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REALITY_RANK

                                             September 21, 2010
                                             August    07, 2013
                                             August    17, 2013

Somone writing a comment in Paul
Krugman's blog suggested it would
be nice if he could block comments
from particular people.

In other words, he reinvented the
idea for "kill files", available
for years in usenet clients.


   This would work to screen out the crazies, but
   not the professional, hired jammers who have
   been a problem for some time: they already              TEN_YEARS_LATER
   create new accounts with bogus identities at
   will (a site that doesn't verify identities is
   a site that's essentially a toy, which is to       THE_TOY_WEB
   say they're all toys).



   And running a kill file on trolls doesn't help
   improve the general level of discourse: the
   trolls work by acting on people who haven't
   learned not to take the bait.  If you've decided
   to place a troll in your personal a kill-file,
   you're already well on your way to being immune
   to the troll.

        Myself, I find it's just as easy to
        use a "mental kill file", and just
        not look at the ones from people
        I don't care about.


   Krugman often laments that the mainstream
   medium-- with professional editors and such--
   don't take the trouble to screen out
   commentators based on elementary criteria
   like contact with reality.

   Is it possible to find a way to do this in
   a quasi-automated, crowd-sourced sort of way?
   Remember: it wouldn't have to be very good to
   do a better job than the editors at the New
   York Times and the Washington Post.

   Take it as a given: you would like to
   see a score ranking commentators based
   not on how polite they are, not how
   "reasonable" they sound, not on whether
   they parrot conventional wisdom; but
   based on things like how often they get
   things right.

      What would that mean?

      How could you get something
      to work like that?

      Or at least to approximate it?


Some ideas:

   (1)

    a forum where you must place three futures bets
    a year in order to play.

        once again: must be tied to meatspace,
        or it's too easy to hedge.

   (2)

    The masters of reality tribunal:
    they stamp people with an R
    score.  High R people become
    lieutenants, capable of handing
    out R scores to others.


    (3)

    Don't ignore the obvious:
    "like", "recommended" buttons,
    so the churning crowd can
    gradually contribute to your
    score.  Note: this is less
    easy to game with real ids.          REAL_ID
    Still has the problem of using
    conventionality as proxy for
    the reasonable.  (the family
    feud epistemology).



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