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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.'"
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?
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)
And how do you educate people without trustable knowledge ?
\u262D = \u5350
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.
Im curious as to how sites that discuss UFO and/or paranormal phenomena will be rated.
We're talking about a grey area that has little to no concrete evidence for or against. How do you judge truth in this sites except by personal opinion?
At what point did Berners-Lee appoint themselves Rulers of the Truth?
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
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)
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?
Universities are FULL of trustable knowledge; academic journals are peer-reviewed, and usually there's plenty of original data available, so you can repeat the experiments or statistics to see if you get the same result.
The PROBLEM is that only about 10% of the people alive at any one time are even CLOSE to being smart enough to attend university in the FIRST place.
Sorry if this bums you out, but most people are terribly stupid. My old boss used to say that it surprised him to no end that most people could eat cereal in the morning without accidentally gouging an eye out with their spoon.
Yep, I'm sure there is some form of inverse square law which can be applied to a group of people: The more intelligent the group is on an individual basis as a collective whole the group rates about the same as something yet evolve out of the primordial soup...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Its not. This is just a glaring example of what happens when people who are good at one thing start applying themselves to other things. TBL is good with the ol' hypertext but social issues of truth and bias? Not so much. It reminds me of all those quotes people have of Einstein in their sigs. If they arent about relativity then why bother?
No, no, the rule for collective intelligence is as follows: for any case of collective decision-making, the effective IQ of a group is equal to the IQ of the smartest person in the group, divided by the size of the group.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Well, according to who? ;-)
Who's truth?
As Napoleon once said: "History is a set of lies agreed upon"
I mean, a page describing how Jesus ascended into heaven after being buried. Is that truthful? I guess one billion people would say it is.
Quite often, truth is just what most people think. Burning witches in the dark ages was fine, because we _knew_ they were witches.
This seems like some guy who just woke up after believing some dude was going to send him one million dollars, and now he wants the internet to be all "truthful".
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Well, they chose it as word of the year, but didn't actually add it to the dictionary. "Word of the year" is like that sometimes, its a word that's on everyone's lips but isn't necessarily what academics would consider a "real" word. But words like truthiness, wassup, and so forth do end up in the dictionary at times. Most dictionaries specifically indicate "slang" in their word definitions, however, so you should be safe.
How so?
There is only one factoid contained in the given input: The sentence declares itself false.
Since we have no other information to validate against we must trust it by default, hence we assume the statement is True.
This is a bootstrapping problem. We must trust the very first factoid entering a system or we'll never get started.
Alternatively we could decide to disallow self-referential input.
Really, these puzzles are completely irrelevant in a peer reputation system.
... 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.
Wow! Someone who actually understands the creation of NCLB (and the fact that Pres. Bush really isn't that conservative overall; he is conservative but really no more conservative than Clinton was liberal while in office). That's pretty rare on the internet.