious for us to hear them, but we must let them speak
it is a common fallacy, and it is amazing that someone as supposedly as wise as berners-lee should fall for this common fallacy, that society should protect us from ourselves. i guess the thinking is that a lot of people are out there are believing bullshit they shouldn't be believing, and that someone some magical societal protection will save them from themselves
impossible: you can't save stupid people from being stupid
there is just a constant background noise of gullible people in all societies, in all time periods, in all cultures, forever, who will believe absolutely idiotic things, and nothing, i repeat, nothing you do will save them from their fate
stupid people exist, get used to it, make peace with the fact that some people are just unsalvageable
if you prevent stupid people from believing in idiotic things they find on the internet, they will find some other media channel to find something stupid to believe in. and if you filter all media channels, they will invent something of their own stupidity to believe in. it is impossible to save some people in this world. they are a problem that can't be prevented, just damage to route around
this is an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of respecting the free will of those around you. and not respecting their free will, by somehow magically filtering "truth" for them, is simply something worse, not least of which because a good personal bullshit meter is your best protection, and you won't develop a good bullshit meter in an antiseptic magical world of only "truth". you will get flabby minds that are in fact MORE gullible, not less, in a world of only "truth"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the evil bit.
Even Berners-Lee is new here!
Who decides what's the truth and what isn't? For example, based on the replies I read on Slashdot, I'm in the minority in my belief in a Creator and my skepticism of man-made global warming. Would like-minded Web sites be "modded down" by some Arbiter of Truth?
My daughter just finished reading 1984 in high school English. Orwell's depiction of the thought police hits a lot closer to home than when I was her age.
The need to sort through pages of distinctly worded searches will probably never go away.
that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.
That got all messed up. The cat must have stepped on the touchpad and I didn't notice. I do have a cold, that's why I'm posting to slashdot.
What about stuff like dhmo.org? Dihydrogen Monoxide DOES kill.... So yeah..
We should additionally rate all conversations on their level of truth. Kids gossiping in highschool? Not anymore!
"This statement is a lie."
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Fact checking and elaboration on the details is something that would make sense. Something that can be scientifically proven, or at least described in a manner that has been reviewed and then, if there is any doubt, proper caveats have been issued in clear language.
Truth? That's just silly. What is a "cult"? Who says that said "cult" is bad for you? The Catholics? The Atheists? Yeah, well no shit.
I think that most sites could use a fact-checker associated with them, and if there was a "fact review" annotation by a third party for each site, that would be really helpful. The problem would be who do you trust enough to provide facts, because unless you are an expert in the field with a great deal of experience, I don't trust you.
In the end, any chain of trust will end up having people simply create a list of people who already believe the same way that they do. Unless you are *truly* committed to being as unbiased and factual as possible, it will end up just being a big Internet based circle-jerk. And creating some sort of big dumb rating system so that the slobbering masses can quickly know the "truth" level of your site before reading just maintains their tendencies to view content uncritically.
Its bad enough when people on this site use Troll, Flamebait, Overrated, and Off-topic to mod down posts that they don't agree with, at least we aren't being treated to people being able to mod things down as -1 Wrong.
1) Absolute certainty
2) Arguably true
3) probably false
4) provably false
5) CowboyNeal says it's true
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So what Mr. Berners-Lee is looking for is to rate the level of journalism of a web site. Of course, I'm sure he'd prefer that the sites he agrees with get rated as "true" and those he disagrees with as "false". Believing in objective reality myself, I wouldn't trust any sort of necessarily subjective rating on the truth or falsity of what I read.
We do not need an MPAA-like organization for the web. Instead of being the arbiters of morality (a joke, to be sure), such a ratings board would be an arbiter of truth. I thought all smart people understood this has always been a bad idea.
Okay, maybe Pilate's question isn't the right one for this scheme.
How about: "Who gets to decide which is 'truthful' and which isn't?"
"How do you go about making sure your ratings matter outside of political arenas?"
Sure, a well-meaning oversight body can brand, say, Scientology as not "truthful". But all they have to do to neutralize that is to intimidate or take control of the oversight body.
Beware those who propose solutions to nonexistent or insignificant problems, that create more problems than it is supposed to solve.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
A "This entire folder is advertising" rating of sorts?
Sites that are pimping concepts that are widely regarded as suspicious (creationism, flat earth, Jehova's, pyramid schemes, timecube) can be rated as such and the information retrieved and shown in your browser similarly to HTTPS, in order to warn people to be wary?
There is no need to tell people that a good site is good, but you want to point out the bad ones.
Who the hell gets to decide what's "truth" and what isn't? I have a word for what he wants to do: CENSORSHIP.
If on the other hand he's just naive? Get a clue, son. If your critical-thinking skills are so non-existant that you can't judge for yourself, then perhaps you don't deserve "the truth". Either way: there are enough damned "net-nannies" in the world, we don't need any more of them and we sure as HELL don't need anyone trying to impose some half-assed ratings system for web content. I mod Mr. Berners-Less down to "-1,Full_of_Shit".
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
--
make install -not war
that goes something like:
The contents of this website are not true.
If they rated it truthful, then the site is wrong
If they rated it false, the rating is wrong
Gotta love contradictions...
A crackpot site will have crackpots that will persistantly rank the site as highly credible, and normal people don't want to constantly mark down crackpot sites. In fact if 4,000 visit a crackpot site and 400,000 a reputable site it's probably a better metric than any kind of user rating. This looks like another way of reviewing truth by popularity, it's pretty similar to pagerank (except it doesn't distinguish different meanings of the same word) or wikipedia (which tries to mush them all into a consensus) and I don't see how this would do much better. The only thing that really could improve on things was a sort of authority hierarchy - for example that a scientist is highly regarded by some scientific instiutions which again are highly regarded by a science association or something like that. However, keeping that sort of hierarchy going on most subjects would be an absurdly huge job, particularly where there's little formal structure. And if there's no real authority then it's just another form of popularity.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Likewise, you atheists have some pretty weird assertions about the beliefs of Christians.
How do we mark you?
Who gets to decide if Christianity or Islam or Atheism is "true"? Richard Dawkins? Hahahahahahahaha.
The problem is that a lot of "truth" is subjective. In fact I would go as far as to say the only things that have a chance of being solidly defined as being "true" would be the scientific "laws".
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The nature of "Truth" has been bandied by philosophers for thousands of years. To think we can "rate" the "truth" of websites is terrifically naive.
Different people harbor vastly different models of what "truth" even means. For some, there are unyielding absolute truths, defined by social norms. For others, truth is simply consistency with their other knowledge. Different people hold these two different models tightly, and defend them fiercely, and are at time create incompatible worldviews. As another example of different models, the Bhudda (yes that long ago) talked about Truth and truth - absolute truth and everyday truth... an insight that is very deep.
Beyond the idea that different people view the whole concept of truth differently - what is and is not true is bounded more by individual's ignorance than anything else. A proposition "X" that is "true" for Alice may be "false" for Bob, only because Alice and Bob have extremely different information. If they both *want to*, then they can choose to work out their differences, exchange information with each other and most likely other, trusted sources and resolve the "truth" of X to a common place - but for 1 fact, and 2 people in the vast complexity of the real world, that can sometimes mean a lot of work (like OJ trial work) for both Alice and Bob and others.
In a way, different truths for different people is very, very good thing. One-story societies, monocultures have critical points of failure. There is no one way to live, and if there ever were, all the emo kids would reject it just on principal anyway.
I'm not disagreeing with the need for reliability and accountability for information online. But 'truth'... that word does not mean what you think it means. Sir Lee is correct, I brought up a similar issue in a meeting in August 2006. . . over time does someone's (blogs, news, speeches, etc) statements match observation. That could be useful, but it is certainly not the same as truth, at best the word would be consistency.
If such a system were used, it would surely be abused. People could flag a website as "untrue", when in fact it is truthful, thus ruining the point of having truth raters.
Take this example: if this type of system were in place right now, what do you think the "truthness" rating of www.johnmccain.com would be? www.whitehouse.gov?
In California, everything is a health hazard.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Sure it is difficult to determine truth with multi-trillion dollar corporate PR campaigns, but it is much easier to determine truth online than with newspapers or TV, mainly because I can open another browser tab and research the issue from other sources. President of the grammar police, run-on sentence division thank you for reading.
4. Collect Truth Clarification Request administrative fees from corporations and governments. The International Truth Registry has to stay solvent somehow!
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, but what's needed is for our primary education system to focus less on facts and more on thought processes. Without this, there can never be a democracy. Children need to learn that there are always people who will lie to them, and they need to be able to sort fact from fiction from honest speculation on their own.
This is why I say that creationism should be taught in science class. It is bogus, and it is obvious with a little thought that it is bogus, but so few Americans are capable of this level of thought. Blind trust in authority is the end of civilisation. It is essential that we teach good and bad theories, and give children the tools to tell the two apart on their own.
A truth rating for websites is useless. We already strive to teach kids the truth in schools, and that's turning into The Truth (ie. the Christian nutcases' religious doctrine). Let a governing body decide what is truth and you get more circularity in your so-called "democracy"--people learn to trust another govenment-run FACTory, and stop having to think for themselves. That is the last thing we need.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Only believe half of what you see and hear and nothing of what you read.
One of my english teachers made us memorize this in the 7th grade. It's words to live by.
I (and others) have been suggesting "peer based scoring" for Internet content for about 15 years now.
Of course one should use the collective wisdom of the net in choosing and evaluating content.
The fact is, we have plenty of fact checkers that can help the average joe distinguish between what is true and accurate, and what is the latest idiotic memescare to land in his Inbox.
The problem is that Joe doesn't care.
So long as people still have a gut reaction to treat news as entertainment, and a desire to see something which confirms what they think rather than challenges it, people just won't care to fact check.
Snopes.com, Factcheck.org, and many others exist to help people sort out the real from the fake. But I'll still get "did you know" compilations featuring such untrue statements as "A ducks quack doesn't echo and no one knows why".
Oh yeah, and Obama is a Muslim, and Sarah Palin visited Iraq.
Websites being flagged as 'primary content' or 'referenced content'.
There are millions of sites which are just advertising, reviews, online shops, lists of links to other sites etc.
These are 'referenced content'. They are effectively useless most of the time when you want to know something.
Sites that stand on their own, and contain useful information like wikipedia, oldcomputers.com, and any site dedicated to a particular subject should be 'primary content'. It does not matter if they are true, or truthy, only that the web site should actually contain the information it purports to be about.
So if a site purports to be about 'second world war u-boats', if it is a primary content site, then it should contain some information about them, rather than advertising for shoes and watches.
It would be wonderful to be able to just search the sites on the net that actually contain useful information and not pointless trash.
The Ministry of Truth would like to remind you of the following truths;
* War is Peace
* Freedom is Slavery
* Ignorance is Strength
The statement in the title is a lie.
There. Now you're confused ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Now everyone will stay away from Wikipedia and get all their trustworthy facts from Conservapedia
I'd like it on the newspaper, before...
Please dont go against the groupthink on diggdot. Until then, I have no choice but to bury your comment and then reply to it flaming you.
It is a well known fact that George Bush used dozens of Cops with Tasers to bring down Richard Stallman for Smoking Legal Pot for his Melanoma. We should ban Tasers, Bush, Cops and vote Paul/Stallman for 2008 (Paul is still running, the MSM just lies about it).
Also, the moon landing is a hoax, 9/11 really happened on 9/12 but the Pepsi bottling company wanted it moved a day to sell more soda so the fat cats in Washington fucked with the calandar to make it so (this is true, there have been several other diggdot stories proving it...), and Diebold stole every election since Hoover.
Now digg my comment *up* please--if not for stating the obvious, but for its inner truth.
This is just another example to add to my thesis.
Namely, if you draw a Venn diagram of "cleverness"
and "common sense", the region of intersection is amazingly small...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed.
No. All systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed IF you allow anonymous involvement.
If you remove anonymity from the equation, efforts to game the system won't work, because people can then filter you out after you demonstrate that you're a liar or a manipulator.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I think we need a goverment controlled Ministry of Truth... Goverment being the only impartial entity can insure that we get the Truth and only the Truth...
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
... up until you rate blogs/sites that include topics such as...
politics
religion
sex
www.icanhascheezburger.com might come out OK though.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
people could just use their brains? I mean, how hard is it to read a website and determine the bias for most intelligent people? If you log on to some nutjob's blog that has an agenda, it is not to difficult to take anything they say about someone they don't like with a large grain of salt.
"But this one goes to 11!"
We can work out a "Truth" rating for Slashdot and TheOnion as soon as they find an appropriate one for "Faux News", erm, I mean, "Fox News"...
All you need is to set up one or more truth-rating services who will publish their opinions as PICS ratings of the web sites in question.
The only thing holding up the idea is that Firefox doesn't support PICS. It's one of the few cases where Microsoft IE supports web standards better than Firefox. But no doubt that's because nobody really cares about web ratings.
(Specifically, the "problem" PICS was designed to solve was the screaming over adult content. However, once the rating system solution was deployed, it became apparent that that wasn't the solution the people screaming really wanted.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
what in the posters list of beliefs is NOT a part of Christianity?
You DO believe in the bible still right?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
...truth ratings.
Actually, I agree that that's a good first step. But I worry that it's not enough. It depends a lot on the implementation, I suppose. If it's Us vs. Them and They claim that We're gaming the system, then who is the user to trust? But if it's just users managing who's trustworthy in the system ... I don't have a lot of faith that facts/truth will prevail. A lot of systems get gamed today by people who are open about it - see lobbyists, politicians, most of Wall St. - and no one seems to give a shit.
So you can laugh all you want to...
This is an excellent idea. There could be a entire organization dedicated towards deciding what is true, and making sure that only true information is spread.
The organization can be composed of, and guided solely by some very inquisitive "questioners", because of course we believe in the notion that truth can defend itself under scrutiny. These "questioners" can bring in various parties suspected of untruthfulness, and "question", or put them to "inquisition" them to see if they stand up to the scrutiny of true truth.
And better yet, we can then archive all the websites that are the most true into one database, or Book, if you will. That way, any person who wants to help out the "inquisition" can simply check the Truth of the Book, and if it doesn't match up, they can simply burn, that is, delete the false prophets, I mean, posters. Why didn't we think of this before???
'nuf said.
Thank you Vernor Vinge.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think it would be easier to filter out if the site is Lying or not, vs. if it is True.
Being that many religions have so many different views it is quite possible and most likely that none of them cover all truths. However explaining their religious values they are not Lying. Heck there is a chance the atheists are wrong and there is a God, but they are not Lying when they say there is no God. But still it is difficult to prove the truth only prove Lies, as Lies are intentionally giving false information.
Having this filtering system can be used to squash unpopular ideas, just like saying you don't like the GPL on Slashdot, you get relegated to an area where less people can view your message. Not censoring but rating can have similar consequences, if popular opinion determines if you argument or view has merit or not, or falls under the readers idea of the truth, then a free exchange of ideas is limited.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It would be far more efficacious to push for a critical thinking and debate class requirements in grade and collegiate level schools.
But if everyone was good at critical thinking, I wouldn't be special anymore. The advantages which put me in a higher economic rung than most people in my age-group will no longer be advantages...I will be a commoner again...relegated to the same mundane jobs that the rest of them are.
That sucks. I think I would prefer for most of the populace to remain stupider than me, even if it means putting up with DRM and evil governments.
Um, what about something like mod points or ebays seller ratings? Let the wisdom of the masses indicate what they think of a site.
What about sites that slam MySQL?
What about Vi vs Emacs?
Hell... lets be serious:
What about insiders who are leaking information about the next enron?
What about global warming?
What about academic sites that publish research linking cell phones to cancer? What if a paper is published that actually does connect them? How do you prevent it's "truthliness" from getting freeped by people with vested interests in the status quo?
What about a pharmaceutical website that claims their medication is safe despite mounting evidence it shuts down the liver?
What about a website that has recipes for making heavy grade explosives? How do you rate the truth in something that only a terrorist or a government can test?
What is the truthliness of Homestarrunner?
What about the story published in the National Enquirer about John Edwards affairs when nobody believed them?
This is another version of The Semantic Web and is just as impossible to pull of as the original. Both fail to take into account the tenancy to lie and exaggerate things to promote your world views. They operate under "as long as everybody plays by the rules this idea is perfect!"... which is a very stupid idea unless you've got a legal framework to enforce the rules.
The problem with logical fallacies, which this one is, is that sometimes the premise itself is flawed. In this case, the premise that one can assert the "truthiness" of the statement that is flawed in formation. One cannot prove a negative, which is why in courts the premise is that a person is innocent (didn't do it), and the burden of proof is to prove guilt.
Being able to spot a flawed premise in the first place, goes along way to proving or not proving binary questions.
Too bad most people stop thinking when presented with questions that seem simple on the face.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
now the tricky part, who, may I ask, will be the governing body of truth? Surely somebody from Skull and Bones, right? :-D
dB Masters
It would only take seconds for partisans to slam Fox and CNN as untrue so the idea simply won't work. However, if someone were to create a domain similar to wikipedia that was well regulated and comprised of science and history information known to be authoritarian (or marked that there is debate on the subject) it might do us all a world of good. Wikipedia is great for topics that are not contested (history of the Hundred years war for example) at all but it's censorship-hell for anything that someone might disagree about (politics). Such a site could post science papers and request to repost other stuff of interest and if done properly even the contested stuff could have rational discourse and thus provide useful information.
no one can train you what to think
all you can do is expose people to issues and arguments, and their mind grapples with it
Yeah, because it's real hard work for our brains when we have to analyze obvious, "really stupid things."
read my comment again. what is easy work for the well-developed mind is hard work for say, a 13 year old mind just beginning the journey
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you remove anonymity from the equation, efforts to game the system will work just as well as before, because people can then filter you out after you demonstrate that you disagree with them.
And so is the subject line.
Many posters expressed their well-founded scepticism towards a kind of authority (Ministry of Truth?) rating websites for their trustworthiness.
But Tim Berners-Lee actually proposed that different organisations rate websites independently from each other.
That way, I suppose you yourself could rate those organisations in your browser and have it calculate some reliability index.
Kind of a simplified, less powerful but maybe more useful Web of Trust, as it's used for PGP - just for credibility, not authentication.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
"Imaginary man in the sky" is quite hyperbolic, dont'cha think?
A sneer is not an argument..
Yes, that's right the web should be filtered through /. rating system.
Then those mod points I keep getting would make me the most powerful user in the world! Mwhahahahaha!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I recently got an itch to think more about evolution (some of you Bay Area folks may know why). The physical evolution side is very cool, but that aspect is very well covered. So I seized on the evolution of mind. Specifically, collective intelligence.
Bees, ants, flocks of birds, schools of fish - lots of groups engage in collective information processing. A beehive vastly exceeds the intelligence of any single bee. Similarly, the human brain is vastly more intelligent than any single neuron.
Over the past 50,000 years, our body has not evolved much. As a species, we are not significantly different than Euclid. And as individuals, we are not significantly more capable (as far as the machinery goes) of learning or discovering new things. And yet, we our rate of advance as a species is accelerating at a staggering pace. If we're using the same computing machine (more or less, maybe a bit better diet or whatever), what accounts for this extraordinary advance in our effective intelligence?
It is the evolution of collective intelligence. We neurons, we ants, we bees, are not getting any better - but the communications network is exploding. Consider the rate of advancement during the period of paper, then during the printing press, public lending libraries, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, the web, email, Slashdot, YouTube. We are advancing faster not because the nodes in the network are any better, but because the information can flow more freely. Social networks are not new they've been with us since before speech, but back then the only communication channel was seeing someone doing something. A couple hundred years ago the best channels were books and town criers. Twenty years ago it was broadcast and telephone. Today instant, free, social networks are everywhere. And social networks are no more nor less than neural networks, beehives, writ large with us as the units of processing. The social network is vastly more powerful than any of us. More powerful than all of us.
And it is also a fantastic medium for siren songs. For flawed, but appealing, information. That is a problem.
But it is not a hard problem to solve. We see it here every single day, my fellow Slashdotters. Our community does an excellent job of culling the wheat from the chaff. And we do it with very little central directive (karma is about it), and with little if any deep discussion of the need to clean the information. It happens even in the face of great numbers of bad nodes - nodes that intentionally propagate bad information right here in our community. It happens because the rating system is pretty good.
Now imagine having that same rating system for the entire web. I think that would be pretty good.
But here is the important part, the call to action: We can help us advance as a species right now. We can improve the social networks right now. We already have the rating and feedback system, in one form or another, for most social networks. Most social networks at least have a way to leave comments. All we have to do is to think about what makes good information, and help it propagate.
Is good information that information with which I agree? I think not. Sometimes it is, but that is not the real measure of good information. The real measure of good information is whether it makes me question my assumptions. Whether it makes me dig deeper. Not even whether it is true, per se, but whether it leads us to truth.
My conscious objective, then, should be to find that good information, to find those nodes that are producing good information, and then to stimulate them to do more. How would I do that? Simple. Say, "Thank you for making me think." Post a comment demonstrating that the information presented has made our society better. It is a tiny thing, but most of us are good actors. The couple thousand intentional bad actors on Slashdot are no match for the tens or hundreds of thousands who do just a little to clean the information. One little thing.
The social networks ge
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is just an extension of the semantic web and fails at reality in the same way is the original. It is like these people live in a bubble--they fail to see how easy it is to manipulate such systems.
Create an anarchistic way to add meta data to your website by adding a [Pizza] tag, and spammers will create websites that are purely [Pizza] tags. That is why no sane search engine uses meta tags for anything more then the description line in their results. Remember back when search engines actually *used* the keywords metadata tag? Everybody crammed the "keyword" tag full of junk. You'd have sites about food preservation with "Spice Girls" as a keyword!
Create an anarchistic way to rate the truthlieness of you site, and it will be freeped the same way Digg is. It will be abused by parties with vested interests. They will rent botnets, they will send company wide emails to "digg it", they will ask their buddies on their forum to "truth rate it!".
Seriously, haven't these people ever heard of Digg or Youtube comments? I've seem more truth in fortune cookies then I've seen in highly rated comments on those sites!
This seems little more than keeping people more tightly within the boxes they already are in. He doesn't propose a single system, but multiple different ratings systems. So the Democrats could have one, the Republicans could have one, the Scientologists could have one, the "free thinkers" could have one, the Vegans could have one, the Anti-abortionists could have one, etc. I think I'd prefer a single all-encompassing one. At least everyone would know that's bullshit.
In other words, you could always be certain how well the website you're reading corresponds to your Chosen Doctrine. Great. Hell, with such a ratings system people could filter out anything and everything that disagrees with Doctrine.
No, the current system of your friends and family telling you "You're An Idiot" when you read stupid things like "the moon landing was faked" works a lot better. Sure, it sucks too, but at least you know the people telling you you're an idiot, and occasionally get exposed to some idea you may not agree with.
AccountKiller
And I want these ratings to be ANSI & ISO
certified.
The point is, WHO is to be the arbiter of "truth"
Does the site reference the King James version of the bible. Everyone know's that's the absolute truth. ;-)
I can't see this not being exploited heavily, move along there's nothing to see here.
I can see a lot of problems with this. For example, I run a Wiki detailing the fictional universes of a publishing company.
Now, objectively, the information is false. The last thing we need is people running around shrieking about being vampires, and they know it's true because a trusted site on the Internet said so.
But the information is valid in the context of describing fiction.
So a simple truth rating wouldn't quite cut it, I don't think; there would need to be some sort of contextual reference as well, which starts down the path of making this more trouble than it's worth.
Soylens viridis homines es
I want hese ratings on PEOPLE. They need to be endorsed by the official Ministry of Truth.
This law is enacted retroactively, yesterday.
Those not conforming to official truth records are subject to reformation and compulsory psychological medication.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The only Truth you can get from someone else, is theirs.
mod +1 Chuck_Norris
He could use http://tynt.com/ to indicate the truthiness. For example http://tynted.com/0LVPDtCI1090D
Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed.
See Digg: gain a reputation of reporting good stories such that you end up on the front page practically automatically, then insert your shill story, then optionally go back to reporting good stories or just disappear and repeat.
"And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
that someone who believes some of the utterly stupid things you've listed above, can actually be saved and converted into a rational free thinker?
no: they are waste, you can't save the stupid from themselves
however, they do serve a purpose: as a cautionary example, to train young minds NOT to be so stupid
you honestly believe you can save the stupid from themselves? that you can get stupid people to stop thinking stupid things? you believe that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If this happens it should be mandated and affect every news source everywhere.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The Truth?
You can't handle The Truth!
In fact, you wouldn't even know The Truth if it bit you in the butt. Your Truth isn't someone else's Truth. Just look at the political campaigns and try to argue The Truth with someone of the opposite party.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It depends on who you trust, of course, but one could easily build a Firefox extension which looks up a website on a list of your choosing, and shows a green or red dot depending on which list it's on. It's an extension of the phishing-site lists. You'd need to be able to trust the lists, but we always have to trust someone to tell us what truth is, whether it be your local newspaper, Walter Cronkite, CNN, FoxNews, The Daily Show, or what have you.
Problem is that truthfulness is harder to determine than whether a site is evil (phishing, scam, etc), and so it would take more work to create such a list, maybe impossible given the size of the web.
Here's an idea (which may already exist): put a little button in your browser that says "Send to The Truth Squad", which sends the website to a forum where people vote on whether they think it's the truth; the people themselves have been vetted so that either only experts get to respond, OR people's opinions have different weights depending on their trustworthiness (evaluated how? I don't know).
... has he actually USED the Internet lately? It's all a bunch of lies.
.... be honest and good deal in the beginning and then slowly distort and change the deal.
Many a good small private diners will give you a lot for teh money when tehy first open but in time as they build up a repeat customer base, the change the deal to less and not as good.
Why should web sites be any different.
Where is the "a-point truths" of a web site when there is the bigger picture of wide scope honesty to constantly watch for?
Who wants facts? Everybody knows the Earth is flat and supported by turtles all the way down!
... Sir Berners-Lee found out "Angela" from "his area" really didn't look like her photo!
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
"The ministry of truth, that deals with pretense" --Ozzy Osbourne, "Rock'n'Roll Rebel"
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
So, obviously we can't allow one single body to determine "Truth", since even objective things, like Science or History, spark debate amoung experts.
I predict we will end up with two major "Truth Rating" organizations.
One will rate everything on CNN.com 100% true, as well as everything Al Gore says, and rate anything tainted by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh as 0% true, even if it's the announcement that the sky is blue.
The other will rate everything FoxNews.com posts as 100% true, everything Rush says as 110% true, and will rate all sites about "Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming" with a NEGATIVE truth rating.
And, the average person will pick the side they agree with, and use it as a tool for avoiding objective news, and instead only seeing the opinions they expect and agree with.
so let's say a popular web site gets a high truth rating and then publishes something like an old story about UAL going bankrupt. Doesn't the high truth rating just make this situation worst.
I think people already know that you should not trust everything you read, whatever the medium. We should remain wary.
Nullius in verba
;-)
Because we all know how well that's worked out for them.
It's true only so long as no one fucks with it.
I wonder if anyone else recognizes the Indiana Jones reference.
What is truth? or what is trustable? For some things we have a scientific method, that at least until proved wrong (or right) could put as current theory something completely false. And that is the best scenario. For things where "scientific method" dont apply, where there are subjective matters or things that cant be proved involved, things are worse.
If in the internet of 1000 years ago some website claimed that earth was round (yes, even with scientific evidence saying so) maybe the average people would rate that website of untrustable. Maybe more important, some truths (i.e. earth is not the center of the universe) would go against the official "truth" of that moment.
I agree that trustfulness of what you find online (and not online, i.e. newspapers, books, movies before internet age) is a problem, specially when you base on it to i.e. sell all your shares of a company because 5 years ago had economic problems, but the proposal wont solve the problem (in that example, the site could be trustable, the date not).
Maybe could help taking out the "truth" word of the middle and putting instead "consensus" or "the official truth", with all the grain of salts needed to say that is not the truth, but what most vocal people believes in a particular moment. And that, before even considering how to do it in a safe/not spammable way.
... for conservatives, at least.
Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375_pf.html
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
But which facts are true?
If you've got two published scientists, both with PhDs, both with decades of experience, and one says "Global warming is real, catastrophic, and caused by man's pollution." and the other says "Global warming is natural, we are coming out of a little Ice Age still, and man's CO2 emission have no effect on the global climate"...
How do you judge truth there? We have MILLIONS of issues like that. So called Experts in every field, who have experience and education to the highest level you could ask for, fight each other and pose polar opposite view points on key issues.
About the only thing you could really FACT rate objectively is math, and that's assuming you don't venture into the really high end of theoretical math.
Wikipedia already does reasonably well at this. The Wikipedia verifiability and reliable source rules tend to force partisan articles to contain criticism sections, cites to critics, and verifiable negative information. Any cult that's had legal problems will have those prominently mentioned. It's hard to keep a hype article in Wikipedia, although some people keep trying.
Business reliability can be addressed. We do that at SiteTruth. That works because business cannot legally be anonymous. Businesses have a trail of records behind them - corporate filings, credit ratings, criminal records, regulatory filings. Legitimate business sites can be tied back to that information to find out who's behind the business. As for less legitimate business sites, we just move them to the bottom of search results.
Reputation on the Web is a difficult issue. Slashdot has "karma", which helps. The problem on the Web is that not only can one be anonymous, one can create a large number of anonymous identities. (Mostly this is used for spamming; on Wikipedia, it's called "sockpuppetry"). An inter-site karma system, where a single signon accumulated karma from multiple sites, might be useful. It helps if there's some consequence for being a jerk.
So a modest level of web reputation can easily be added to the Web as it exists. Some reasonable solutions are already working, and just need to be deployed more widely.
people should just start thinking for them selfs ? no wait we can't control them when they start doing that, best to have a controlled version of the truth that we can brand and repackage
Yay! Someone who understands that fact != Truth. Facts can be true but not all facts are true or Truth.
I'm sure those people were extremely grateful for that.
I think you need a refresher on inquisitions. You may dispute whether or not the Spanish inquisition was supported by the Pope at the time (he was at least pressured into not speaking out against it). However, the Church definitely was the prosecutor, judge, jury, & executioner of heresy in various inquisitions (in which witches were convicted)
One person's truth is to another person, delusional thinking.
For example my sister is very big on a guy called Jesus who she (among others) claim can walk on water, raise himself and others from the dead (after brain, organ and cell death), and many other claims which violate the well known and well tested laws of nature. To me her "truth" that she'll be lifted up in a "rapture" and taken to the place she calls "heaven" is not just silly nonsense mind junk but it's actually dangerous delusional thinking. Anyone who's stepped into a bath tub with water in it can see that Jesus and anyone else can't walk on room temperature water (non-frozen and no cheating of any kind like no boxes, etc...) ... it just isn't possible just like it isn't possible for you or I to jump to the moon under human power alone, we need a space ship.
So good luck with a truth rating. What you'll end up with isn't "truth" but some sort of "agreement of reality" by some slice of humanity.
Who's to say that that is "truth"? Big Brother?
Within a "cult" the "truth" is either what their leader dictates to them or what they "agree" is the "truth".
Within a "culture" the "truth" is usually a complex fabric of criss crossing ideas and notions and "beliefs".
How are "cults" and "cultures" any different? Cultures are cults with more members.
I wouldn't trust any "truth rating" since I think for myself. Critical thinking using rational thinking skills applying the well known and well tested sciences can solve most questions of "truth" during the typical day.
Questions such as "Jesus" and other nut bar "truths" are easy to slice and dice due to the lack of nature in their nature.
Thinking for yourself will always trump someone else's "truth" since humans can and will make anything the "truth" no matter how silly it is. They'll even attempt to deny serious facts of life and succeed in their denials even while the harsh realities of nature rule our destinies and ultimate fates.
So good luck with your "truth" rating there. In reality it's more of a "this web site conforms to some degree to this particular cult's point of view on the world". Even with that the'll be epic flame wars over how accurate ratings are since within cults and cultures there are different angles on the points of view!
Naturally my point of view always has the highest rating for my cult(ure)! ;--)
People will start relying on truth rating rather their own brains to determine truth. The ratings will then be delgated to a single point of control which can be manipulated. In essence, you will have an organization determing what truth is and stupid people will listen to those ratings. It will destroy the free flow of unregulated information.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
cat Website > Tim_Walrus_Berners_Lee | grep Liddul_Oysters "But answer came there none."
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Lots and lots of new users are coming on to the internet. How are they to know that Darwin was right and Hubbard was wrong, if John Travolta, who they've seen in movies, tells them in a nice video presentation about how everybody in the world is wrong and him and his people know the truth.
Really, fundamentally, you can see the fear that TBL has here.
On the other hand, although I agree about the problem, this isn't the solution.
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php - see the final item, "The Primer" for my approach to this problem, which involves big, stable organizations (in this case the USG but anybody coudl do it) publishing basic overviews of reality for newly connected populations to help inoculate them against bullshit.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
We have to go back to basics here. Truth is not subjective; it's a scientific concept based on how much evidence can be provided towards a claim - once that claim is accepted, there is a burden of proof on challenging claims. That said, the breadth of the internet is such that I sincerely doubt we as a species have enough power to audit it. What we do have is the tools of education, and people need to realise that "critical thinking" does not equate to "thinking critically". You don't have to automatically oppose things; you just have to be able to accept that whichever claim has more evidence is more worthy of belief. Naturally, knowing what others think is a kind of evidence, though how strong it is depends on the nature of those who believe it. Not simple. But the truth rarely is.
is to teach grade schoolers basic fact-checking skills.
My Websites Truthiness Rating is a Lot.
That's funny.. whats next, ratings to see if there are and bad words so we can protect the children? Feh.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
TruthfullnessFactor = Math.log(PageLoadTime) * NumberOfAdvertisements;
What the hell does one have to do with the other? You may as well have said "It will work just as well as before, because I'm jumping on one foot". The fact that you can't make them listen to you doesn't impede the capacity to cast a more critical eye on a known bullshit artist, and it doesn't impede the capacity to consider the history and motivations of the speaker.
The whole point is to be able to bring your trust in a persons character to the table when you don't have the capacity to critically judge what they're saying. If people weren't insulated from the capacity to bring such determinations to bear in their economic decisions, things wouldn't be so fucked up in the first place. As it stands, half the time wielding economic power without applying critical judgment to what the recipient will do with that power after you give them the money is considered criminally prejudicial.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Instead of a rating, can we have them color coded?
Truthiness level: Green, for nice God-fearing webistes, Red for terrorist hippy propaganda?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
F is for Fox News.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
The article you linked doesn't support that assertion (if you take liberal to mean Democrat.) It discusses the effect on both parties, when they're considering the opposition.
Perhaps the use of terms like "conservative" and "liberal" should be used less. In conversations I've had recently, I've been called "liberal" when my position was clearly "conservative". Because I don't back down, I forced the name caller to define liberal, and she couldn't. After defining it for her, along with conservative, she consented that she was just parroting something she'd heard on TV.
Unfortunately, terms like these no longer mean what they originally meant. Certainly, the dictionary gets it right, but people who don't know the actual definitions accept the common usage and infer the definition. Now being used like an expletive toward people with whom you disagree, I'm forced to make an Orwellian 1984 reference - these words are now newspeak expletives.
Donkey or Elephant? Liberal or Conservative? Democrat or Republican? None-of-the-above, I am a free thinker.
"Lame" - Galaxar
If one reads TFA, or better the original article linked in tFA (here, but not linked in the summary), its quite clear that most of the way this is being interpreted is wrong. He's not asking for a unitary rating by a single authority, he's asking for a mechanism by which diverse entities can provide their own ratings in their own way:
What he's asking for seems more like a form of accountable third-party tagging than like a single MPAA/ESRB/etc.-style rating based on "truth" rather than "maturity" of content.
We could call it the ministry of truth. I think I hear a whirling noise as Orwell spins in his grave.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue.
I'm just curious about what statements you are speaking of there...
I'm assuming (which gives me the distinct possibility of being wrong) that it has something to do with the effect of tax rates on the amount of revenue collected by government. And since you seem to be beating on the Bush supporters (which on about 95% of what he has done I am not), I'm assuming (once again opening myself to being incorrect) that your position is that raising taxes brings in more revenue to government.
That would be a true if we were starting at a 0% tax rate. It of course be incorrect if we were starting at a 100% rate.
Tax revenue and the effect of the tax rates is a maximization problem. Unfortunately, no one in our government seems to be interested in trying to work on the maximization of revenues.
The leftists want to take the rates to the ceiling despite the fact that the government could take in more money by utilizing a lower rate. It's generally about class warfare rhetoric and geared toward "punishing" the "rich."
The right wants to (well at least in argument, but the 6 years of Bush and his Republicans in congress didn't follow it... a clear illustration that they don't have any true principals) cut taxes to the ground to shrink government. It's really based around letting their friends avoid paying that much.
The problem is there is a point that could maximize revenues and keep enough in the private sector to create jobs and economic growth. Unfortunately, I doubt all the lawyers that are running our government took many math classes that covered maximization problems. They all just use their rhetoric to rob the people... either they overtax or undertax them and don't get enough money to keep the government out of the red, which just makes the future tax consequences for everyone greater.
The politics and crony-ism need to be taken out of tax policy in order to maximize revenues and ensure economic growth. The US tax system is nothing but a tool for buying votes, which is the only real objective our so called representatives in government seem to have.
Point: Mesa Mike.
If anyone literally believed an imaginary man created anything real, even religious folk would regard him with pity. Followers of the Judaic religions believe the eternally living God created stuff.
Would this idea sound silly if it were attached to other media? Then it's silly when attached to the Internet. And it seems to me applying this to conventional media would be a farce: imagine, for example, trying to come up with a "truthometer reading" for C-SPAN.
Why try to reinvent the wheel when Google does on good job in this space. Trusted sources bubble up towards the top. At the same time, do I trust a Wiki article that the first URL to a query or do I trust a .gov site. Some minor issues but Google has a pretty solid trust mechanism in place for web sites and works for most part.
Again what is trustworthy for you may not be for me. So Google along with custom tagging to bubble up sites I prefer more to the top should help
There is already tons of sites out there for dispelling rumours on the net but people still opt to ignore the truth and pass on lies they want to believe.
Secondly, who decides the truth? Sometimes those who claim something is false are doing so under false pretences.
...for appropriately flagging Web sites promoting creationism, astrology, homeopathy, and other such nonsense.
Frankly, I think "truth" is overrated. If something is true, it's true whether you believe it or not. Only things that aren't true need to be believed. I say let it be a free for all and leave reality to sort it out. Keep the Scientologists in line with laws against things like kidnapping, murder, fraud, medical malpractice, etc.
OH, HOW EXPLOITABLE!
Irony: A site where users frequently use wikipedia to prove various truths discusses the "truthiness" of various websites.
kcabward drawkcab
1. I define myself as a liberal because I believe in using tax money to fund social programs, I'm against the war, for gay rights, etc. All positions which you can probably respect, regardless of whether you agree. ..., Freak show, because I admitted it myself, right?
2. Change the definition of the word "liberal" in people's minds minds to mean Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
3. Since I gave myself that label, I can no longer argue that I am not a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking,
In my own mind I do the same with Republicans. I hear "conservative" and I think, "Gun-toting, Bible-thumping, fact-ignoring, etc", when really they probably just believe in lower taxes, a free market and strong national defense, which are things I don't agree with but don't hate you for believing.
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
That's the slogan of Fox News. Truth, perhaps, as far as it goes.
And "as far as it goes" is not all that far.
Controversial sites aren't going to get meaningful truth ratings, all you'll be able to do is figure out what the site's bias is. And if you can't do that already, you're not going to benefit from "truth ratings".
why not remove all the safety labels and let the problem solve itself?
of course we have to slap a safety label on a website first before we can start to complain about it!
actually, i'm all in for this truth rating business. accessibility for the masses!
When this thing comes into effect, the past twenty years will be retroactively known as "The Doubt Age".
"Welcome at whitehouse.gov! See our truth rating here: *bling*. You see, this site is telling you the truth. Relax and consume."
Do not trust this signature.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
Thanks. That's an important philosophical point that is too easy to forget.
OTOH, I can see why TBL might think some kind of rating system is a stab at education, not censorship. Unfortunately, the "gaming the system" a lot of us has mentioned goes both ways. Those in the wrong may well trick the system into dubbing them trustworthy, but those in the right are just as likely to squash the slightest peep from those in the wrong. Neither situation is healthy.
So you can laugh all you want to...
So someone will watch for "truth", but who watches the watch-
Ah, who cares... I give up. We're doomed.
First of all, truth is subjective. Truth is not fact. Second, have you ready *anything* on the internet, its all conspiracy or fanboy nonsense.
For example, I can point out that Obama's blaming on the stock market drop yesterday on Bush is idiotic because Bush didn't write the bad loans, Bush didn't sign loans he couldn't afford, and Bush had absolutely no means to stop foreign investors from pulling out of the American mortgage market over a year ago which initiated this mess... And some 18 year old - never paid a dime for his own toilet paper - Democrat Socialist is going to mark this post as trolling. Not just because he would ride Obama's knob if he could, but because he doesn't have any practical knowledge of the economy or economics. All he knows is that his unionized Democrat school teachers have been brainwashing him to vote Democrat since the age of 6.
So how will you get the truth from users clicking true/not true? Internet users don't know what truth is. And even if they did, they would ignore it for choosing with their emotions.
99% of you have already assumed I am a Republican, and I am not. Truth is subjective. Look the word "subjective" up in the encyclopedia.
What, they've never heard of WOT? You can rate sites based on:
- Trustworthyness
- Vendor Reliability
- Privacy
- Child Safety
I'm sure trustworthyness would count
Well where does that leave us? How can people be persuaded?
HTTP isn't the only traffic on the internet. We need this implemented at the protocol level. Perhaps some kind of flag that would indicate whether a packet was good or "evil"? I'm sure there's an RFC out there somewhere...
A sneer is not an argument.
I'd sneer at someone who professed an earnest belief in the truthfulness of the Harry Potter series. Your beliefs are just as ludicrous, and quite a bit less entertaining.
Argument? There's nothing to argue about. You believe some crazy-ass story taken from a 2000 year old book. You have no evidence whatsoever for any of it. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you are completely delusional.
Next!
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
That can readily be explained by the perception that "experts" in many fields have a distinctly leftist bias. (From my perspective, they have a rather statist bias, which may or may not be leftist depending on the issue. Given that most "experts" are funded at least in part by the state, that should not be surprising. But it also is possible that my libertarian/anarchist leanings are partly responsible for my perception as well.)
Nonaggression works!
Sneer if you must.
But it still doesn't convince me (nor anyone, I suspect, who doesn't already share your views) that belief in any of the great world religions is anything at all like belief in the literal truth of Harry Potter stories.
You see, a sneer is no argument.
It didn't convince me, anyway.
But, nevermind.
I know you're just out having fun with a bit of intolerant fundie-bashing.
So... carry on.
Good point. What other subjective ratings will people want for web sites after that? Fun ratings? Interesting(ness) ratings? Sites currently convey their version of "truth" with some facts. Mark Twain said it well. "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.â
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." - Henry Ford
I disagree that the tax policy of the Federal government should be to maximize revenue. That does not take in to account that raising taxes takes more of the wealth that I as an individual have created out of my back pocket. Of course to your typical politician, they just want to spend as much money as they can (well, OK, they just want to get reelected, and they do that by spending as much money as they can).
Who will decide truth :
One or less between Obama / MacCain will be right in the end ... Which will be tossed into the 'wwwrongness' oblivion ?
Btw, quite a dictatorship you would be crafting, Mr Berners Lee ... dont you think there are enough would-be dictators already ?
Read TFA, or better yet the BBC source article linked in TFA. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who (neither plural nor indefinite gender use being appropriate) would usually be referred to as "himself" not "themselves", said: "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
Hardly what you'd expect from a self-appointed "Ruler of Truth".
Actually, cults rely on their own freedom to spread information to recruit, and on social structures that discourage members from accessing (or at least giving credence to) outside information sources to retain membership. Yes, some cults will actively seek to restrict derogatory claims (true or otherwise) about themselves from being distributed in the public media, where there are readily available means to do so, many others are far less concerned about that because they principally target people who are generally detached from or distrustful of mainstream media sources, or because they rely on far more powerful person-to-person communication ot overcome negative media images (often, using outright false-flag recruitment where recruits don't know what group they've become associated with until they've been drawn deeply in).
Its not at all as simple as "cults rely on restriction of information to thrive".
Yes. But, economic activity is what generates revenues in our system. So, to maximize tax revenues, the tax policy would have to create sufficient and sustainable economic activity. This is where I get into issues with the confiscatory tax proponents. Sure, you can tax everyone at 100% this year, but your revenues are going to drop like a rock for the next year.
There also has to be enough incentive for people to generate activity. If you say that you will tax any income over $100,000 at 100%, how many "rich" people that make more than that are going to just take the rest of the year off once they hit that level.
You can raise the amount and lower the percentage, but there will still be some people that will say, that's enough. It's not worth it for me to work any more this year. So, whatever the policy happens to be, it must take into account the effect of economic incentive to drive productivity in order to maximize revenue.
I don't get why people are slagging Tim off over this. We already do have such mechanisms on the small scale: karma points for comments, reputation systems for online trading, blogrolls and 'social bookmarking services' for 'this unknown website is recommended/suggested by this other website I read'.
Remember Advogato's rankings?
The logical next step would be to have a generic way of talking about such rankings/recommendations such that I don't need to subscribe to a third party to do it. Use, oh, I don't know, how about RDF? We've already got FOAF - how about an 'Enemy Of My Enemy' protocol?
Yes, this will lead to 'ontology wars' as groups with different views of trustworthiness start formalising the metrics they already use informally. As long as the protocol itself remains open and interconnectable, I don't see this as a huge problem. At least people will be openly owning their philosophical bias rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Sir Tim is not proposing a "systemic rating scale", in fact, he specifically any single such scale in favor of something more like a freeform tagging system by which different ratings providers could provide ratings using their own rating systems. (He's not real specific, at least in the BBC article cited by TFA) about what exactly the system would entail, just that different organizations could provide rating in different ways.
parent is correct, and I will take it one GÃdelian step further and say that the more 'trusted' a site is the less I trust it. (or, in non-fuzzy sets: I trust all the sites that are untrustworthy)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
what in the posters list of beliefs is NOT a part of Christianity?
Well, lets count:
imaginary
Christians say he's real.
man
God != Man
in the sky
Christians say God transcends physical position and thus can't be in the sky.
created the universe, Earth, and all life most especially people,
Unless he evolved them
in six days about 6000 years ago.
Only if that first day took a few billion years.
In 30 words he got five claims about what Christians believe wrong. That has to be a new trolling record.
(Disclaimer: He got these wrong not because what the Christians believe is right, but because he was wrong about what the Christians believe.)
FATMOUSE + cthulu_mt = FATMOUSE
Definitely fatter than "A is A".
this is so easy to defeat
just make a website that's called
This Website is False
So we should force dictionaries to omit terms that appear only in published fiction? Um, what for? That sounds (a) stupid, (b) like it would prevent dictionaries from specializing for different uses by using different selection criteria, and (c) stupid. (Should we knock out all the entries in the OED that only appear in works of fiction?)
Many dictionaries will already label informal entries or usages as such. Read the damn dictionaries' methodology, pick the one that serves you best, learn its entry format, and use it correctly.
Are you adequate?
I think the methodology in the study cited in the article is flawed.
1) I'm sure the sample sizes were too small. When it comes to psych testing, you really can't tell anything with less that a couple hundred people and results are highly suspect with anything less that a couple thousands. I'm sure some psychologists reading this will disagree with me, but they're wrong. Validation drops off precipitously as sample sizes drop.
2) Using real-world events and personalities could have poisoned the results as participants could have factored in outside information. For example, even though Newsweek retracted the article, numerous other sources validated the Koran flushing story. The study should have stuck to purely fictional scenarios that closely resembled real situations, like Supreme Court John Smith being affiliated with the violent right-wing group "End Abortion Now". That would still reveal political bias (or not!) and couldn't be poisoned.
Why is it that as soon as someone is knighted they get stupid? TBL needs to understand that there are somethings which are appropriate to think of as a technological challenge, and some that are not. This is one of the "NOT"s.
The idea that someone, never mind someone so respected, would even THINK of trying to do this is frightening. Berners-Lee now goes onto my list of dangerous nut-cases. He'd better not show up for a speech at my University.
From w3c.org:
I give that at best a C- in terms of truth.
Dear father of the web,
Show us on the doll where the bad www.theonion.com touched you.
While I think most people would agree that there is a distinction between porn or sexual content on the Internet which is "OK" and that which is "over the line", legislators, religious leaders and technologists alike have failed to come up with any sort of objective standard for what is good and bad. I have a feeling that "Truthfulness" on the Internet is going to have as many or even more problems coming up with a way to judge content. That's sort of the heart of the Internet, or even of Free Speech itself -- the belief that, for any one subject, there are many different points of view, and no one has a monopoly on the truth. The more opinions that are allowed to be voiced, even if some of those opinions turn out to be false or baseless, the better the chance that we will actually find the truth in there somewhere.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Actually, there is an addon for firefox called "Web of Trust" which does pretty much exactly that. It also gives you a warning for websites you are about to enter if it was deemed unsafe by others who use the addon. While it may not be exactly accurate, this sort of thing seems to work for websites such as wikipedia and, god forbid, even /. (moderation)
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
Sounds like a recipe for Group Think to marginalize controversal ideas. George Bernard Shaw said "Success covers a multitude of blunders", mark this as one of Berner-Lee's failures and lets forget about it.
Not trying to convince you of anything, buddy. Indeed, I doubt that is possible.
Just annoyed at your use of the word "argument". You see, argument is about logic and reason. You, having embraced irrationality and "faith" in unprovable "truths", are capable of neither. So stop using that word, please.
And another word for you to stop using is "intolerant". Persecution of groups they don't like for some arbitary reason is what religion does best. I probably wouldn't have anywhere near as much animosity towards religion if I hadn't heard repeated tirades by the believers I know against gays, for example.
Maybe using the word "sneer" to describe valid and reasonable criticism of your belief system makes you feel better, but it doesn't change the facts. You believe, unconditionally, in supernatural beings with great powers to create and restore life, influence world and personal events, who tell you how to live your life, and who reside in an unknown location either in space or another dimension or something. You have zero evidence beyond personal anecdotes for any of this.
If my pointing out the ridiculousness of your beliefs is "sneering" then yeah, I guess I'm sneering. However, to me, I'm just stating the obvious.
Anyway, no point arguing, like I said. Carry on.
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
The problem with having a central authority that determines what is true and what is false is that the individual may eventually stop deciding for themselves what is true and what is false. I am more than capable of making decisions on my own when it comes to the Internet, and I don't need any elitist-style group to make my decisions for me. Here comes the question: Will website owners be forced to use such labeling on their sites? What if the system is not trusted? See the problem yet? It gets worse.
What about those who decide to question things like government policy? One commenter mentioned 9/11, and how they think that alternative perspectives are bunk, but one thing that isn't is how the rescue workers and first responders are being treated.... not very well at all. These same people are calling into question the EPA's statement that the air was safe to breath and the water was safe to drink. If a "truth-labeling" system were ran by those with less than honorable intentions, and most people were relying on said system too heavily, what would happen if said system were to say that the Feel Good Foundation was bogus and full of it? Do you see the problem yet?
And even if something could be seen as credible, like say.... an American Psychological Association publication that stated that Aspartame actually is linked to weight gain (doing this for illustration purposes), you would still have those who consume the product anyway and those who are opposed to criticism of the artificial sweetener would dismiss the group on their own, even if such a publication was already peer reviewed and considered valid in the academic community. In other words, the labeling system could in theory be ignored entirely and would also be a complete waste of time, unless it were to fall into the wrong hands...
If that were to happen, then entire populations of people could be conditioned (in theory) to think one way and only one way. The fact that people are free to question things, even if it seems absurd to do so at times, means that they are truly liberated and truly free. The day that asking questions lands you in prison is the day in which you are no longer considered free. In terms of freedom of thought, such a web labeling system would be the wrong direction to take. Encouragement of critical thinking is a better idea. Isn't it time for us to stop insulting our own intelligence and encourage ourselves to think for ourselves instead?
I resent being modded down as "flamebait" for voicing my opinion, whoever you are, you insensate ass!
Sir, I think you may have a patent material there
If we have this then can I go to all the religious sites and minus their truth points :D Considering I'd put all their books into fiction anyways.
1. I define myself as a liberal because I believe in using tax money to fund social programs, I'm against the war, for gay rights, etc.
Well, that's where you went wrong. The correct label you are looking for is Socialist - with liberal social policy leanings. The current term of art and obfuscation for this combination is "Progressive".
Anyone who believes in having the government confiscate their money to redistribute it according to a social plan is a Socialist, and that very lack of personal economic freedom is anathema to Liberty. Therefore, you are no liberal.
Except, they did find WMD is Iraq:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19552050-23109,00.html
So you are the one that can't believe the facts.
I didn't vote for deregulations that allowed massive redistribution of wealth to corrupt speculators. Did you? What about arming Saddam Hussein? Did you vote to ignore all evidence except what would suggest that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and working directly with al Qaida? The serious problems with the United States are not as general as "the undereducated." It is the most corrupt among the over-privileged, undereducated who are completely to blame for all the problems described in the stories I've linked. These policies were all implemented without the knowledge of the People, and in direct contradiction to the will of the people, which has been clear from the reaction to each. All of these American atrocities are not the fault of "democracy," it's the fault of fascist traitors, led by the Bush family.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Perhaps what we need is a way to group the domain names into logical groups that will help describe the content available. For example, we could have "groups" for Governments, Educational Facilities, Military, and Businesses. By viewing pages from an Educational domain we could safely assume that the information presented is truth. We could even have groups for each individual country!
On second thought, it'll never work...
I've met TBL at a function where the topic was basically that implementing some of the W3C standards in browsers could be cryptic. During this talk, the feeling I got was, that once you get past his Sir Tim bullcrap he was technically a bright guy.
I think the biggest problem with TBL is that he's standing high up on a pedistal we built for him and forced him to stand on for so long that he's forgotten that he is and always has been a pretty innovative coder/engineer, but politically, he's still just as irrational as all the rest of us nerds.
At least he's not HWLee
You're providing misinformation and linking to its refutation.
Google has created a very good rating system to help people distinguish sites that can be trusted to tell the truth, and those that can't. You think the web is in bad condition now (and I don't), imagine if search engines worked on nothing but keywords and if news aggregators didn't exist. This is an existing product, and you're free to create a better one if you can. Don't ask for somebody to create a system that so many brilliant organizations in the private sector have already created and are competing to improve.
...it's the fault of fascist traitors, led by the Bush family.
...ho was given his political mandate (more or less) by the American People via the democratic process. You get what you vote for.