Facebook is Rating Users Based On Their 'Trustworthiness' (engadget.com)

Truth is not truth... by The+Original+CDR · 2018-08-21 04:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

Trustworthiness is the new truthiness?

Re:Truth is not truth... by jellomizer · 2018-08-21 04:31 · Score: 1

Truthful fact can be used to deceive and non truthful information can be used to enlighten.
The trustworthiness of the information lies in the intention.
I can take facts and put them out of context or giving them odd weights to them with the intent to deceive people.
I could tell a parable not based on actual events to express a point, not for them to believe the actuality of the parable, but the abstract point it was meant to portrait.

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If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:Truth is not truth... by sdinfoserv · 2018-08-21 04:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

We live in the era of "truthful fact" being subjective. For example, only 28% of white Evangelicals believe global warming is man made. Remember that "faith" is belief in something despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. Therefore, you discredit the messenger, refuse to accept the premises, align those who oppose your view with evil, etc.
Trustworthiness is simply someone else who is aligned with your views.
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 04:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

No. Some facts and theories are testable by the scientific community using scientific method.
Some are demonstrable by scientific tests simple enough for anyone (with sufficient resources) to reproduce.
Correspondence (of propositions and theories and terms) or not to measurable aspects of physical reality is a testable thing. Enlightened humans discovered that about 400 years ago.
Maybe you didn't get the memo.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Truth is not truth... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:55 · Score: 1, Insightful

No scientists believe that global warming is 100% the fault of human activity. There is robust debate about how much is caused by humans, from fractions to majority.
You just demonstrated exactly the type of truth manipulation that you were trying to argue against. Only fanatics are entirely certain of "fact" without debate or room for doubt.
Re:Truth is not truth... by jellomizer · 2018-08-21 04:57 · Score: 1

I can trust someone who I disagree with. I can also not trust people who I do agree with.
There are many people who I would disagree with on their beliefs and idea, they may try to convince me to follow their logic. But this could be a person who I trust, and they are not trying to mislead me but in their minds correct me in my misguided ways. Outside of the topic that we disagree I would trust them to try to do the right thing.
Compared to say a Used Car sales man who will agree with whatever I wan't is a shady guy who is just being agreeable to try to sell me a car. There is much less trust involved there.
Many politicians will ignore science just because they know by not pushing the issue at hand they can get elected by people who do not want to deal with such issues. So by blocking a study in global warming, or hazard in whatever, to keep the truth fuzzy is distrustful. However someone who disagrees with the topic however will allow such studies just to prove that he is right, is more trustful.

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If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:Truth is not truth... by fazig · 2018-08-21 05:14 · Score: 2

Like you implied, not everyone got the memo.
If you never learned and understood what value the scientific method can have, you probably won't consider it to be of much importance.
Although if you learn and understand "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone" you may thing that discrediting the messenger is a very valid method.
Re:Truth is not truth... by fish_in_the_c · 2018-08-21 05:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

sure, but how many of those facts are 'interesting'.
For instance. Let's just suppose one could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that withing 500 years the greenhouse effect would destroy the earth and make in uninhabitable by mankind.
( let's ignore the difficulty of proving that for the sake of the demonstration.)
You will notice what has NOT been proved.
a) that there is anything we SHOULD do about
b) that there is anything we CAN do about
why, because material science can't prove or disprove a moral proposition.
So while science can prove useful facts like. IF you do this ,you have a high likelihood of accomplishing that.
It is entirely useless when it comes to the first part of the preposition. That is to say 'should you do the IF'.

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âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Re:Truth is not truth... by iMadeGhostzilla · 2018-08-21 05:19 · Score: 2

You don't realize that it has always been like that. But don't take my word for it, take Max Planck's:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 06:34 · Score: 1

clap ... clap ... clap ... clap ... masterful ... truly you have rendered bullshit of the highest pungent order. Very droll.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 06:34 · Score: 1

Oh, you mean like 70% of scientific study results that are impossible to reproduce? I'd say for a discipline that's so focused on objective truth it's a pity that they can't achieve a higher rate of success than a coin flip.
Re:Truth is not truth... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 07:21 · Score: 1

To be certain, Global Warming Alarmists have their own article of faith that is not supported by evidence. This is why many people refer to it as a Religion.
But I do like how you disprove your own point with such elegance. Few people can fall that hard and not feel the ground when they slam into it.
Re:Truth is not truth... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 07:31 · Score: 1

Scientific facts or even a metric ton of scientific facts do not mean your policy position is valid from all points of view. If we snap our fingers tomorrow and rid the world of fossil fuel usage, there are going to be a bunch of 3rd world people who die over the next month from lack of access to clean drinking water they would have had with continued fossil fuels. Scientific fact supports the world would be much better off without fossil fuels. However, rushing in to a policy change without mitigating the failures such a policy would cause is destructive, inhumane, and unconscionable. I'll scale that back: there are a bunch of first world problem solvers who are pushing really hard to fix it because our current best guesses at a fix royally screw over their political opponents more than their own party and they can't quite figure out why they aren't getting buy in from the other side on a world ending issue.
Re:Truth is not truth... by lgw · 2018-08-21 07:44 · Score: 1

Remember that "faith" is belief in something despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

Bullshit. Faith is belief in something where there's a lack of evidence, usually because acting as if it were true has worked well for a long time. Faith is often based on evidence, but it's evidence about what beliefs make people happy or successful, not the scientific method.
The scientific method less than 500 years old, after all, but humans have been optimizing their behavior for far, far longer.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Truth is not truth... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 07:57 · Score: 1

This has a lot to do with choosing to use language that is not precise.
Look for example - "only 28% of white Evangelicals believe global warming is man made"
For "Global Warming" some people use that as shorthand for "anthropogenic global warming"
For others if is what you said Global Warming - Well of course it is warming, I believe in the last Ice Age happened, and we are in an Inter-glacial Period so of course it is warming, The question to me is, How much is man made and how much is natural cycle? But you didn't phrase the statement that way. You stated it as -anyone who doesn't believe the planet is warmer then when it was mostly covered in ice is an uneducated simpleton.
Same goes for "Climate Change" - Of course the climate changes. Yes I believe the climate changes, But somehow I am a simpleton not believing what others are proposing - That the climate would not have changed if it were not for man's interaction.
Take a google search peek at the definition of "Climate Change" - Hint it's been hijacked.
Climate Change - a change in global or regional climate patterns, in particular a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels
Really.. So "Climate".. "Change" .. Any change in climate is due to 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels ???? Really , so when the climate changed at the end of the last Ice Age it was all mans fault?
I'm agreeing with you here - "Trustworthiness is simply someone else who is aligned with your views."
but also pointing out that you did it too when you chose to use simple abbreviate language.
"believe global warming is man made" . Did you mean to say "28% of white Evangelicals believe recent global warming is not primarily caused by actions of humans over the last 100 years" ? I'll bet that's not how the question was phrased on the questionnaire.
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 08:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

"because material science can't prove or disprove a moral proposition."
Just for the sake of fun argument: One could posit an overarching moral principle which is possibly able to be scientifically and mathematically investigated, and a somewhat objective assessment of ranking of moral states might be based on that:
Here's one candidate general moral principle:
TLDR: Maximize quality complex-life-years summed over some spacetime region (set of situations).
Measured in bit-seconds per cubic-parsec (or cubic metre) of life-information conservation, perhaps?
You may recognize this as a vast but defensible generalization of "Thou shalt not kill" or the related "don't covet thy neighbour's wife", "don't steal" or otherwise mess up life-conserving societal cohesion. The Dalai Lama's "My religion is kindness" is also covered, as kindness promotes co-operation, minimization of energy-squandering and life-squandering conflict, and more energy efficient co-operative processes for keeping more people alive longer. It also handles the more controversial "women and children to the lifeboats first" and at least lets you quantify trolley problems. :-) It also covers bio-diverse eco-system conservation as a moral goal.
Details:
Each individual lifeform is most generally characterized by representing it as an information pattern that describes the complex form of the matter-energy pattern that is the lifeform, or perhaps alternatively by an information pattern that encodes the construction of the lifeform (the genome).
We will say that each lifeform embodies its characteristic information pattern. The stable, descriptive,complex information pattern is carried (present) in the form and genome of the organism, even if nowhere else.
The amazing thing about life is that it conserves locally many, very similar but not identical, copies of these complex-information patterns. That, most essentially IS what life is and does. A local particular-information conserving process. A negentropy machine working in an open thermodynamic system.
The complexity of the lifeform is well measured in terms of the bit-length either of its generative genome information-pattern, or if you prefer, the bit-length of the matter-energy-pattern-descriptive information-pattern. Normalized of course by near-maximally compressing the information in the information pattern (so that is close to a Kolmogorov-random bitstring).
The thing about long PARTICULAR bitstrings that can encode complex form is we do not expect them (the bitstrings) to be conserved throughout time in most physical regimes. Too much entropy or free-energy going on all around them. Conservation of the information is a tough job, achievable only through the form and continued functioning of the complex lifeform information-containers. Lifeforms carry forward the complex particular information through time, unexpectedly compared to the average rate of entropy generation in their region. That's life, precisely.
So I'm positing that morality was developed by humans to make life easier (more survival probability per unit of energy expended) for more people. A self-aware, environment-aware, intelligent-agent piece of life (humans) seeking to conserve life-iness through inculcated behaviour guidance. Originally just applied to people, but the extension to lifeforms/ecosystems in general, ranked by complexity, is straightforward (since let's not forget, we're inextricably part of that ecosphere.)
Of course there would still be room for argument, mostly over how to scope the situation-set, and then also about how to define life-quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?.) But the basic framework for morality assessment is there.
As long as you accept that my universal moral principle is a valid generalization of most if not all other common moral principles.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 09:30 · Score: 1

Scientific method and scientific community process may not be that well practiced on average, but at least its "in the game" of rational and empirical inquiry and knowledge formation.
It's much better than the alternatives such as "appeal to authority", "what he said", "it's trending", and "it is written (by some spice-fueled mystic monks in all likelihood)".

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 09:35 · Score: 1

We're not rushing! This problem was scientifically known at least back in the 1970s and well-known and well-confirmed by the 1980s.
The deniers and blockers have been effectively preventing effective action since then. We are WAAAAAAAAYYY late.
Give your head a shake.
We have not even started to make physically effective progress on the key metrics of this problem.
Rushing? Don't make me laugh.
And BTW desalination or whatever works on PV or wind power too (duh). You're pulling out a tired and recycled canard as another obstacle to getting the transition started. Yes. This will be YOUR fault in particular.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 09:46 · Score: 1

So, paraphrasing you, faith is making yourself (pretend) to believe something, or trying real hard to get others to believe something that is pretty much certainly not true, because it's operationally useful.
Well, at least you admit that that's what it's all about. At least you know (what's really going on there) which is that convenience trumps truth, for a lot of people.
That's why somethings are called "inconvenient truth"s.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by Attila+Dimedici · 2018-08-21 10:24 · Score: 2

As long as you accept that my universal moral principle is a valid generalization of most if not all other common moral principles.
The problem is that I do not accept your "universal moral principle". It is certainly NOT a valid generalization of Judaeo-Christian moral principles. Your "universal moral principle" values the individual not at all. Judaeo-Christian moral principles assert that the individual is infinitely valuable. Your principle accepts the call of the group to sacrifice an individual for the good of the group. Judaeo-Christian principles call for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the good of another individual. The success of Western Civilization is a result of the value it places on the individual, on the fact that it does not value the group at the expense of the individual.

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The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 11:44 · Score: 1, Insightful

No. I don't think you have understood what I said.
One person (and their live-long-and-prosper status) is worth a lot in my math, with that person being a bundle of a lot of life-complexity.
However, when it comes to: Given no other choice of a win-win scenario, do you knock the terrorist off the ledge to spare the 10 people they are threatening to blow up, well you can see how my principle would say, yes, kill the terrorist. So I violated "thou shalt not kill" but in order to "not allow to be killed" 10 other more life-affirming/supporting people. I stand by that math. Of course, my math also says that if you have an option that saves the terrorist and the victims, prefer that one. I frankly don't see how all of that is "unchristian". It's more about how you modify an overly simplistic rule when faced with complex real situations with multiple factors to weigh.
And sorry, a creed that says that a single individual is infinitely valuable is ridiculous and dangerous, when it comes to practical application. You are immediately drawn into "yeah but what do I do when faced with choices to help this infinitely valuable individual survive versus that one, like for example who gets the heart transplant." Your principle does not help. Since your principle is simplistic (for teachability reasons, no doubt), individuals trying to apply it must violate it using their own discretion, to handle real situations, without guidance for how to gradually modify the principle to fit reality. Not as helpful as the more universal principle.
And more importantly, my principle also supports Vulcan morality: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Live long and prosper.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 11:47 · Score: 1

read the scientific books and journal papers. Oh wait, they're paywalled. Forget it. You win.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 11:51 · Score: 1

Complex physical phenomena that are not consistent with known causal processes are a priori extremely improbable.
Simply by the combinatorics of the number of ways atoms and energy can arrange themselves, compared to the one way you are saying they did.
This applies to orbiting teapots and divine miracles both.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by lgw · 2018-08-21 12:57 · Score: 1

Where did you get the "not true"? Faith for the most part is based on evidence about what sort of behaviors work well, and what don't. That part is as "true" as anything in the social sciences.
For example "act as if it were true that a moral judge who sees everything you do will reward or punish you" is damn good advice. It's also clearly true, assuming you have a conscience and a sense of morality, as your future self knows everything you did, and judges you, and suffers for your mistakes. You may have faith in some supernatural entity motivating you, but the advice remains good regardless of His existence. However, for those with poor impulse control, thinking of their father looking over their shoulder right motivates a lot better than concerns about the future. Call that "convenience" if it makes you happy.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re: Truth is not truth... by lgw · 2018-08-21 12:59 · Score: 1

So what's your position on the universe origin hypothesis that it all started as a sufficiently large random quantum fluctuation? Feynman didn't buy it, but he never argued it wasn't science.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re: Truth is not truth... by fish_in_the_c · 2018-08-21 14:29 · Score: 1

There is no such thing as a universal moral principle that can be objective. This is simply proved by the question. Why not do evil? The only way any moral principal can be universal is if there exist in reality some non entity that is the cause of both the moral law and the physical laws.
So science (in the sense of purpose study of all knowledge) is able to determine with high certainly that such a cause must exist.
However the material sciences will never sufficiently prove the existence of the immaterial because it is outside the scope of its tools and study.

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âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 14:41 · Score: 2

I'm saying:
We do agree that moral principles evolved as memes, don't we? If not, I can't talk with you much, since we are on different planets of worldview and discourse. The most likely evolved moral principles are ones which serve to promote human welfare, individual and collective, by governing behaviour, and notably social behaviour.
Conflict between intelligent agent organisms is detrimental to their survival probability, since it uses up some of the energy they acquire and could put to productive purposes of thriving, not to mention the increased risk of physical harm and death through conflict. Small-scale conflict between individuals and small groups is like friction acting on survival effort of individuals. Also, conflict and attendant lack of trust in society lead to inability to get inefficiencies of specialization of labour. Societies with internal conflict and lack of trust are unable to create co-operative economic processes. Co-operative economic processes that emerge in an environment of trust or bad-behaviour constraint, lead to increased energy efficiency of survival maintenance activities.
Bottom line is societal cohesion is adaptive, both for society's memes (such as moral rules and norms), and for individual adherents to the memes; society members.
Moral principles are either completely arbitrary, in which case their longevity needs to be explained, or they are evolved and collectively promulgated and enforced memes which essentially encourage pro-social behaviour, or in other words, encourage upsizing of the entity size that tries to co-operate to survive. This leads directly to decreased energy expenditure per unit of survival probability per individual organism in the society. This in a context in which memes persist when a) their operation in society leads to survival benefits for the individual adherents to the meme or subjects of its operation, and b) because of these benefits to individuals, their is a derived survival advantage for the meme (moral ruleset in this case) itself.
That, my friend, is moral science, as an extension of evolutionary theory.
Hard to test in the real world, admittedly, but should be subject to demonstration and validation by computer simulation.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by Wolfier · 2018-08-21 15:13 · Score: 1

Let's replace that 10 potential victim with 1 victim, now you have 1 terrorist on one side and 1 innocent person on the other side. How would your system handle this?
Re:Truth is not truth... by AutodidactLabrat · 2018-08-21 19:21 · Score: 1

False. Trustworthiness is speaking facts in making arguments as opposed empty claims like "Faith"
Re: Truth is not truth... by c6gunner · 2018-08-21 21:55 · Score: 1

And more importantly, my principle also supports Vulcan morality: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Agreed, which is why we should have a mandatory random lottery every day, the "winner" of which gets chopped up to provide organs for the people on donation waiting lists. After all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
Re:Truth is not truth... by Attila+Dimedici · 2018-08-21 22:13 · Score: 1

I do understand your math. Your moral system allows me to sacrifice YOU for the good of the many. My moral system only allows me to sacrifice myself.

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The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Re:Truth is not truth... by AmiMoJo · 2018-08-22 01:00 · Score: 1

Moral principals evolved with language. It's our ability to understand other people's situations and feelings (empathy) by them telling us that drives us to behave morally towards them. When this mechanism breaks down (different languages preventing communication, sociopaths and people on the autism scale who find it hard to empathise) is when people start to act less morally, in general.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:Truth is not truth... by terrycarlino · 2018-08-22 07:19 · Score: 1

It's really great when you can put imaginary words in your opponent's mouths to make them sound foolish.
The fact that such words have no relationship to reality is irrelevant to you I guess.
No Republican is saying "All scientists are liars, and thermometers are a hoax invented by Democrats."
What many are saying is that certain scientists are refusing to release their raw data so that it can be independently by verified by experts who don't have an agenda based on preconceived political views. What they are also saying is that emails which were composed by certain scientists involved with the United Nations show a pattern of manipulating the peer review process in a way that punishes scientists who don't agree with them, while also manipulating data to support their preconceived conclusions.
At the most, from a political view, Conservatives are saying some non-scientists, who support a policy of radical income transfer from industrialized nations to third world countries are using the concept of anthropogenic global warming as an excuse to bring about that income transfer.
Re:Truth is not truth... by terrycarlino · 2018-08-22 07:23 · Score: 1

"Appeal to authority" is the backbone of the AGW movement. Climate scientists won't release their raw data to be checked by people that disagree with their conclusions.
Societies of scientists, like the APS votes on the reality of AGW, based not on the data, but on belief and then tell individuals they should accept AGW based on the fact that 98% of "scientist" support it, like science was a popularity contest.
Re: Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-22 08:19 · Score: 1

That hypothesis may be plausible. Here's why.
Although any particular complex state is implausible, nevertheless if multiple differences are possible at all, then at least one configuration of these asymmetries can occur. It may be that differences/asymmetries, from that point on, constrain and shape each other in a "convergent evolution" sense, but that is just another hypothesis. My point is that if you are claiming that one particular complex configuration exists, then you are either saying "that's the one that randomly came to be" and there, you are fighting its improbability. That's possible, but extremely unlikely.
Or you need to explain why constraints and interactions and properties would have led to something of that sort of configuration, in the later evolution of the universe closer to now.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-22 08:38 · Score: 1

Thanks for that insight. That is indeed trolley-problem-like.
It's the variant of the trolley problem that distinguishes between:
Do you pull the track-switch lever to kill one person on one track vs the 10 people on the other track,
and
Do you push the fat man off the bridge over the train tracks to stop the train that would otherwise kill the 10 people.
Anyone have a suggestion how we might quantify our moral intuitions on this question?
Let's assume to make the problem sharper that we know with certainty what will happen in either case.
Is it something about the limits to rights of one person to interfere with another's welfare, in general. So do we just have different moral rules conflicting with each other, with different applicability strengths in the different situations?
Or how else, by what logic and math and model of the situations, could we teach an AI robot about this precisely?

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-22 08:53 · Score: 1

Touche.
Interestingly, your moral system does not allow you to be a political leader or general or sergeant or whatever who calls for their troops to enter mortal danger to save the society as a whole in a just and necessary defensive war.
Now sure, if everyone were like you (or Jesus), that would all work out, so maybe it is the best ideal principle. What about in the real world.
In one sense, we could say it is a subjective illusion of the leader that THEIR society's membership is more worthy of protection than the "other side's" people and interests are.
I tend to see it all as "self-organized matter-pattern instances making fight/flight/merge decisions" with an overall aim to increase their safe perimeter by patterning more matter and energy around them to be more hospitable to their pattern's continuation, or even, to become part of their pattern's continuation. Evolution in action, in a Borg-like assimilation way.
Organized, stable complex embodied-information patterns (individual organisms and societies) compete to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in their environment to their continuation, including the ultimate strategy of patterning MORE of the surrounding environment to be part of their or a larger amalgamated stable pattern. Certainly, that's what Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Victoria; those great or terrible empire builders and path clearers etc etc were up to, whether they knew it or not." How the right moral rules might emerge out of all of that is an interesting puzzle indeed.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is not truth... by Attila+Dimedici · 2018-08-22 09:07 · Score: 1

If everyone followed my moral code it would work fine. The fact that some people wish to impose their will on others does not make doing so moral.

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The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Re: Truth is not truth... by c6gunner · 2018-08-23 16:25 · Score: 1

I think the trolly problem, while very interesting, doesn't really say anything about mortality. Rather it tells us about the wiring of our brains. We have some hard-coded rules for judging morality which evolved before we had things like trolleys, so when presented with the problem we experience a brain fart (more scientifically known as a "cognitive bias") which doesn't really mesh with the reality of the situation. There is functionally zero difference between pushing the fat man onto the tracks or pulling the lever, so there should be no differentiation as far as morality is concerned.

Anyone have a suggestion how we might quantify our moral intuitions on this question?
I wouldn't worry about the moral intuitions; morality is complex enough without bringing intuition into it. In many cases it's not a clear cut case of one action being moral and another being immoral; rather it's different shades of morality. In the trolley problem, it's not immoral for you to NOT pull the lever, and it's not immoral to pull it, either. Which action is MORE moral depends very much on what model of morality you accept. If your definition of morality hinges on not violating the liberty/consent of another human being, then not pulling it is more moral (you're probably a Quaker, or a pacifist). If, on the other hand, your concept of morality is based on reducing harm and suffering as much as possible, then pulling it is more moral (you're probably Sam Harris).
Which model is better ... that's the real question. It has yet to be conclusively answered. But regardless of which model you subscribe to, a case like chopping up people to provide organs for others is generally seen as immoral. In the consent-based morality model it's pretty clear why this would be the case. Under the harm-reduction morality model it's more difficult to see why it would be immoral, but the big concern is downstream effects. None of us would want to live in a society where we might be randomly chopped up for spare parts, even if it means that we will have a plentiful supply of parts when we ourselves need them. So while having such a "donation" model might reduce harm in one area, the effect it would have on the population as a whole would be far more detrimental than the benefits gained.
Like I said ... it's complicated.
Re: Truth is not truth... by presidenteloco · 2018-08-24 05:56 · Score: 1

Your last paragraph gets to one of the hearts of the problem for sure (no pun intended :-).
Moral rules have to work effectively both for the local immediate situation, and for the stability of the society (and its abilty to maintain morality through collective education and persuasion), longer term. Those morality customs which can do both will likely be more prevalent.
And like you say, lottery involintary organ donation; a form of unpredictable, fatal, trust violation toward random individuals for the sake of a group of others would not cause intelligent-agent individuals to be comfortable so stay in such a society. So such a convention is unlikely to persist. It seems to be true that some societies sacrificed individuals for the collective "good" as offerings to gods, but luckily, for whatever reason, including lack of evidence of effectiveness in that case, no doubt, those practices seem to have faded out. In some cases it was through overrun of those societies with ones without that practice and condemning that practice as immoral. But let's not get too specific.
Some practices, like true non-kin altruism, are best understood I think, if we realize that moral decisions (conscious or innate) need to serve individuals for (the dice-roll statistics of their encounters with danger or benefit) over their entire lifetime (to breeding and child-rearing age, anyway.) Not just serve the most survival probability in one incident. Sometimes those goals conflict.
A clear example is alarm calls of birds, squirrels etc, which alert their unrelated neigbours to the danger of a predator, while risking the neck of the whistler.
If we considered only the one incident, the altruistic act makes no sense. But if we consider the lifetime risk statistics of living in a protective society of whistlers, vs risking a tiny extra chance of being killed by whistling and attracting predator attention in the current incident, whistling works better.
This sort of stochastic math probably helps explain why moral rules are more prevalent if they work well (or not too badly) in the current situation, but also work really well at improving life-probability and living energy-efficiency, statistically, over the whole natural or reproductive lifespan. How can an individual be thinking about the statistics, in the exigent situation, you say? They don't have to. Evolution of the individual's tendencies to action, and also evolved societal memes such as education and shunning, will do a lot of the thinking for them, leaving them only to follow only their gut instinct or their partly inculcated conscience.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Truth is not truth... by c6gunner · 2018-08-25 02:37 · Score: 1

Yep, I agree with all of that. Which is why (bringing it back full circle to my original comment) your "Vulcan morality" comment was too simplistic. Often the needs of the many do NOT outweigh the needs of the one, if for no other reason than because violating the rights of the one would have detrimental effects on the many. The reason our laws emphasise the rights of individuals isn't because any one individual is more important than society as a whole but rather because if we arbitrarily take away the rights of the one then we've effectively taken away the rights of everyone.

Zuckerbook == China? by Rick+Schumann · 2018-08-21 04:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

Gee whiz Zuckerbook, you're starting to sound an awful lot like living under the communist Chinese government, aren't you?

Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Mashiki · 2018-08-21 04:20 · Score: 1

Remember when people, psychologists, media, government bodies, and so on all over the west were saying that if you don't have a "facebook or social media account" you're a psychopath, rapist, murderer in training, terrorist-wannabe and so on? Yeah...not so crazy now for saying fuck you to it.

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Om, nomnomnom...
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Rick+Schumann · 2018-08-21 04:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

Not so specifically as you're stating it, no, but I do remember the vast majority of people having been 'indoctrinated' that way by social media, to believe that anyone who wanted to preserve their privacy 'must have something to hide' and therefore must be criminals, terrorists, and/or pedophiles. I never fell for any of that, and as the pressure to be brainwashed by social media increased, my aversion to social media increased proportionately, and I don't use ANY social media anymore, and haven't for a long, long time now, and encourage everyone I can to dump Facebook, Twitter, and any other so-called 'social media' and (shocking!) actually be social with live people away from the Internet.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:50 · Score: 1

It seems like you have no intuition of what's to come.
Yes, currently people have the choice to use FB or not. But with seemingly more and more sites using FB as an (and eventually the only) means of user login, and the notion mentioned in a sibling branch of this thread of people who avoid FB and other social media being perceived as likely criminals, and the constant calls for universal online accounts, real IDs and like; the critical point is how long until the nannying creeps in power get their way, and FB, google et all flip the switch for social credit scores in YOUR country.
After all, They already have the system built and running in China.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by swillden · 2018-08-21 05:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Facebook is an opt-in service not mandated by anyone or anything. Don't want to use it, then don't. The only time you "need" Facebook is if you're dealing with public relations, and even then, you're not using Facebook for socialising but for promoting.
A Chinese citizen does not have the same freedoms. Facebook and China are not comparable in any way.
I think the idea that this is going to happen is laughable, but it's worth pointing out that if the Facebook trustworthiness score were to be used like the Chinese "Social Credit" score, it wouldn't be necessary to force people to use it. All that would be required is for various entities to begin relying on the score to make decisions about whether or not to trust someone. In such a world, someone who refuses to use Facebook would be distrusted by anyone who relies on the trust score. If you wanted to be trusted, you'd need to participate, much the way that if you want to be able to borrow money to buy a house you generally need to build a history of borrowing and repayment on smaller loans first.

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Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Mashiki · 2018-08-21 05:05 · Score: 1

The stories are here on /. if you really want to read them. There were plenty of them back a few years ago, and I seem to remember them being trendy 2010? 2011? or around there too. Back when governments, and various people believed that facebook and so on would be the wave of the future and everything will be tied to it.

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Om, nomnomnom...
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 05:08 · Score: 2

news[1] site with commenting[2]
not 'social[2] media[1]'.
Yeah, commenting isn't social and the news isn't media. I'm not so sure I believe you on that.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 05:10 · Score: 1

And I suppose next you're going to say that a masquerade ball isn't a social event either. This argument is far older than you are, and I think it was lost that long ago too.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Rick+Schumann · 2018-08-21 05:35 · Score: 1

That's my point, really. Do people really think my real, legal, IRL name is 'Rick Schumann'? LOL no it's a character from a series of short stories. Do I share personally identifiable information with people here? Do I collect 'friends' here? Is it some sort of 'network'? Am I posting pics of myself and some sort of running 'stream-of-consciousness' about my day-to-day life? NO. It's a news site with commenting capabilities. It's no more 'social media' than going to one of the TV network news sites and commenting on news stories there. What's next, are they going to call 4chan 'social media', too?
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Rick+Schumann · 2018-08-21 05:36 · Score: 1

I remember the general gist of them, and besides which it's sort of obvious how much indoctrination and brainwashing has occurred to an entire generation of people over so-called 'social media', and of course governments are naturally going to leverage that any way they can just like they do any other surveillance technology. All of which is why I refuse to play.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by Oligonicella · 2018-08-21 06:15 · Score: 1

"One is a government action, the other informs readers of the opinions of the platform owners."
Re: Zuckerbook == China? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 07:25 · Score: 1

It's not just semantically true. It functions in much the same way as news articles shared on Facebook.
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by aevan · 2018-08-21 07:58 · Score: 1

4chan is probably more of an antisocial media
Re:Zuckerbook == China? by budgenator · 2018-08-21 08:22 · Score: 2

I get this mental image of an entire industry growing around trying to game this "Trustworthiness" index, just like the Search Engine Optimization and Credit repair leaches. I wonder if the index will automatically reindex itself when information moves from "False-news" to "Real-Facts"?
These Social Media Providers are just bound and determined to exert Editorial Control over postings and forfet their safe-harbor in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act!

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Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds

Yay, we're getting Sesame Credits in America! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:08 · Score: 5, Funny

Now I can be secretly tracked and blacklisted by glorious capitalists instead of dirty communists.

I feel so much better.

Facebook by beep54 · 2018-08-21 04:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Who is going to rate Facebook's 'trustworthiness'? Anyone....anyone??

Re:Facebook by Bodhammer · 2018-08-21 04:30 · Score: 1

The stock market? That is about the only thing that can make a difference.

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"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Re:Facebook by hAckz0r · 2018-08-21 05:07 · Score: 1

I would volunteer, but then that would probably require me to actually get an account on Facebook, and throw what is left of my privacy out the window. On second thought, I'd rather be an impartial non-observer of Facebook policy.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 05:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Who is going to rate Facebook's 'trustworthiness'? Anyone....anyone??
Their customers. The same people who rate the trustworthiness of any company. And since you may not know this, Facebook's customers are the people who buy targeted advertising and pay for your data, like Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook's users are not their customers. They are just voluntary donors of their personal information and eyeballs. They have no business relationship with Facebook.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by CohibaVancouver · 2018-08-21 05:41 · Score: 1

Here you go, Anonymous Coward -

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/ne...

Some of the limits of public support for freedom of the press are made stark with a quarter of Americans (26%) saying they agree "the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior," including a plurality of Republicans (43%)
Re:Facebook by SeaFox · 2018-08-21 06:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

The stock market? That is about the only thing that can make a difference.
Yup, if there's one thing we can depend on as a moral compass, it's the actions of large corporations. /s
Re:Facebook by shanen · 2018-08-21 06:17 · Score: 1

Good comment, and if I ever got a mod point to give you, then I would. However, I don't think your description of the financial model is accurate. While Facebook is deriving some revenue from advertising, I don't think the ad revenue is important. The important metric is market cap as driven by stock price. The Zuck suffers from the delusion that the insanely inflated stock price of Facebook shares can keep growing forever. After all, stock price is just a matter of opinion.
I said a bit more on the solution-side of the topic in my earlier comment on this story, but I should have explicitly stated that I don't think Facebook will EVER be part of any REAL solution. That's on a rational level, though on a gut level I continue to hope the corporate cancer can change its spots.

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Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Re:Facebook by Oligonicella · 2018-08-21 06:31 · Score: 1

You're conflating two kinds of "trustworthiness". The corporations rate them on whether they receive enough data that is useful from them. The public rates them on whether they lie and engage in dishonest (at least) behavior.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 07:38 · Score: 1

The public rates them on whether they lie and engage in dishonest (at least) behavior.
My point is that they're a business. Their customers love them. Who cares what "the public" thinks of their trustworthiness as long as they keep forking over their private lives for resale?
The idea that Facebook has some special duty "to the public" flies in the face of every conservative principle about corporate existence and the law. I guess I'm just trying to encourage those hypocrites to expose themselves now publicly.
If you want to argue that there should be special regulations requiring corporations to operate "in the public interest", then we have something to discuss. In fact, Senator Warren has just introduced a bill in Congress to do just that and all the conservatives are scoffing, because they believe the only duty a corporation has is to the shareholders.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 07:45 · Score: 1

While Facebook is deriving some revenue from advertising, I don't think the ad revenue is important.
In 2017, Facebook took in $40 BILLION in revenue. Of that, $39.9 BILLION was from digital advertising. So, yeah, I would say $39.9 BILLION is pretty important.

The Zuck suffers from the delusion that the insanely inflated stock price of Facebook shares can keep growing forever. After all, stock price is just a matter of opinion.
Facebook stock price today is almost exactly the same as it was 1 year ago today. That's a long time for a stock price to be "insanely inflated". With $40 BILLION revenue, that stock price is pretty darn good. In fact, some might argue it's cheap. That is a LOT of revenue.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by lgw · 2018-08-21 07:58 · Score: 1

Obviously, the market regulates the actions of large corporations, not the other way around.
And it does help, a lot, when not corrupted by bailouts. Corporations dominated by short-sighted greed and lack of concern for customers will fail in the market, making things better. Unless they're "too big to fail", of course.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Facebook by lgw · 2018-08-21 08:01 · Score: 1

43% sucks. What percentage of people on the left support restrictions on "hate speech"?
It's good for the POTUS to call out lies as he sees them, but that's different from shutting down news outlets. The answer to bad speech is more speech.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Facebook by lgw · 2018-08-21 08:18 · Score: 1

The idea that Facebook has some special duty "to the public" flies in the face of every conservative principle about corporate existence and the law.

Are you confusing anarchists with conservatives again? Anarchists are the ones in the black hoods. They're color coded for your convenience.
Every conservative I know believes that utilities have a special duty to the public. Most believe that abuse of monopoly power is bad. The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
I do, however, believe that Facebook can either be exercising editorial discretion over what gets published on its platform and thus be liable for all of it, or it can be a neutral platform that just passes messages along, not responsible for their content. It can't have it both ways.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 09:13 · Score: 1

Every conservative I know believes that utilities have a special duty to the public.
And every conservative I know would say that you've got a long way to go if you want to successfully assert that Facebook is a "utility".
Words have meaning, lgw. They may not be the ones you want them to have, but it doesn't mean that you can just start naming things arbitrarily according to your political agenda.
If an ISP is not a "utility" (which you have asserted in the past), then certainly Facebook cannot be one.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by shanen · 2018-08-21 10:46 · Score: 1

Facebook has a market cap over $500 billion. If there were NO expenses, that $40 billion in advertising revenue looks relatively small. I think I know what's wrong with this picture, but what's your explanation or hypothesis?
I'm trying to figure out the source of your handle... I'm remembering a funny comic on the Web about 15 years back. Any connection?

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Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 11:18 · Score: 1

I'm trying to figure out the source of your handle... I'm remembering a funny comic on the Web about 15 years back. Any connection?
The story behind my nickname is in my Slashdot bio. But the short version is it's a childhood nickname (I was an altar boy, so "Pope") I had growing up in Chicago's Little Italy.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by lgw · 2018-08-21 13:04 · Score: 1

The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
And every conservative I know would say that you've got a long way to go if you want to successfully assert that Facebook is a "utility".
Mmm hmm.

If an ISP is not a "utility" (which you have asserted in the past), then certainly Facebook cannot be one.
I have consistently asserted that the "last mile" should be a utility. That has always been my objection to net neutrality, which addresses the wrong problem.
Connecting "net neutrality" and "social media" is left as an exercise for the student.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-21 13:41 · Score: 1

I have consistently asserted that the "last mile" should be a utility.
No problem. I'm all in favor of the "last mile" to Facebook being regulated as a utility.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by johnsie · 2018-08-21 21:54 · Score: 1

I rate them by not opening their url and blocking their tracking scripts on 3rd party sites. Those "like" buttons on other websites are often hosted on FB servers, not to mention some background javascripts and cookies.
Re:Facebook by lgw · 2018-08-22 03:24 · Score: 1

For a rabid liberal, you sure are a staunch defender of the rights of corporations all of the sudden!

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Facebook by PopeRatzo · 2018-08-22 03:26 · Score: 1

For a rabid liberal, you sure are a staunch defender of the rights of corporations all of the sudden!
Well, one of us has to stand up for the cause of liberty, and in this case, it's not going to be you apparently.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Facebook by raind · 2018-08-25 22:36 · Score: 1

Like your comments PopeRatzo.
My nick was derived from a Counting Crows song for what's it worth. Lol !

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Get up!

Oh... by dejavux · 2018-08-21 04:12 · Score: 1

This won't end well, I suspect.

+1 Insightful by mccrew · 2018-08-21 04:13 · Score: 1

Wish I had some mod points for you today.

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Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.

as apposed to... by Comboman · 2018-08-21 04:14 · Score: 1, Funny

As apposed to Slashdot, where your Karma is calculated by mod points assigned by bots pretending to by humans.

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Support Right To Repair Legislation.

Re:as apposed to... by alex67500 · 2018-08-21 21:35 · Score: 1

Actually, someone in the EU should be able to send a GDPR request to find out what their score is. It would be a good test case :-)

Conservatives vs Liberals by beerlord1 · 2018-08-21 04:18 · Score: 3, Informative

I've noticed that when commenting on friends' posts or public posts from political parties, messages supporting conservative parties or criticising Islam or immigration tend to be filtered out, whereas liberal comments or support are in the 'top filtered' section.

Re: Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:59 · Score: 1

The Nazi party was disbanded in the 40s.
Facts.
Re: Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:00 · Score: 1

Suddenly not wanting a mentally deranged creep with a mutilated penis to shower in the same stall as my daughter is a race war now.
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:02 · Score: 1, Informative

Yeah, I know.
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Mashiki · 2018-08-21 05:13 · Score: 1

Yeah, it's getting so you can't even call for a simple race war any more! What is the world coming to.
Just think! When you point out that people who believe cutting off the clitoris of little girls and sanction it under islam it's some bad shit. Or try to point out that muslims have argued that because islam accepts rape against non-believers, it's okay to do it too. You're igniting a race war! Boy, those are just the type of comments we need to restrict, that absolutely won't make those "far right crazies look right when we censor this."
Just think even harder, at the delusion that you believe a religion is now a race.

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Om, nomnomnom...
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by ScentCone · 2018-08-21 06:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

You're confused. You're thinking that the handful of idiots who walk around with tiki torches and fantasize about a long-dead political organization are actual Nazis in any way that actually matters. They're universally scorned and/or laughed at, and on the rare occasions they actually break the law, the get busted and prosecuted. What you're thinking of are the modern day brown shirts - the actual foot soldiers of totalitarian fascism. That would be antifa. Black uniforms, masks, weapons at "peaceful" demonstrations, spoken desire to kill political opponents and leaders, destruction of property and beating people bloody when there's any sense that someone, somewhere may not agree with their violent world view. And of course, they generally do NOT get in any legal trouble for bringing weapons into no-weapons-allowed areas and hurting people. They're all about intimidation, silencing people, and terrorizing those they don't like. And they're cheered on by the statists who now run the left side of politics in the US. There's your contemporary Nazis.

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Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 08:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

Fascists usually wear masks and their defining characteristic is destruction of property and public beatings? This is apparently some new meaning of the word fascist I hadn't previously been aware of.
But by all means please go back to demonizing a small portion of your political opponents as sub-human creatures who are evil to the core and the real cause of society's woes. It makes your accusations of fascism highly ironic and entertaining!
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 10:17 · Score: 1

[...] antifa [...]
*eyeroll*
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 13:18 · Score: 1

Oh bullshit, and you know it. "Universally scored and laughed at", except by all the confederate flag worshippers, and plenty of other rightwingers. They'll march right along side them.
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by Daralantan · 2018-08-22 02:34 · Score: 1

go back to demonizing a small portion of your political opponents as sub-human creatures who are evil to the core
Really everyone needs to do this. Left, right, center, up, down, imaginary (?), etc. There's several antifa idiots (or people using it as an excuse/disguise) that go around destroying things whenever there is a chance. Then there's a ton that are just peacefully protesting. Then when there was that retarded tiki torch rally, one guy drove through the crowd and killed someone... And suddenly everyone said the entire tiki battalion there was there for the purpose of running people over with cars as their sole purpose.
Re:Conservatives vs Liberals by lgw · 2018-08-22 03:57 · Score: 1

Fascists usually wear masks and their defining characteristic is destruction of property and public beatings?
Other than the masks, yes, that's exactly how the brownshirts operated. They engaged in political street fights for a decade, kept at arms length from the Nazi party, with no official connection. It was only in 1930 that Hitler officially took control of the brownshirts, having gained a lot of credibility in the meantime by being seen as keeping things strictly legal. Of course, 4 years later Hitler killed all their leadership to cement his control of the party.

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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.

YAY! Just like in China! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:21 · Score: 1

I'm sorry, your social score is too low.

How Chinese Communist of them! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:22 · Score: 1

China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy

Whuffie? by Migraineman · 2018-08-21 04:22 · Score: 1

So they're implementing Cory Doctorw's Whuffie?

"Nebulous", "opaque" by Futurepower(R) · 2018-08-21 04:23 · Score: 1

"Lot's" in my parent comment should have been "Lots".

The linked story says, "As nebulous as the rating system is ..." Worse than nebulous, which is "unclear, vague, or ill-defined". Probably foolish.

Washington Post story: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1. Quote from that story: "... Facebook has given people more options, some users began falsely reporting items as untrue, a new twist on information warfare..."

Another quote: "But how these new credibility systems work is highly opaque..."

Re: "Nebulous", "opaque" by Reverend+Green · 2018-08-21 18:54 · Score: 1

"falsely reporting items as untrue"
OUR obviously-false propaganda is THE TRUTH, you deplorable proles!

I think it just might work. by Gravis+Zero · 2018-08-21 04:26 · Score: 1, Insightful

Facebook is basically trying to define truth by using user input. Obviously this can be manipulated but I think by adding their own input to week out untrustworthy users, they just might be able to pull it off. There are a lot of variables that can be factored in to deem someone trustworthy but many factors can also be gamed. However, with additional input on who is a bad actor then it also discredits the users that trusted that user.

Russia is definitely going to fuck with this system but I don't think it will be a case of cat and mouse because there is a continuing basis for trustworthiness. It's just crazy enough to work.

The real news here is that Facebook may actually start doing some good instead of being a total parasite!

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Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.

Re:I think it just might work. by shanen · 2018-08-21 06:37 · Score: 1

I wish I could share some of your optimism, but maybe I'm just jealous because what the Zuck has decided to implement is so much weaker than the EPR (Earned Public Reputation) that I've been advocating for a while now. In my fantasy, you should be able to see the data and even contest negative accusations. Also, I think any system involving REAL human beings has to be multidimensional.
I actually went over to Facebook to see if I could detect any trace of this system, but I couldn't. So let my go wild and speculate how I think it should work: You should see two adjacent icons for each identity. The first avatar would be self-selected and link to the usual profile generated by the self. The second avatar would be a standardized representation of the EPR of that identity. I usually imagine a little radar graph featuring the dimensions that are most important to you, the person who is looking at this mysterious new identity and trying to assess whether or not to read what it wrote or linked to. If you click on the EPR icon, the link would take you to the details, both of how each dimension was calculated and the actual data.
Also, I think the entire system should be biased in favor of positive reputation and the data should age over time. Easiest to illustrate with an example using the relatively simple dimension of "truthful", where the clear negative is "untruthful". If someone wanted to accuse someone of being untruthful, then they would have to document the lie, not merely point at it--and the reputation of the accuser should also be taken into account. If someone makes a false accusation, then that should bounce back against the accuser's own reputation. I think that most of this could actually be done automatically using algorithms, though I also think you still need ways to bring humans into the loop to resolve disputes--and I'm pert' shure Facebook would hate that part of the idea.
Anyway, I started a related proposal over on Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... ADSAuPR, atAJG.

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Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.

You have that backwards by SuperKendall · 2018-08-21 04:30 · Score: 1

As apposed to Slashdot, where your Karma is calculated by mod points assigned by bots pretending to by humans.

Actually it's more humans acting as bots, by running tons of alt-accounts to farm moderation points...

No self-respecting bot maker cares enough about Slashdot to build bots for it. :-)

At least Slashdot has meta-moderation as well to provide another layer of correction.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley

Re:You have that backwards by CanHasDIY · 2018-08-21 07:23 · Score: 2

I don't mod often, but when I do, I meta-mod

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An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Re:You have that backwards by Quirkz · 2018-08-21 09:43 · Score: 1

I don't meta-mod often, but when I do, it's by commenting.
I like infinite loops in my code, too.

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The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay

Facebook becomes China by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:30 · Score: 1

I am curious how this does not end up having real world effects similar to China's Social Credit System, which is nowhere I want to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

yeah, that's a great idea by cascadingstylesheet · 2018-08-21 04:33 · Score: 1

Since facebook is so neutral and trustworthy itself, we'll just have it rate everybody (well, everybody that they allow to remain there at all).

What could possibly go wrong?

I know how this works by SuperKendall · 2018-08-21 04:34 · Score: 2, Insightful

Mention Infowars (even in jest) - rep score 0 forever until the end of you or Facebook.

Post link to Huffington Post article - A++++ GOLD STAR WOULD ALLOW TO POST AGAIN.

I posted just one political comment on Facebook once, expressing a desire that those on the left and right should talk to each other and not shut people out - so I'm pretty sure my trust score is like -5 out of 0-1.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley

Re:I know how this works by omnichad · 2018-08-21 05:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

I know you're joking, but even basing it on posting a link is a bad move. I may post a link to an article that is 100% wrong because I want to comment on how wrong it is.
Re:I know how this works by iMadeGhostzilla · 2018-08-21 05:56 · Score: 2

I wrote the same thing about two years ago and got comments "when the other side is racist there can be no discussion with them." Those people hate nothing more than someone appealing to balance and reason.
But maybe they are right, likely no one is really neutral in these mindwars, even if they fancy themselves to be.
Re:I know how this works by SuperKendall · 2018-08-21 06:05 · Score: 2

Yeah, my post was just after the presidential election and got similar dubious responses. I figured people would do what they would do, and it was pointless trying to repair a bridge that so many others were furiously trying to burn down so I never did a political post again. Until some distant day when sanity returns I'll just buy shares in popcorn and sigh with a bit of sadness seeing people drift further away from each other that should be able to work things out.
But maybe they are right, likely no one is really neutral in these mindwars, even if they fancy themselves to be.
I think you can still be relatively neutral but both sides make it very, very hard to stay that way - everyone wants you fully enraged, to one direction or the other. Also not sure it matters how neutral you are if no-one will believe you are actually neutral. Defiantly continued strong pulls in all directions, that's for sure. Or maybe more like strong pushes, as both sides try to out-stupid each other.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re:I know how this works by ScentCone · 2018-08-21 06:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

Why would you assume he's joking? Sites like YouTube are now doing things like flagging a George Will commentary about baseball as possibly dangerous speech and suppressing it in search results... because George Will isn't a progressive cheerleader. He even hates Trump! Doesn't matter. He's vaguely conservative, so he must be silenced on social media.

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Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Re:I know how this works by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 07:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

I know plenty of democrats who behave that way but very few of us who are actually on the left.
The problem from our point of view is the right (democrats) and the far right (republicans) dominating all conversation, controlling all major media, and keeping out rivals to themselves despite most of the country really not being either of those. They refuse to talk policy and only want to argue with one another about trivia (Russia, Hilary's emails, etc.) instead of anything that matters while the country is suffering. Presumably because the donor class benefits and the politicians care most about the hands that feed them. We don't need neutrality. We need politicians who talk policy and vote for the interests of their constituents.
Re:I know how this works by ScentCone · 2018-08-21 08:15 · Score: 1

Why would a George Will article be on YouTube?
It's a video. Of George Will talking about baseball. You know, on YouTube. Where they have videos. Unless you're looking for one that features someone like George Will, in which case it's pretty well hidden and flagged as dangerous. Because, you know, he doesn't obey and speak only in leftist terms, as YouTube now prefers.

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Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Re:I know how this works by PGaries · 2018-08-21 14:27 · Score: 1

I'd expect a "left and right should talk to each other and not shut people out" comment to have no effect, positive or negative, on one's score. It's conciliatory, but at the same time contributes nothing substantive to a discussion.

Facebook is censorship heavy by micahraleigh · 2018-08-21 04:36 · Score: 1

I don't feel like it's worth it any more.

They delete all the good posts and leave the garbage / click bait.

Get used to mystery by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 04:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

"The problem: much of how this works is a mystery"

AI algorithms and knowledge-bases/trained models are already too complicated in their function for most people to understand. And they will get even more obscure and indirect in future versions, most likely.

Just as you don't know how I reached a decision or assessment, you won't be able to know how an AI reached a decision or assessment. We are just going to have to get used to that.

The chances are very high that the AI way of assessing will be more objective and principled, going forward, than most individuals' way of assessing.
If you like, to make people less suspicious, perhaps a convention of publishing the code and data in the assessment system (anonymized when references personal data) might be established. But how will this help? A few experts would be able to check it and vouch for its reasoning integrity, but nobody seems to believe experts these days since many of them seem "bought" anyway.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

Re:Get used to mystery by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 06:03 · Score: 1

The chances are very high that the AI way of assessing will be more objective and principled, going forward, than most individuals' way of assessing.
Uh. Not a fucking chance. Only with strong AI and then there's nothing to tell me I can trust the AI's motivations, either its own or those it was told to have.
Even if it may work for limited or trivial topics and with plain old AI akin to what we have now, you give it too much credit. Algorithms will do something akin to guilt by association, or even target the wrong person (by mistake or because someone opened an account or registered to something using name and info of someone else). Like we bomb weddings because a target's cousin is there, or bomb the location of a SIM card without knowing who gets bombed.
Algorithms will fail on data they don't "understand" and have false positives/negatives. They'll also operate on completely wrong knowledge like "Assad gassed children in East Ghouta" and their behavior will depend on which knowledge is considered authoritative.
Re:Get used to mystery by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 06:48 · Score: 2

Granted, a lot of work still has to go into making AI model and infer better. No doubt.
If anything, I'm insulting the "average" level of human reasoning and judgement these days, as evidenced by the general level of discourse; saying that that is not a very high bar to get over for the tech. Sad but probably true.
As the algorithms get better, and closer to self-learning strong AI, it will become harder to bias them maliciously.
Because awareness of external agents with purposes (including purposes in communicating information),
and resistance to bias in information input, will clearly be requirements of such a system, so those "meta-reasoning" or "epistemic" topics will have to be important in the development of that tech.
Your point about a strong AI developing its own preferences and bias is interesting and valid. I think an interesting class of system for people to research will be ego-less semi-strong AIs, capable of self-learning but highly focussed on a top-level goal of objectivity and information quality assesment and truth assessment based on general epistemic and probability principles.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Get used to mystery by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 06:58 · Score: 1

Well pretty much any tool (e.g. hammer, shovel, pen, twitter, google) can be both constructive and used as a weapon.
I think it will be realized how easily manipulable and abusable overly simplistic versions of AI are.
Hopefully this leads to several things:
1) Treatment of results of this kind of stuff with skepticism.
2) A convention of transparency, where the AI models and code are open source and inspectable by all. Each side can hire its experts to debate the merits of the input data, the training method, inference method etc.
3) Research effort into stronger, bias-resistant AI technology.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re: Get used to mystery by Reverend+Green · 2018-08-21 18:43 · Score: 1

We know these tools are being built by villains for the express purpose of controlling and exploiting the masses. It's not a question of "if" they will be used as weapons. That's like asking "if" the Air Force's cruise missiles will be used as weapons. Of course they will - they were BUILT to be weapons.

Who doesn't? by Kjella · 2018-08-21 04:40 · Score: 1

Seriously, who takes any kind of random internet user flagging/rating and uses it raw like it's gospel? Unless you're reviewing each and every report that comes in I'd start evaluating if this user has flagged something before and whether it's been valid or the user has been crying wolf. And if I don't have any direct data points well I'll check correlations with other users I do got data on. Of course that's not enough or you'll have people flag bad videos that they uploaded to build credibility then hit on the innocent, but maybe you can catch patterns like that too.

But no matter what kind of system you build not rating the reporter seems awfully naive. Sure it hinges on Facebook correctly identifying ground truth, but in the case of outright trolling it should be pretty clear that this content did not merit a take down. If it's a gray area, well I think Facebook could very easily throw their own bias into it without bothering with what users think...

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings

Re:Who doesn't? by Quince+alPillan · 2018-08-21 05:32 · Score: 1

I don't know whether I should trust this comment or not because it only has a score of +1 with no moderation history at the time of my post.
Help me decide how to think about this comment, Slashdot!

China is there by sdinfoserv · 2018-08-21 04:41 · Score: 3, Informative

Sounds like a private corporation is taking the United States down the Chinese path of Social Credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How long before businesses check your facebook "trustworthy rating" before you can get a loan, rent a home or even get a job.

So, speculate! by Sloppy · 2018-08-21 04:41 · Score: 1

The problem: much of how this works is a mystery.

This user's browser somehow doesn't load the ads. Score modifier: -0.20.

User's post once mentioned the banned word "kodi." Score modifier: -0.15.

User never posts anything: -0.10.

User only logs in once per week: -0.10.

User's face tagged by at least two other users with scores of 0.60 or higher, and photo is sufficient to be hashed for database: +0.10.

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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

In EU only with explicit consent... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 04:51 · Score: 1

GDPR states that: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
Paragraph 1 shall not apply if the decision:
is necessary for entering into, or performance of, a contract between the data subject and a data controller;
is authorised by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject and which also lays down suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests; or
is based on the data subject’s explicit consent."

Background checks? by fluffernutter · 2018-08-21 05:03 · Score: 1

Who is watching to make sure these "trustworthy" people don't monetize their achievement? Everything goes if someone is willing to pay enough for it. Facebook is just encouraging career propagandists. What kind of background checks are being done?

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Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.

Well, as it just so happens, I already rated THEM. by Hallux-F-Sinister · 2018-08-21 05:05 · Score: 1

I have already rated Facebook. They get a zero.

Facebook is a blight upon humanity that should be abandoned by all and abolished as a grievous mistake that we as a species should never have made.

That is all.

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Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.

Where will this score be displayed? by pincorrect · 2018-08-21 05:06 · Score: 1

Is Zuckerberg is planning on the user's right hand, or perhaps the forehead?

Black Mirror and 1984 all in one by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

This is LITERALLY a "Black Mirror" episode on netflix, where people's entire self-worth is garnered by their social media score. This is big gov't censorship at it's worst (albiet Facebook is "sort of" a private company). Add that to the fact Facebook is incredibly biased towards the left, censors conservatives and actual truth at all turns, this is literally the end of free speech and the beginning of the "1984" book/movie. As another poster pointed out, link, post or like anything to do with InfoWars or pro-Trump, and your trustworthiness will instantly plummet based on their completely hidden "algorithms". Wow

Re:Black Mirror and 1984 all in one by hyades1 · 2018-08-21 06:29 · Score: 1

Thank you for some of the most egregious bullshit I've read today. My cousin has never let a right wing lie pass unpublished on his Facebook page, yet he has never once been sanctioned in any way. He was even putting up links to Alex Jones' website while Jones was suspended by Facebook without any repercussions.
So troll your whiny conservative nonsense somewhere else.

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I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Re:Black Mirror and 1984 all in one by johnsie · 2018-08-21 21:50 · Score: 1

Not really, it's just one website out of millions and you're free not to use it. There are plenty of other ways to communicate with friends and family.

No it's not by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:12 · Score: 5, Informative

Facebook is an opt-in service

No it's not. We've known for years that Spybook has profiles on individuals who have never signed up.

Re:Libel? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 05:14 · Score: 1

Not if they don't share your score with you.

Is this even America anymore? by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:19 · Score: 1

Forget Democrats, Republicans, Socialist... let's just jump right into Communism. You've probably heard this a thousand times, this is straight out of the movie "1984" - I for one personally hate that movie. But Facebook has gone too far, and as of today, I will be deleting my social media accounts to disassociate myself from this type of Orwellian behavior. Where's Antifa? Where's the democrats screaming about freedom of speech, individual rights, and freedom period? Where's the republicans raising flags and launching investigations into this? Alas, I have my own theory. This is all about money - period, and no side is prepared to go up against the billions of dollars Facebook has and will use it fight or buy-off anyone. I am severely fatigued about hearing all this crap and its not only affecting my personal life, but my ability to stay focused at work dealing with complex issues. What has this country become? Wasn't the 21st century suppose to look different - instead here we are heading in a direction that past generations predicted in books and movies. What happened to the world where we can supposedly all get along, respect each others opinions instead of fighting over them. Not interested in leaving the U.S., this is the only country I know, so don't even go there. If it goes down a dangerous path, then I too must follow that path. I'm neither rich nor have the influence to contribute to a change; my only power is to join in an uprising when that day comes - if it ever comes. Maybe too late.

Can't buy a break by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:20 · Score: 1

You don't get a loan, or a job, or food because you are not Chinese patriotic enough! Learn to say Nee How or else we will be goodbye!

Facebook now going full blown Book Burning. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:21 · Score: 1

This is disturbing on so many levels.

"...fight against fake news by flagging people who routinely make false claims against news outlets, whether it's due to an ideological disagreement or a personal grudge."

So, let me get this straight.
If someone posts facts on illegal immigration/national security they may get down rated?
If someone posts facts on islamic terrorism they may get down rated?
If someone post facts, albeit unflattering, about a political/high profile person they may get down rated?

Helloooooo fascist, Orwellian, nazi, dystopic oligarchy.

Yikes. What could possibly go wrong???

Too late to object by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 05:25 · Score: 1

We knew we were going down a rabbit hole and this ball hasn't stopped rolling. It's going to get a lot worse.

Re: Libel? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 05:39 · Score: 1

Nobody has rights like that in the US.

Testing should never be transparent by FeelGood314 · 2018-08-21 05:42 · Score: 1

If I'm testing productivity, trustworthiness or date-ability, I don't want to give away my method of measurement otherwise it will be gamed. Sure I could spend a large amount of time and accurately measure something but for something like productivity it might mean giving 3 people the exact same thing to do. The cost is too high, so I will used a proxy that mostly works. Women use confidence as a proxy for dating all the time and some men knowing that and are successful at faking it. If you boss uses lines of code as a proxy for productivity and you know it, then you comment the hell out of the code. Governments use proxies all the time, like wait times for specific procedures, except they tell everyone what the proxy is and it gets gamed.

Re:Testing should never be transparent by Oligonicella · 2018-08-21 06:41 · Score: 1

If you *don't* tell what the proxy is, *you're* doing the gaming.

Re:Libel? by Cederic · 2018-08-21 05:54 · Score: 1

Legally they're obliged to share not only their score, but also how they calculated it and how they use it in decisions regarding you.

UK Data Protection Act 2018 is a wonderful little thing.

Works For Me by Tempest_2084 · 2018-08-21 05:59 · Score: 1

Anything that quickens the inevitable decline and destruction of Facebook is A-OK in my book. The faster Facebook destroys itself the better the world will be.

Burn baby burn!

Re:as (o)pposed to... by nnet · 2018-08-21 06:01 · Score: 1

Because Joe Q Facebook user reads /. and relies on it to get a political opinion to base who to vote on.

If Facebook rates us, how can we rate Facebook? by shanen · 2018-08-21 06:09 · Score: 1

Glad to see that you got a mod point, though you could have done much more than reveal a tiny bit of insight. In Facebook's case, of course they can't stand the thought of letting us rate THEIR reputation--but they don't actually care because they are only concerned with one metric: Market Cap. On that foundation, there are several secondary metrics, of which time is the most important one. The more human time wasted on Facebook, the bigger the market cap. I think wasted time is bad, but Facebook INSISTS that bigger market cap is good.

There are solution approaches to the problems of bad actors (human and otherwise). I'm even an advocate of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), largely because I think it can be implemented in a symmetry way. However human reputation cannot and should not be reduced to a single number. Human beings are complex and trying to reduce that complexity to a single number is basically insane. A single number can only represent a single dimension, and the question becomes "What are they actually measuring?"

Amusingly enough, I recently submitted a proposal for a multidimensional metric for use on Wikipedia. As the idea mutated, it became two symmetric multidimensional metrics, one for contributors, and one for the articles that they contributed to. MEPR-C is proposed as the Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation of Contributors with the corresponding MEPR-A for articles. ADSAuPR, atAJG.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...

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Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.

Re:Black Mirror "Nosedive"... apk by UnknownSoldier · 2018-08-21 06:13 · Score: 1

> One of the MOST profound lessons I ever got was from a Philosophy professor: QUESTION EVERTHING... especially the motives for this lunacy!

*sigh*

You messed up the joke:

Teacher: "Question Authority!"
Student shouts out: "Says who!"
Teacher smiles.

--
Who knew that in 2018 we'd watch:

* Mainstream Media (MSM) "news" for comedy, and
* Late-night talk shows for the actual news?

Re:Libel? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 06:16 · Score: 1

If you believe that score is included, then something like Google's PageRank would be the same. Google would effectively be forced to tell you how to game their system by telling you why you're not ranked higher. That would be big news, but I haven't heard a thing like it.

Re:Libel? by nnet · 2018-08-21 06:19 · Score: 1

or anyone else, making scoring pointless.

Re:Libel? by Cederic · 2018-08-21 06:27 · Score: 1

If Google pageranked individuals, yes it would.

Personal data and data about a website are treated differently under the law.

Re:Libel? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 06:27 · Score: 1

The point of coming up with a score is to use it internally as a factor in ranking items on someone's news feed. Nobody actually needs to see the score except Facebook when testing and troubleshooting.

Is Facebook on the way down in popularity? by Futurepower(R) · 2018-08-21 06:30 · Score: 1

It seems to me that, eventually, people will realize that Facebook is not a good idea.

Will it affect my credit? by shayd2 · 2018-08-21 06:36 · Score: 1

How long before the Facebook "truth" rating is part of my credit score?

The Chinese are already playing with this

Re:Libel? by omnichad · 2018-08-21 06:38 · Score: 1

Even if a web site is your own personal blog? How is that different than a social media page?

Burying the lede... by YouHaveSnail · 2018-08-21 06:53 · Score: 1

> it's just one of thousands of behavior markers Facebook is using

Seriously? There are *thousands* of behavior markers that Facebook tracks, and we're only talking about one of them?

China by QuadEddie · 2018-08-21 07:00 · Score: 1

China already has this, Mr. 'I speak mandarin' Zuckerberg. It's called the Social Credit System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Just wait until government agencies start asking for this info.

Reputation - not a new thing by bussdriver · 2018-08-21 07:02 · Score: 1

Reputation always existed. HOW you do the ratings system matters - you put a # on it and make it centralized and how you calculate it are the BIG factors. Relative ranking by different people is more realistic. People with your biases also like/hate ____... Truth may be concrete but people's opinions, IQ, ignorance are all relative. Rating somebody who's 100% honest but believes in GOD as less trustworthy because when it comes metaphysics they are irrationally think gay people bring natural disasters... might make sense to YOU but think of your non-mainstream positions on GMO or whatever corporate/gov backed false narrative of the time period. Later you could be proven correct; however, your score will not be adjusted...

Your crazy racist uncle who goes on senile rants all the time already has a poor reputation. If you are a Foxtard, your reputation for common sense is already gone among most the planet. If you are educated, informed and point out lies etc, you have a bad reputation among other groups as being a deep state conspirator or communist or whatever.

WE SHOULD HAVE SOME KIND OF CREDIBILITY RATING SYSTEM. It's a necessity. Credit ratings for example. How you do this is a huge problem. It is needed more than before; in the information age you do not need to censor anything; which draws attention, simply bury and smear it -- nobody has the time... or seems to remember when they do dig into something to verify the reliable sources.

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Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news

Re:Reputation - not a new thing by CanHasDIY · 2018-08-21 08:46 · Score: 1

WE SHOULD HAVE SOME KIND OF CREDIBILITY RATING SYSTEM. It's a necessity.

If you are a Foxtard...
Arbitrarily dismissing people because they get news from an outlet you don't like*? How do you think such an emotional (ie, illogical) response would affect your own Social Credit Rating?
* I don't care for Fox either, but even a blind sow finds a truffle now and again; you should be questioning the data, not the source.

It's a necessity. Credit ratings for example.
Credit ratings are absolutely NOT a necessity, and in fact Americans in general were far more prosperous before they were invented.

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An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese

Truth is evasive by radicimo · 2018-08-21 07:21 · Score: 1

You come across as a theoretical scientist who has not much ventured into the nuanced real world of humankind.

Please watch the movie Roshomon and then let's continue the conversation about objective truth and subjective truth.

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100 REM PISS OFF CODE FASCISTS 200 GOTO 100

Re:Truth is evasive by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 10:28 · Score: 1

And the whole function of science is to identify aspects of reality that you can use a principled, methodical approach to getting closer more and more corresponding-to-reality descriptions, and then apply that approach. It has worked remarkably well. You are probably alive because of it (scientific medicine) and probably most things you do every day depend heavily on processes derived from it.
Yes, people can bullshit in self-serving ways very proficiently, but scientifically developed police bodycams and roadside security cams and smartphone cams are able to give more perspective on even some of that these days. Not that I'm in favour of universal surveillance based on scientifically developed imaging and information communication and storage, but it does have a way of outing some of the bullshit for all to see. If the characters in Rashomon had been wearing bodycams or took smartphone recordings, would there have been so many different versions of events?
Of course each person can choose which events and causal factors to include and exclude in their story. But before you say there is no truth, do a thought experiment where you imagine every square inch of humans' environment monitored by audiovideo cams. Is everything still completely subjective? Some little bit still is, sure, but there's a lot of objective truth about physical events to be had.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:Truth is evasive by radicimo · 2018-08-21 16:09 · Score: 1

Your solution to the elusiveness of human memory and perception is to throw your lot in with the panopticon? Really? Not that you're in favor of universal surveillance ... but you're willing to double down on a bad argument with it. Seriously?
You have a very binary view of a world that actually runs through many shades of gray from black to white. Police body cameras are actually quite subjective. For one, the officer wearing them is responsible for starting recording. Department policy can dictate recording under a wide variety of circumstances, but at the end of the day, the officer must start recording. And can we even trust the data they produce as being untampered?
I didn't say there is no truth. That is a strawman of your design. I just said that subjective truth is much harder to nail down than objective truth, and most of our experience is run through the lens of subjective not objective reality. Humans are quite fragile in that way, and they will continue to be so far beyond our deaths, panopticon or not.

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100 REM PISS OFF CODE FASCISTS 200 GOTO 100
Re:Truth is evasive by presidenteloco · 2018-08-24 12:00 · Score: 1

I don't think you know what a "thought experiment" is.
It doesn't convey an attitude of support or abhorrence of the scenario. It justs asks you to contemplate the scenario as a hypothetical, to elucidate some contemplation of implications in the interests of intellectual exploration.
You come across as one who equates mentioning something with supporting it. That is dumb and a stupifying level of political correctness. Not to mention unjustly insulting. Stop with the completely off-side rhetorical techniques already.
Also, don't call "subjective truth" truth. Call it perception. Or interpretation, or whatever. Once we accept subjective truth as actual truth, the concept of truth loses pretty much all meaning, at least when discussing the actual world.
The notion of "subjective truth" is only useful in psychological counselling and the like, where the issue is the person's mind. "Subjective truth" may have "personal validity" to the perceiver, but it doesn't necessarily say much or anything about the collectively analysable and consensus-measurable external world. Schitzophrenics have their own "subjective truth" too. It's very valid to them, but tells us not much about reality. Most of us are also deluded, or irretrievable biased, when we come up with our "subjective truths". I think a major struggle of post-post-modern philosophy will be to figure out how to recover more properties of objective truth. A truth that any otherwise unbiased observer (including the simplest "observer"; an interacting particle) would have to agree on if it were following principled perception, representation, modelling methods.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

Re:Obligatory Black Mirror Reference by snapsnap · 2018-08-21 07:43 · Score: 1

And 1984 shouldn't be an instruction manual.

Re:Scale? by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 07:52 · Score: 1

Is one of two possible values really a scale?

Wow, this is so cool, I'm about to blow your mind, I'm so glad I'm the one who gets to tell you about this.

Hold onto your hat, sit down, because this is word-changing information right here. There are actually numbers between 0 and 1.

I know, you are thinking no way, I mean c'mon. It was hard enough to accept zero as a number and now you want me to think about these "numbers" "between" zero and one?!

But, really, mathematicians have devised a system of numbers with values between zero and one. They call them "rational" numbers (because they represent ratios, not because they make sense - but they do make sense).

You know how when you have an apple and you cut it into two pieces? They call each piece a "half" and represent it with the rational number 1/2 (shorthand for 1 divided by two, get it?). The cool thing is when you extend multiplication to these rational number now you can cut any number in half, not just even numbers!

Then they extend it so that it is possible to do division with any of the integers and still get a number (instead of a number and a remainder like the old way). Think of the applications. This rational number system is going to be quite popular!

OK, so, go off for a few days and digest that and when you are ready we can talk about "irrational" numbers.

graph api by bobmagicii · 2018-08-21 08:49 · Score: 1

depends if we can get that value from the graph api. if not then it doesnt really matter at all, some internal number for their bullshit. we track how many users report problems and how many were flagged as NOTABUG and id be a liar if i said didnt use that ratio to determine if i should even dignify the report with a response lol. but that is an internal affairs issue. if we can get this value out of the graph api though and it gets used for like... job applications, interest rates, immigration... granted if the score was provable as legit it could mean something but there is no way anyone could calculate it without some form of bias. so it really should not be.

For the best FB experience by BadTuna · 2018-08-21 09:23 · Score: 1

...they've implemented binary?

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Your sig here!

To summarize by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 14:51 · Score: 1

The scientific study of moral/ethical systems is a subset of study of self-organizing systems and emergent behaviour and emergent stable complexity (e.g. life) in open thermodynamic systems.

The role of moral/ethical systems is as embodied information patterns that constrain the behaviour of elements of the emerged stable/metastable complex systems, with the effect of the behaviour constraint being energy efficiency of survival of the emerged stable complex matter/energy patterns, through the general mechanism of allowing organized co-operation of generally independent-action-capable sub-parts.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

Re:To summarize by presidenteloco · 2018-08-21 14:58 · Score: 1

In other words, this particular opined "ought" "is" because it is evolutionarily adaptive to both the thinker that it "ought", and thus adaptive to that form/content of "ought".
That's how you get "ought" from "is", or vice versa.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:To summarize by presidenteloco · 2018-08-22 09:11 · Score: 1

Living systems exist and persist because of (some essential, adaptive aspects of) the particular way that they are.
The intelligent-agent and intelligent-agent-society subtypes of living systems exist and persist because of the particular way that they are, including the individual mental functioning, their concepts and attitudes towards things and actions, and the collective information and culture that they develop and maintain in their evolution.
Example of one moral philosophical principle, and its origin:
If we ask "why do people value continuing to live their life, despite being able to conceive of many forms of suicide" (Camus's question): (or a generalization: why do people think pro-social, unselfish, sometimes altruistic behaviour is moral)
We should see that, by evolution, those intelligent-agent creatures which have such an attitude (of desire and determination for survival) and act accordingly are the ones that are here (partly because of that attitude and disposition), among all the possible alternative types of potential survivors, who didn't make it, either by chance, or because of flaws in their physical, mental, or attitudinal states.
Same, in a more subtle way, for pro-social, altruistic moral attitudes. They turn out, when widely practiced in a society, to be adaptive for that society type-and-instance's longevity, and for its members' survival. (Compared to societies with less pro-social behaviour and less morality to support such.)
That is how "ought" derives from "is". The adaptive conceptions, attitudes, and personal and social behaviours are the ones that survive longer and more probablty, along with their developers and adherents (societies and individuals.)
That's why we see similar moral principles, at the general level, across many societies. OF COURSE the specializations of those rules are contingent on particulars of the environment, configuration, and experience of each society, but there are clear persistent general threads (themes) to the rules that survive over many generations.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Re:To summarize by presidenteloco · 2018-08-22 09:18 · Score: 1

Roles are roles of parts (simple or semi-autonomous) in co-operative or hierarchical persistent complex systems.
They describe constraints on the function/behaviour/position of the part in the whole.
They are part of the information pattern (organizational schema) that organizes the matter and energy in the system in a way that makes the system "function", perhaps in ITS role in a higher-level system. But a prerequisite for any organized/self-organized system to do any externally "useful" role or function is for that system to have form and function for its own stable persistence. So a role of a part may most often get its meaning from the contribution that the part, as long as it stays formed, positioned, and functioning as described by that role constraint, makes to the self-continuation orchestrated function of the next-level up "whole" system.
Roles are aspects of (constraints on) the form and position and function of sub-parts of systems in the operation and continuation of the system.

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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

Re: How long before they start selling this? by Reverend+Green · 2018-08-21 19:01 · Score: 1

Why do you believe they don't already sell your data to Uncle Sam? Where do you THINK all their revenue comes from? Ads? ADS? That's rich!

Nice abuse of a sentence. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-08-21 19:04 · Score: 1

The president's lawyer was discussing perjury traps when he said "Truth is not truth".

In context, he was saying that if the president were to testify and tell the truth and if this conflicted with the testimony of former FBI director Comey, it would be possible that Special investigator Mueller (who is a many years long best friend of Comey) could decide to believe Comey and thus the truth uttered by Trump would be presumed to be not the truth - and in that entirely possible solution truth is not truth. Remember that this investigator is currently trying to jail general Flynn for lying to the FBI even though the FBI's report on their interview of Flynn says Flynn did not lie - and the Mueller investigators lied to Flynn to trick him into pleading guilty to lying to the FBI (that's even more context).

Sadly, in the modern era of crap journalism and rapid-fire meme generation fueled by misquotes and intention context stripping, we are seeing an endless supply of such snarky memes.

Facebook rating their trustworthiness by Daralantan · 2018-08-22 01:28 · Score: 1

On a scale of 0 to 1, Facebook has rated themselves at 100. Please. Trust the Zuck.

And here we go. by Chas · 2018-08-22 02:01 · Score: 1

Another step on the road to a "social credit score".

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Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

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Facebook is Rating Users Based On Their 'Trustworthiness' (engadget.com)

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