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Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet takes a look at how crowd-moderation can capture and reflect the prejudice of individuals. 'As more web content is crowd-sourced and crowd-moderated, are we seeing only the wisdom of crowds? No, we're also seeing their prejudice. The Internet reflects both the good and ugly in human nature. ... Any system relying on people implicitly encodes prejudices as well. In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected, there is no hope for moral or intellectual consistency in crowd-sourced or moderated content.'"
Anyone who needed ZDNet to tell them this clearly hasn't been on Slashdot very long.
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected, there is no hope for moral or intellectual consistency in crowd-sourced or moderated content.
The Republicans made so much noise prior to the just concluded elections and they won...won big! Now their maths awaits the test. The modus operandi is:
Make so much noise so often, and your argument will be believed. Even when it carries no sense at all.
That is precisely why an my karma is in the cellar. Anyone who disagrees with the crowd anywhere, even on Slashdot, will get moderated into oblivion. I really think they ought to have a disagree option in the moderation system.
Nowhere ever, even once, has a crowd of people ever come up with anything great or outstanding. Progress in almost every human endeavor is made by people who are willing to swim against the current carrying all the dead fish that are floating downstream.
All theory is gray
Welcome back to reality newbs!
Who, ANYPLACE, promised you prejudice-free surfing on any site on the Internet?
And did you buy a bridge from them?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
After giving it a bit of thought, I don't think consistency is too much of a problem. Things that 100% of people like will be up 100% of the time. Things 99% of people like will be up 99% of the time. If only half of people think it is proper, it will be removed half the time. And so on, until we reach the things everybody hates, which will be immediately removed. What happens is that things some people dislike will be reduced, but still available, giving us a compromise - people who disapprove will not encounter it as often, but those who desire it can still seek it out and obtain it. Sure, edge cases may be problematic - if only one in a thousand people considers something acceptable, it will be difficult to find; people who are easily offended will still be often offended. But those are the outliers - for the majority of the probability distribution, it will be relatively fair. Much more so than letting a select few moderate all the content, at any rate - by increasing the number of moderators, you decrease the effect any one has.
I believe Plato covered this concept a while ago
...not having RTFA, that the article is bogus.
Who's with me?
and this isn't a FOSS promotion article?
Boycott and vote it all down!
... explains the Mac cult
Shocked, I tell you, to find humanity in here!
And another great quote: a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
More and more it appears the so called voice of the crowd is becoming the voice of the organization paying the spammers.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/11/02/follow-the-%E2%80%9Ctruthy%E2%80%9D-tweets-to-find-twitter%E2%80%99s-political-spammers/
This dude's butthurt whine about Craigslist is somehow cast as a contemporary political drama titled "Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds"? Am I in the .onion TLD or something?
Wait, so someone actually used crowd sourcing as a way to gather information for a study against the common wisdom of crowd sourcing -- which reveals that crowd sourcing is prejudiced?
They expect us to believe that their "wisdom" gained from "crowd" sourcing shows "'the wisdom of the crowd' is prejudiced", and theirs isn't?
Wikipedia? Yes, it is clearly an example of bias and prejudice.
Write an article on one subject, it'll get deleted.
An article on a different subject, but similar content...will be defended to the death.
Not because of a difference in notability, or references, but because the one is much better than the other.
Don't believe? Go check some of the pages that are nothing more than a list of chess moves, or a random description of a not particularly important element, or a pointless object somewhere in the world that nobody cares about. Yet it is in some database or book so it's reference so it must be kept. Then find an article being deleted on a Pokemon, or a television show, or a book series. Watch it get trashed.
Huzzah for the fairness of Wikipedia!
The web might be filled with prejudice but this is a guy who got flagged on craigslist as a business because he accepted credit cards. That would sound like a business to me too. I'm so sorry Craig isn't ready to come down and give you special treatment honey...
"Editor gets treatment he doesn't like, says them inner-tubes iz evil, news at eleven"
Welcome back to reality newbs!
Who, ANYPLACE, promised you prejudice-free surfing on any site on the Internet?
And did you buy a bridge from them?
Heh. No, I didn't fall for that old trick!
Say, did you all happen to catch a look at my new blocks of ice just outside the igloo? Pretty fancy!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Actually, the last guy who promised me prejudice-free anything to do with groups bought a bridge from me. And a couple of routers or switches IIRC, and at retail price when they were well-used and obsolete.
Do you figure non-RIAA music is better? Most anyone’s “better” is different. Fair enough, make the quality distinction that fits you without getting into label ideology. If the indie model really makes it better, let that influence quality and then make the quality distinction directly.
I say similar things about open-source.
P.S. – do you listen to really good classic popular music? That kind of stuff tends to be on the major labels just as surely as the modern mainstream stuff you’re likely decrying.
P.P.S – do you mean that non-RIAA musicians tend to focus more on the music itself, rather than nonmusic aspects? Steak versus sizzle is another hard to address “better” argument. I figure you need some of both, although I personally have developed a desire for a higher mix of ‘sizzle’ recently.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I don't have an issue with Bill Clinton banging the fat chick, or Elliot Spitzer cheating on his wife with a hooker, or Fluffy the Trial Lawyer knocking up some over-the-hill political groupie. That's between them and their wives, as far as I'm concerned. What I do have an issue with, is Bill Clinton lying under oath, Elliot Spitzer having prosecuted other people for the same thing he was doing himself, and Fluffy spending campaign money on covering up his sordid tryst.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I call BS here. I don't think you got modded into oblivion for "mentioning that logic should dictate the outcome of a decision and not political motivations." Hell - I'm an extreme liberal and I agree 100% with that statement. I'm thinking it was probably something else that you said.
Show us the post that got you modded out of existence.
Was? Is? Whatever, I don't go there.
I noticed this effect the first time I saw Digg. A topic that started to trend would stay toward the top, and be seen my many more people, so it tended to trend even more, which means it stays near the top even more... and soon this bias becomes not just obvious, but enormous.
Theoretically it could happen even to a topic that was voted up by only a very few people, if they did it at about the same time. Which means that there is a certain amount of Chaotic nature to trending topics on Digg, and the eventual trends may bear very little resemblance to peoples' actual preferences, were a simple vote or some other measure taken for comparison.
In a privatized society, the public space is owned by individuals and corporations.
It is thus not public but private. Owned and ruled by whatever incentives and agendas those individuals and corporations have.
Said agendas are thus usually politic, religious or to make profit.
There's your free speech right there.
Me, I like state-owned and thus non-profit institutions framed in constitutions defending the right of the individual.
I don't think that unimportant elements really exist, what with being the constituents of matter and all. I, at least, am perfectly comfortable with deleting articles on worthless pop culture wherein creepy internet nerds write ten thousand words on the symbolic significance of blastoise as compared to the savior-figure in Babylonian creation myths. Actually, that might be interesting. Just take out the Pokemon parts and move it to an article on Babylonian creation myths. It pains some to hear it, but Wikipedia does not need a plot analysis of every Dragon Ball Z episode. However, it really should list all the elements. Chess is a historically relevant game, which additionally present a computationally interesting problem, and is the basis for several other interesting mathematical problems. No one over the age of twelve cares about Pokemons. When they build supercomputers to play Pokemon professionals, maybe it'll be noteworthy.
Pff. This is why "unnotable" material is deleted from wikipedia, because the material isn't notable to the majority.
So some articles, that people spent hours, if not days or months writing is deleted because one person thinks it's unnotable and gathers the meat puppets to kill the article. They succeed most of the time because the material in question isn't interesting to the nerds that run Wikipedia. But oh yes, we must have an article on every goddamn pokemon thing.
There's no way on slashdot to appeal this. In theory metamodding would catch it but I've tried it and it's boring (you don't know the context) and incredibly inefficient (because most mods are fine). It would be far better if you could flag a bad mod on a post and have *that* reviewed.
Which is useful as a yardstick to avoid, otherwise you're copy&pasting with your brain
"Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Alert to the dangers of majoritarian tyranny, the Constitution's framers inserted several anti-majority rules.
http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/politics/democracy/5496-Abhorrence-Democracy-and-Mob-Rule.html
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Are you sure that Clinton lied under oath?
Clinton was asked, under oath, if he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton did not immediately answer the question, but instead asked what was meant by a "sexual relationship". He was told that a sexual relationship was a relationship where they had sexual intercourse. Clinton then said that he did not have a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.
Clinton and Lewinsky had oral sex, but they did not have sexual intercourse. Clinton was slippery, but he does not seem to have lied.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I learned this the hard way when I posted a counter-argument explaining a logical fallacy in a poster's statement.
Citation needed. Everyone thinks they are logical. The people who post here seldom are.
Some of that is true, some isn't. Conspiracies DO exist to restrict technology to to make it appear worse than it is, etc, or to deny the existence of certain data points, etc, or to obfuscate in other situations. You can say this or that is just tin foil hat, but a counter is that you might be engaging in a conspiracy of FUD. (open source versus MS fud is an example)
There are some old well documented examples, say like the los angeles streetcar system and how it was destroyed, or how industrial hemp got the kabosh in the US because of du pont and some others, it was a threat to their plastics. The tucker automobile, or the GM EV1, how that got quashed. Various assassinations clearly have more to them than the "official" story, like JFK and MLK. Very large scale international banking establishments and big industrial establishments providing funding and support to competitive nations that were engaged in warfare.
Can we really say this or that is "crackpot" all the time, when some pretty spiffy advances get shelved, bought up and buried for a long time, like the oil company and large NiMH batteries?
I think it is way too easy to just throw out the tin foil hat label, a lot of times people HAVE come up with something that apparently gets wiped out due to a conspiracy at some level.
Here's one that got me going many years ago, UFOs. I mean, I, and a few friends, witnessed a super advanced flying craft at very close range back when I was a teen. It was obviously nothing even remotely close to what we have public knowledge of today, yet it for sure existed, and close enough and in detail enough to not have been misidentified, ie, it was not the planet venus shining through the clouds or any other common dismissive argument. And I am not alone, vast numbers of people have had similar observances, yet it is still "tinfoil hat" debated and dismissed by many.
look at the very recent government "investigation" of the BP oil spill, they are claiming that nothing shady went on, no shortcuts, nothing...I mean, who besides some of the BP shareholders really believe that? Yet, this is now the "official word" on the subject, move along now, nothing to see here...right.
So who knows about a lot of these things, we could very well have some pretty spiffy energy advances that have been quashed because they would threaten a lot of old well established big money business interests, and some where some advanced thinker with his energy whatever is steaming wondering why he can't get his breakthrough noticed. "Science" and the scientific establishment is just as full of politics and ego, engaging in conspiracy, and big money manipulating things as any other human endeavor. I give you..monsanto and their ilk for another example, or some but not all of the shenanigans associated with the carbon cap and trade trillion dollar wall street "market" being proposed and "climate science".
The US is run by a mob, just luckily there are more than one of them.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
If a certain viewpoint is preferred by 90% of people, do you really think that 10% will keep a niche rather than be bullied & overwhelmed? What about when viewpoints are wrong? In vitro fertilization had overwhelming opposition when it was first pioneered, and human history is rife with illogical prejudice and absurd beliefs. I'd like to be an optimist like you, but it seems - with regard to religious or political issues - the majority typically attempts to impose its vision on others.
So-called "consistency" is overrated, because it often ignores context.
Often results in crowd response come down to some slight variance in conditions, that is subtle. The simple fact is that you cannot codify every possible scenario into a rule, so human judgements of anything can and will vary on ingrained cultural patterns of "what is right".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, I hate to tell you this, but the constituents of matter has worked its way down a few levels since we found elements.
But I suppose I should have used the phrase "chemical compound" instead, as that was closer to what I meant. Or even "random combination of elements" as that was really what I was going for.
And while Chess is a historically relevant game, not every aspect of Chess is that interesting. Really, you need to look for some of the articles that are nothing but a listing of moves.
Also lots more people than you think care about Pokemon, you should go to the next world championship. That might show you how incorrect you are.
And if you want to get funding to make a Pokemon/MagicTG/Yugi-Oh AI on a supercomputer, I bet you'd find a lot more depth to it than you think.
"In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected"
This in fact has nothing to do with "mob-sourcing". It is the inevitable result when one political party prizes the advancement of their agenda over the morality of their members, and the other does not. I bet I could correctly guess the political affiliation of the former and the latter in your example. One political party in the U.S. regularly demonizes and marginalizes members caught in flagrante delicto while the other circles the wagons on cue unless the unfortunate perpetrator hampers their cause.
Morality is entirely subjective, although it often seems objective to the individual. So hoping for moral consistency is a pipe dream. Why even bring it up? A politician with a call girl is not really thrown out due purely to morality reasons -- voters make a judgment about their ability to lead them and whether they trust them to make good judgments and be the kind of person they want to have lead them, which are not moral judgments.
Currently hooked on AMP
...just try posting something from a conservative or libertarian perspective. or suggest that Sarah Palin isn't a drooling mongoloid retard, and is in fact a pretty sharp cookie, and lo and behold the downmodding begins.
There is nothing morally inconsistent with the above.
If a politician is running on a conservative platform of family values then he should resign when caught with a call girl.
If he is running as a liberal politician who favours relaxing the rules on prostitution then getting caught with a call girl is not that big a deal to the public. Basically it is saying the the public puts more of a moral emphasis on honesty than what some may consider the other immoral behaviour. Most people don't seem to like a hypocrite.
Ya got these 12 people and theoretically they all have to agree on a verdict. But only one of them (in USA criminal cases) needs to vote against the crowd to cause a hung jury. Again, theoretically, nobody knows which juror it was, or what his reasoning was.
The difference between a court case and CraigsList, I guess, is that someone set up very specific ground rules about how a verdict was to be produced, and CraigsList just sort of said, "well, gosh, we never set up any clear rules about allowed posts, so maybe some random complainer has a point, but we're too busy to review the validity or the consequences."
I'm not sure which is worse.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Slashdot has the absolute worst form of moderation, except for all others that have already been tried.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Someone should post this on 4chan...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"