Adversarial action makes this at least an order of magnitude worse. If Carla has to include the chance that Bob could be lying (for attention, for humor, or just pathologically) about his experiences or his history of drug use or hallucinations, she makes an even smaller update. This is especially difficult in group-membership or banning discussions, because LOTS of people lie (or just focus incorrectly on different evidence) for status and for irrelevant-beef reasons.
I don’t think there is a solution, other than to acknowledge that such decisions will always be a balance of false-positive and false-negative, and it’s REQUIRED to ban some innocent (-ish) people in order to protect against the likely-but-not-provably-harmful.
I think Bob and Carla’s problem isn’t really whether Bob is lying or not. If they knew for an absolute fact Bob wasn’t speaking things he knew to be factually untrue, Carla still has to sort through misunderstanding (maybe Bob’s talking about a LARP?) and drug use (maybe Bob forgot whether he took LSD the way I forget whether I’ve had coffee sometimes?) and psychotic breaks. I wouldn’t usually count any of those as “lying” in the relevant sense; Bob’s wrong, but he’s accurately reporting his experiences as best he can.
I don’t have a solution for the group membership case, which I think of as a special case of the reputation problem. I’m trying to point out a couple failure modes; one where you don’t realize a bunch of your information actually has a single source and should be counted once, and one where you don’t actually get or incorporate reputation information at all.
Adversarial action makes this at least an order of magnitude worse. If Carla has to include the chance that Bob could be lying (for attention, for humor, or just pathologically) about his experiences or his history of drug use or hallucinations, she makes an even smaller update. This is especially difficult in group-membership or banning discussions, because LOTS of people lie (or just focus incorrectly on different evidence) for status and for irrelevant-beef reasons.
I don’t think there is a solution, other than to acknowledge that such decisions will always be a balance of false-positive and false-negative, and it’s REQUIRED to ban some innocent (-ish) people in order to protect against the likely-but-not-provably-harmful.
I agree adversarial action makes this much worse.
I think Bob and Carla’s problem isn’t really whether Bob is lying or not. If they knew for an absolute fact Bob wasn’t speaking things he knew to be factually untrue, Carla still has to sort through misunderstanding (maybe Bob’s talking about a LARP?) and drug use (maybe Bob forgot whether he took LSD the way I forget whether I’ve had coffee sometimes?) and psychotic breaks. I wouldn’t usually count any of those as “lying” in the relevant sense; Bob’s wrong, but he’s accurately reporting his experiences as best he can.
I don’t have a solution for the group membership case, which I think of as a special case of the reputation problem. I’m trying to point out a couple failure modes; one where you don’t realize a bunch of your information actually has a single source and should be counted once, and one where you don’t actually get or incorporate reputation information at all.