Maybe some kind of social app inspired by liquid democracy/quadratic voting might work?
Do you think it’s wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals? I can think of a lot of reasons this could go wrong: cognitive biases, emotional reasoning, ignorance, Dunning–Kruger effect, politically-driven decisions… Just look at what’s happening now with cancel culture.
In general this connects to the problem of expertise. If even intellectuals have trouble understanding who among them is worthy of trust and respect, how could individuals alien to their field fare better?
If the rating was done between intellectuals, don’t you think the whole thing would be prone to conflicts of interest, with individuals tending to support their tribe / those who can benefit them / those whose power tempts them or scares them?
I am not against the idea of rating intellectual work. I’m just mistrustful of having the rating done by other humans, with biases and agendas of their own. I would be more inclined to support objective forms of rating. Forecasts are a good example.
Do you think it’s wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals?
The idea as described doesn’t necessitate that.
Everyone rates everyose else. This creates a web of trust.
An individual user then designates a few sources they trust. The system uses those seeds to propagate trust through the network, by a transitivity assumption.
So every individual gets custom trust ratings of everyone else, based on who they personally trust to evaluate trustworthiness.
This doesn’t directly solve the base-level problem of evaluating intellectuals, but it solves the problem of aggregating everyone’s opinions about intellectual trustworthiness, while taking into account their trustworthiness in said aggregation.
Because the aggregation doesn’t automatically include everyone’s opinion, we are not “entrusting the collective” with anything. You start the trust aggregation from trusted sources.
Unfortunately, the trust evaluations do remain entirely subjective (IE unlike probabilities in a prediction market, there is no objective truth which eventually comes in to decide who was right.)
Do you think it’s wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals? I can think of a lot of reasons this could go wrong: cognitive biases, emotional reasoning, ignorance, Dunning–Kruger effect, politically-driven decisions… Just look at what’s happening now with cancel culture.
In general this connects to the problem of expertise. If even intellectuals have trouble understanding who among them is worthy of trust and respect, how could individuals alien to their field fare better?
If the rating was done between intellectuals, don’t you think the whole thing would be prone to conflicts of interest, with individuals tending to support their tribe / those who can benefit them / those whose power tempts them or scares them?
I am not against the idea of rating intellectual work. I’m just mistrustful of having the rating done by other humans, with biases and agendas of their own. I would be more inclined to support objective forms of rating. Forecasts are a good example.
The idea as described doesn’t necessitate that.
Everyone rates everyose else. This creates a web of trust.
An individual user then designates a few sources they trust. The system uses those seeds to propagate trust through the network, by a transitivity assumption.
So every individual gets custom trust ratings of everyone else, based on who they personally trust to evaluate trustworthiness.
This doesn’t directly solve the base-level problem of evaluating intellectuals, but it solves the problem of aggregating everyone’s opinions about intellectual trustworthiness, while taking into account their trustworthiness in said aggregation.
Because the aggregation doesn’t automatically include everyone’s opinion, we are not “entrusting the collective” with anything. You start the trust aggregation from trusted sources.
Unfortunately, the trust evaluations do remain entirely subjective (IE unlike probabilities in a prediction market, there is no objective truth which eventually comes in to decide who was right.)