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!
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?
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
In Soviet Russia, truth rates YOU!
Waitaminit....that's almost how it should be...
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)
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.
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!
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.
i.e. a universal reputation system is a hard problem.
Today, we use brands for that.
Deleted
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?
Bah. I've already posted, but if I hadn't I'd mod you up. These are exactly the kind of worries one might have about a system like what Berners-Lee is suggesting.
But there's something else here. Suppose we were to pick one of the first two options you present (users or an uninvolved organization). Then the suggestion isn't terribly original. There are already sites that incorporate user input to rank sites (and some of them *koff*digg*koff* don't work all that well). And the idea of a neutral fact-checking group/site isn't too interesting either. Just thinking of factcheck.org and snopes.com, it isn't too hard to see something like a rating service coming down the line. (And there are probably more obvious relatives than those that I'm just missing.)
Just doesn't seem like a very good idea...
So you can laugh all you want to...
So you are asking this question?
"What is truth? Is your truth the same as mine?"
What rating would be given,
The Roman Catholic Church?
The Mormons?
Scientology?
What about Global Warming sites? What about sites that say Global Warming is a theory and is unproven?
Facts are easy to rate. A site that claims that a Toyota Prius gets 3000 MPG is has their facts wrong.
A site that says the McCain is a Nazi would have their facts wrong.
But Truth is much harder.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, those are statistics...its different.
Sorry Mr. Twain.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Ok, let's truth rate (True or False answers only) the following sentence in this post:
"This sentence is false."
I'd have to give it 3 trues out of 5 possible.
She made the willows dance
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
Tim Berners-Lee advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting untruth. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to his are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and he is a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Likewise, you atheists have some pretty weird assertions about the beliefs of Christians.
How do we mark you?
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.
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...
"Sad to say, but that's censorship. Coming from someone I respect like Berners-Lee, I am truly disappointed."
Censorship means denying access to information. How does rating the information as (un)trustworthy deny access?
"...it won't work perfectly which is to say it won't work - period.
Nothing works perfectly - period! However, this does not mean we throw out the Principa Mathematica.
"Look at an algorithm like PageRank which Google bombed so easily. What's to prevent miscreants from messing with this?"
Nothing. - What's preventing you from learning the SKILL of researching information (eg: the definition of censorship)?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Sadly, science and mathematics, the pillars of modern western philosophy, rely upon irreducible axioms. These axioms, if rejected, would make the entire system nonsense.
Sadly, people who don't understand science, seek to undermine science by trying to inject the framework of religion in a discussion of science.
Science is not a belief system and there are no "irreducible axioms." The whole of science is built upon layers of proof and verifiability. There is no axiom that is "self evident" to "believe." Science has facts that can be proved to ridiculous degrees.
The term "axiom" also has a canonical meaning as an established principle. In science and math, the term axiom is sometimes used in this manner and the theologians like to seize upon this ambiguity in the language to create an argument that takes a bit to untangle to show its nonsense.
It is a mathematical axiom that 1+1=2. Assuming we are using common base ten numbering systems and integers, this is a fact, it is provable. It is not something one needs to believe.
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.
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
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.
> all you can do is expose people to issues and arguments,
> and their mind grapples with it
We can hope so, but I've seen too much from every side that indicates a lot of minds don't grapple.
Examples:
Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Sarah Palin asserts the conflict in Iraq is God's war.
The Universe is only 6000 years old.
etc, etc.
But yeah, you may be right that the obvious, really stupid stuff is good fodder for young apprentice thinkers.
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 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
... 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.
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.
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.
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