It’s easy on Lesswrong in particular by just clicking on your name link, so I can see you’ve been pitching in on the thread “Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate”, and I think the record goes back years—probably since you’ve been a member. If you mean other forums (fora?) opaque to us, maybe—I’m sure the NSA is doing that, compiling profiles of what people say across different forums, so far as the IDs can be matched up. However
1) What I have in mind would mine credible sources for quotes of public figures.
2) I intended it more as an illustration of the main point, i.e.: I think the world would work better if the ratio of
ability to find verifiable facts pertinent to political discussion
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supply of highly opinionated and slanted "news".
could be raised by, say, an order of magnitude.
A major component of “ability to find” would be ease of finding it. Most people follow some approximation of the path of least resistance when “surfing” the net.
The wikimedia people might encompass it eventually—for now they collect “quotable quotes” and don’t try for a comprehensive set of speakings/writings (copyright issues there although something like what google books does might work—so a database of pointers to semi-accessible information sources.
Another more ambitious idea would be design of a sort of protocol object for tabular statistical data, that would stand for some sort of “standard of respectability”, so that when someone presented a summary graph excerpted from some source, the “proper” way to do it would be as a defined operation (in part maybe a sort of “SQL Lite”) on the protocol object, but anyone reading the article could pull the object out of that context and turn it this way and that so they stuck with the slanted and cherry-picked print-bite.
Judging politicians by their quotes is a bad idea anyway. The quotes of a political speech are what the speech writer of the politician thought the audience wants to hear.
I find websites such as factcheck to be a lot more valuable for the political discourse.
It’s easy on Lesswrong in particular by just clicking on your name link, so I can see you’ve been pitching in on the thread “Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate”, and I think the record goes back years—probably since you’ve been a member. If
It easy to get a list of all posts. It’s not easy to automatically search with them in a way that distinguishes between a person having said something himself and a person who responds to them having said something.
speechby would also be very interesting for searching forums like lesswrong to know what a specific poster said about a subject in the past.
It’s easy on Lesswrong in particular by just clicking on your name link, so I can see you’ve been pitching in on the thread “Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate”, and I think the record goes back years—probably since you’ve been a member. If you mean other forums (fora?) opaque to us, maybe—I’m sure the NSA is doing that, compiling profiles of what people say across different forums, so far as the IDs can be matched up. However
1) What I have in mind would mine credible sources for quotes of public figures.
2) I intended it more as an illustration of the main point, i.e.: I think the world would work better if the ratio of
could be raised by, say, an order of magnitude.
A major component of “ability to find” would be ease of finding it. Most people follow some approximation of the path of least resistance when “surfing” the net.
The wikimedia people might encompass it eventually—for now they collect “quotable quotes” and don’t try for a comprehensive set of speakings/writings (copyright issues there although something like what google books does might work—so a database of pointers to semi-accessible information sources.
Another more ambitious idea would be design of a sort of protocol object for tabular statistical data, that would stand for some sort of “standard of respectability”, so that when someone presented a summary graph excerpted from some source, the “proper” way to do it would be as a defined operation (in part maybe a sort of “SQL Lite”) on the protocol object, but anyone reading the article could pull the object out of that context and turn it this way and that so they stuck with the slanted and cherry-picked print-bite.
Judging politicians by their quotes is a bad idea anyway. The quotes of a political speech are what the speech writer of the politician thought the audience wants to hear.
I find websites such as factcheck to be a lot more valuable for the political discourse.
It easy to get a list of all posts. It’s not easy to automatically search with them in a way that distinguishes between a person having said something himself and a person who responds to them having said something.