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Database of Objective Facts
Winky
rRegistered User regular
rRegistered User regular
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.
We are in the midst of the age of information. 30.2% of the population of the planet has at least irregular internet access. Internet usership has increased 480% worldwide since the year 2000 (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). While the rich and privileged have a disproportional amount of access to the information on the internet, it is by no means exclusively available to them. I don’t need to tell you that we are more interconnected than ever before, nor do I need to tell you that this is just the beginning. Regardless of whether or not we can expect Moore’s law to continue far into the future, for the present we are still seeing an exponential growth in information technologies. Every person on this planet has more information available to them than ever before in human history. In fact we are completely inundated with it. Information is essentially free to everyone. It is the most valuable commodity in the world and it costs nothing save the technology to deliver it.
I also shouldn’t need to tell you that possessing valid information is incredibly important. With the dissemination of the correct information billions of individuals could be empowered. The internet provides a venue through which potentially unlimited individuals can be educated cheaply, in all the areas that are important to them. Democracy, the free market; these systems are the basis of our society and rely entirely upon a well-educated populace that holds the power of information at their finger tips. The more valid information we hold, the better we can approximate the actions of rational actors.
At the same time, misinformation is the most harrowing tool of abuse we’ve had to face yet. When individuals, corporations and governments control the flow of information they can manipulate it and through it manipulate the populace to their will. Large media corporations and politicians set the stage and the tone that our political discourse takes place on, steering the populace to and fro. There is even the problem of the public at large deceiving itself with misinformation that spreads virally, riding on the fears and biases of the community.
This is the central issue: we are inundated with information, but there are few safeguards to ensure that we are receiving valid information. And when we put in place organizations to filter through information to make sure the public is receiving valid information we put ourselves at risk of biases and manipulation tainting the information.
What, then, is my proposal?
I think we need to construct a new entity to filter through information and produce valid, objective truth. We need to look at the methods we have to prevent abuse and bias and build them into an overarching, self-monitoring system that will compile information for populace of the world to take advantage of. We need to have the peer review and expert involvement of a scientific journal with the openness and public involvement of a wiki and beyond everything else complete and total transparency.
I am imagining a sort of wiki that is composed of well cited fact-checking reviews of any piece of information that passes into public awareness. Nothing would be outside the scope of the reviewers, not news articles, not political speeches, not books, not scientific journals and especially not other reviews. In fact, a huge emphasis will be placed on self-policing and analyzing the biases of other reviewers to try to establish a more objective environment. Anyone would be allowed to become a reviewer, but the validation process would be exacting and require the reviewer to submit the same amount of private information that it takes to get published (meaning their real name, etc). Each reviewer would have all their publications and other articles on display, making their credentials and biases more apparent. Different reviewers could rate each other on biases and objectivity, and algorithms could be introduced (that, themselves, would be subject to review) that could attempt to interrelate the opinions of different reviewers to establish a more objective assessment of biases. Meta-reviews and articles will be written to document different positions on contentious issues and offer demographic information on the reviewers who hold these positions.
Different sorting algorithms would be of utmost importance, as they are how the information contained within the reviews would be judged for validity. A number of different algorithms would be made available that sort based on different weightings of reviewer credentials, reviewer ratings in bias and objectivity, citations, popular opinion and the like. The database should give the option for any individual to use their own custom sorting algorithms. As I said, these algorithms themselves would be a topic of debate.
The end result that I’m going for is something like Wikipedia with the validity and respectability of Nature.
Thoughts? Opinions?
Also, I know that this idea is based on a number of epistemological assumptions about the nature of truth and objectivity, but I would rather discuss these in another thread.
Winky on
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Something like it, yes. I was actually unaware of this project and I like the look of it. But what I've been thinking about would differ somewhat in scope and rigor. Which is to say, it would be less like an encyclopedia and more of a regulatory entity for information, it would project reviews out onto pre-existing media and fact-check it. It would also be more even more stringent in its attempt to establish objectivity and well-supported information.