I briefly discussed this http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/07/truth-in-numbers.html in another thread but perhaps the general idea belongs in a thread of its own. The gist is that the truth will only flourish if there is a 'tax on falsity'. This is because the vast majority of people who are interested in the truth, are only mildly interested in it. Conversely, those who are interested in error are passionate about their error (there are various categories of these people which I discuss in the post). Thus the people interested in the truth are not interested enough to get in protracted argument with those who are on the side of error. Thus, without any social mechanism to favour the truth, error will always prevail.

The only way to help the truth (I argue) is to tax everyone a small amount, in proportion to the general feeble interest in truth. Then pay someone independently to establish the truth. Universities are one example of such a tax.

This is a general argument against libertarianism. At least, versions of libertarianism that hold that all taxation is wrong.

There are libertarians here: what do they think?

* Oh dear I completely mispelled both parts of the title - It should be 'The argument for a falsity tax' and 'Against libertarianism'. (Libertinarianism is something quite different). Could a mod oblige please? - Thanks.

Boy, all of that Wikiporn is finally getting to you, Peter!

Interesting ideas, which require some thought. I'm thinking about it, but my initial response is that this is a very good idea that will probably never be put into practice. Kind of like that "Christianity" thingee....

Well as I point out, the idea of a 'university' is precisely that, or at least the university model as used to exist in England, where the state subsidises education by means of taxation. The more recent model, where education is nearly universal, but has to be paid by the parents of those who are educated, or by ruinous loans to students, is a retrograde step in my view.

The principle of having government departments responsible for regulating commercial interests is also similar. Both of these are rejected by libertarians, who hold (AFAIK) that a completely market-controlled economy is sufficient for what is socially useful. My view is that the market = the crowd, and that there is no magic about a crowd that gets you to truth, or justice, or whatever.

I suspect a lot of the WR crowd will agree with me here, and I put it to you that the real defining principle that separates 'WR' from 'WP' is around libertarianism. I see many posts here against libertarian ideas. Turning to WP, by contrast, all I get is the idea that 'anyone can edit', this inviolable principle that somehow defines a Wikipedian.

And Bamboozlement Grew Like Kudzu


I generally agree with the notion of providing a reward for producing truth and imposing a cost for producing falsehood, in proportion to the social costs associated with the falsehood. The reward-cost function should be constructed according to the principles first set forth by Joseph-Louis Lagrange, one of the first mathematicians to study the design of optimal regulatory models. The slope of the reward-cost curve must correspond to the marginal social value of truth and the marginal social cost of falsehood. When the Lagrangian function is properly constructed, people will ride the curve gracefully in the desired direction (toward valuable truths and away from costly falsehoods). Nor will there be any temptation to game the system. Unlike the present dysfunctional model, Bamboozlement will not grow like Kudzu. Neither shall they learn deceit any more.

Maybe in a minarchy.

In seriousness you must take a brighter view of humanity than I do. I'll accept that a majority of people (though certainly not 99.99%) favor information which they believe to be true, but how often is it so? How many people have a vested interest in promoting information which they do not believe to be true? Certainly more than ten.

The article was slightly tongue in cheek and remember I am English so 'X is very Y' means 'X is slightly Y' and 'X is slightly Y' means 'X is very Y'. This doesn't always translate well.

But, seriously, you have reminded me of another class of contributor: companies. Everybody, apart from those who moan about their company, lies about their company.

Yes, and/but/however the same shoe fits governments equally well.

Very true, and another to add to the list. Does anyone have anything on this? There was a thread somewhere about some government sponsoring Wikipedia articles.

Oh yes

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sourc...l=&oq=&gs_rfai=

What I have to add probably goes well beyond the scope of your article. (There's that blasted "beyond scope" meme again.)

As a science educator, what interests me are widespread popular misconceptions that, at present, only a handful of scientists know about. Probably the most famous one in history was the Copernican Model that Galileo was stupid enough to blab about in front of Pope Urban (or was it Pope Yerbanned?).

But that was four centuries ago.

There is, today, a comparable widely held misconception that is poised to fall, sooner or later. I've written about it for over a decade (but I'm not the only one).

And lemmetellya, itsadoozie.

<going off-topic here> Care to fill us in, Barry?</back on topic>

Yes please tell.

Functional Systems vs. Rule-Based Systems - How to understand the oldest error in the architecture of human culture.

The First Book of System Design - A creation story for the Cybernetic Age from the Post-Apocalyptic Seminary of Neuro-Mathematical Systems Theology.

Disjunction Dysfunction and the Error Function - Why rule-driven systems are chaotic sources of dramaturgy, and what it takes to craft a functional and graceful regulatory process.

Rules, Games, and Dramas - Mathematicians have known for over a century that rule-driven systems are mathematically chaotic.

Apostasy and Emunah - Turning away from unreliable and untrustworthy belief systems.

Punishment and Violence: Is the Criminal Law Based on One Huge Mistake? by James Gilligan, Harvard University; published in the Journal of Social Research, Fall 2000.

Thanks! I'll read all that stuff, but it runs along the lines of a lot of stuff I've been thinking about myself lately...

As you can see, I've been thinking about it for well over a decade. And more recently I've been working up an educational module for demonstrating the core ideas in those essays and references to the original literature.

Back on topic please. This is nothing to do with rule-based vs functional systems. The question is whether there is something wrong with the libertarian model of Wikipedia. Allowing 'anyone to edit' does not result in a comprehensive and reliable reference work.

I don't care whether the process is drama-filled or not. Drama is often a good thing as it keeps people amused and concentrates the mind. The question is: is the end-product any good - I don't care how we get there. And my point is that the end-product is rubbish.

This is an interesting idea that at least begins to address the problem one of the basic problems of "free" as a price point almost universal on the internet. "Free" content requires that all burdens relating to the content to be shifted to persons other than whoever hosts the content. Thus Section 230 immunity. Thus take down notices and safe harbors. Thus shifting the burden of offensive content unto parents via "controls." Thus wholesale BLP irresponsibility. Thus every form of spam, inaccuracies, lies and deceit imaginable.

I believe that the burden ought to be born by the host and speakers jointly and severally. So I would prefer a system that would tax (or provide tort liability and regulation) the host and speakers rather than the general public. In the case of a "truth tax" it could be perhaps best imposed based on upload bandwidth usage. Believing in a mixed rather than outright command economy I would prefer the revenue be dispersed via grants to universities and public advocacy groups rather than some kind of government "Truth Ministry." But the idea has a lot merit.

That's a little ambiguous. Does that mean that the universities will be paying the lion's share of the tax? I could see that.

Meanwhile churches will continue hiding behind form 1023, schedule A.

Falsity tax, my ass.

No. Surely the context makes it clear that universities are the recipients of the tax, which everyone pays (at least in the UK until the 1990's). I admit the wording was unclear.

Neither I nor my parents paid for my university education. My grant and living costs were entirely subsidised by the UK government via direct and indirect grants. The indirect grant was for the tuition fee, which went to the university to pay adminisration costs, lecturer salaries and so on. My PhD was also entirely funded by the State.

This was not so expensive because in the 1970's far fewer school students went on to university. Academic salaries were relatively higher then, and the universities could afford really high quality staff. The arrival of universal higher education in the 1990's and beyond completely changed that, and was bad thing in my view. There were a lot of junk courses created, and a lot of students left university without any chance of a job, because completely unqualified for the sort of jobs available. We see the results around us. Many unemployed 23 year olds, or working in McDonalds. But I am drifting from the topic. Or perhaps not. The American 'privatised' system, which does not rely on universal taxation, is demonstrably inferior to the taxation model. The Dean of studies at one of the London universities told me that he only recruits students from the former communist countries, who still stick to the model of educating a small number of talented people at the expense of the State.

I was attempting to make a joke. I'm not a big fan of today's universities. They remind me of Wikipedia.

Fixed.

As is "Peter". His is funnier.

Now let's hear some reasoning, Anthony.

The cost of university education today is exorbitant. A lot of the campus services have been privatized since the 1980s, yet it's still a black hole for funding. The problem may not be so much the cost of paying staff rather the state simply pruning back on spending, forcing the campuses to find revenue unfortunately from the students - the ones who can least afford it.

But tongue in cheek sarcasm is so much more fun.

What's the topic about which you want to hear "some reasoning"?

Well, do you agree with my argument that the crowd, the mob, is able to establish the truth better than a bunch of experts? If so, we have no quarrel, and there is no point in your being sarcastic. If you don't agree, give a reasoned argument.

It's an interesting idea to be sure, but the sad fact of it is that too much stuff in the world is subjective (or at least, not objective) for this to work consistently.

The thing that people should be able to agree on is that "market forces" should be allowed to help determine if any given speech platform is being deliberately and/or maliciously abused, and then law enforcement and a (reasonably fair, one would hope) judiciary would take over in cases that resulted in actual injury, etc. This is how it works in traditional publishing, after all.

But as we've discussed many times, because web hosts are being treated (in the US and elsewhere) as "service providers," essentially exempt from liability, web hosts are allowed to provide such platforms with near-total impunity. That gives them a completely unfair market advantage over traditional publishing, and indeed, over nearly all other forms of mass media. This isn't fair, it isn't good for society, and it isn't even "libertarian" - nor is it intentional, to be honest. It's simply people taking advantage of the fact that traditional legislative structures and institutions can't, or won't, keep up with the rate of modern technological progress.

Ideally, IMO, any cost associated with the promotion of falsity should be partially borne by a web host only in cases where the host isn't clearly and definitively presenting the information as the ideas/opinions/research-findings of one individual (or, perhaps, one corporate entity if they're going to insist on being treated as such). That would at least allow for the same level of individual freedom of speech on the internet that we have now. Unfortunately, I don't believe legislatures are going to want to make that distinction, or even take the trouble to understand it - meaning that forums for individual expression will be lumped in with the Wikipedias and Encyclopedia Dramaticas of the world, and all web hosts will be subject to the same potential for liability. And that would be, in a word, sad. But Wikipedians, more than any other group in the world, will bear the guilt for that tragedy.

Fine if there is a single individual, or small group of individuals, harmed by the falsity. But if the harm is to society as a whole? E.g. from the promotion of quack medicine, e.g. chiropractic? Or harm which is difficult to prove, but nonetheless exists, if Wikipedia says that some cult is harmless, and people join as a result, and are harmed.



Well it is libertarian isn't it? On the assumption that as well as being against taxation, some libertarians are against regulation as well.

[edit] I suppose someone is bound to argue that laws against defamation are not the same as regulation. But libertarians are against those, as well http://blog.libertarian.org.au/2010/01/31/...efamation-laws/ .



So no one will call you a rapist or a pedophile or a murderer on Wikipedia, so long as you are a good person.

No.



I thought you were the one being sarcastic.



A reasoned argument for what? My not agreeing? I don't just agree with people randomly because they say something. Is that a valid argument for not agreeing?

Give a reasoned argument for your not agreeing. Simply disagreeing is not an argument. You don't have to give an argument of course. You can simply say 'I don't agree with you but I am not telling you why'. Or you can smirk like a schoolgirl, which is pretty much what you have been doing.

I wonder if you are upset because I wrote the bit below. So you are not in fact a tax advisor, as you claim, but really a 15 year old girl. Fine.

I don't agree because you haven't provided any evidence that what you say is true. And like I said, I don't just agree with people randomly because they say something.



Nope. Didn't even notice it actually.

If anything I'm upset about this:



But I figured maybe you were being sarcastic. After all, you did say that you were being tongue-in-cheek. If this was meant to be A Modest Proposal, then kudos. If you seriously do believe that we should steal from the productive to subsidize "truth for the sake of truth", then shame on you.

If one good reason did exist, this is probably it.

Still, schemes like this can go horribly wrong on occasion. I doubt Tennessee used the term "falsity tax" for the $100 levied against Mr. Scopes, but the underlying theory was similar (albeit wrong-headed).

I know I couldn't assure anyone that enough has changed since then, particularly below the Mason-Dumbass line.

It's quite a racket. You punish people for actually being right and acting on it, and reward them for telling a classroom full of others that they're right. So perverse and backwards I figured I'd give "Peter" the benefit of the doubt and assume he was being sarcastic.

Well, we could go with "Unverifiability, not falsity."

I recently stumbled across an old debate between SlimVirgin and myself, which may be of historical interest because I think it may be the very first mention of "Verifiability, not truth."

It's tempting to agree with you, but I'd be willing to accept the idea that a crowdsourced encyclopedia-like website can manage to present information about things like that in such a way as to make the risk of harm to individuals no worse than if there were no information available about them at all.

The thing about making the WMF subject to class-action suits is, they aren't a tempting enough target for that kind of thing, at least not now (and probably not in the foreseeable future). They just don't have enough money. All they would have to do is avoid summary judgements, i.e., open-and-shut cases - and while they may not currently be competent enough to do that, I'd imagine that they could develop that kind of competence soon enough if they had to.


But from their perspective, it isn't regulation - it's government interference with market forces, by their allowing one market sector a grossly unfair advantage over the others. The difference between them and people like myself is that their "solution" would be to give the other market sectors the same advantage, i.e., the same lack of interference. But just because they would happily make the problem worse doesn't mean that the current situation is in keeping with their ideology.

There is another, and I would argue more useful, example of an operative tax on falsity that has been in some level of effective operation for at least 800 years. Although I doubt it is any more acceptable to the market libertarians, than public funded Universities.

Aside from the great battles for ‘truth’ wage in mediaeval and post mediaeval Europe, which were frequently characterised by slaughter of thousands, a rather quieter and more mundane process of ‘truth assurance’ progressed against the background of every day transactions. The need to know whether a loaf of bread contains the weight of flour that the baker claims, or that a fish is fresh from the river and not five days old, was vital information for survival in the developing exchange economies of urbanising Europe from 1000CE onwards. In response to this need for assured quantity and quality in transactions, systematised weights and measures gained legal statute and laws previously applied to personal conduct were crafted to apply to the exchange of goods. As the cost to the individual of checking the value of each exchange increased (time, requirement of specialist knowledge etc) authorities charged with providing assurance to whole societies over the quality of foods they purchased came into being.

These methods of assurance certainly developed sophistication and eventually looked to the Universities to provide scientific support for the methods of assurance employed, but the policing of the process is/ and always was dependent upon the vigilance of the ordinary person, supported by specialists working outside of academia.

Trades description legislation and product assurance are now (within Europe at least) universally applied to all legally traded goods. In the field of services however there has been a huge degree of retrenchment in recent decades and while unprovable claims for products are illegal, unprovable claims for services are frequently unchallenged, particularly where some semblance of ‘belief’ lays behind the service offered. Reiki, Homeopathy and a whole raft of crank services are traded in circumstances where quantitative assurance is impossible to deliver. It seems to me that this is the ‘market’ in which Wikipedia ‘trades’, where its ultimate defence against being tested for ‘truthfulness’ is founded on ‘belief’, and belief (in the crowd sourcing paradigm) has to be treated as inviolable. Whether Wikipedia is a cult is perhaps moot, it certainly is bordering upon becoming a religion and like most religions making itself immune to the everyday tests of truthfulness. It’s a wonderful, if horrific, irony that the project to encapsulate the sum of all human knowledge should actually be a force that inhibits the growth of the knowledge.

A.virosa

Welcome to the review Mr Virosa A very helpful analysis, if I may say. If only all our first time posters could be so constructive!

Just yesterday there was a news report of an Indian language radio station in the UK being successfully investigated with improperly advertising faith healing, where the argument was essentially that the advertising was or had the potential to prey upon the vulnerable. The fact that someone was found to part with a considerable sum of money in return for prayers was used to bump the case up to OFCOM from the ASA.

It would seem that the regulatory institutions are capable of dealing with it in principle (I rather like the analogy of a trading standards for information). However, it seems that they felt the need to weasel out of challenging faith into "preying on the vulnerable".

Of course, Wikipedia is a far more amorphous concept to do battle with. It is that shapelessness of the problem that makes it so difficult for those who divine the problem and then understand it as obvious to transfer that insight to others. Myself, I think I've been pretty consistent that Wikipedia's "it's not our fault you can't rely on us, sort yourself out" approach is indeed preying on the vulnerable.

Welcome to WR, Avirosa. More posts like this please.

The straightforward answer to this question is another question; "establish the truth better" about what? Different kinds of facts and truths are better arrived at through different kinds of processes. Certainly, if I wanted to know the number of jelly beans in a jar, asking a thousand people and taking the average would work very well. But notice that even in this case there is a need for an efficient aggregator of information (in this simple example, somebody's got to take the average). If such efficient aggregators don't exist, then you don't get the truth but a whole lot of bias.

In relation to Wikipedia: do you really think it has "efficient" ways of aggregating all the "information" that gets inputed into it? Nope.

Very well said. You have much more patience than I.

Aggregation is irrelevant. As I argued http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/07/truth-in-numbers.html , people do not edit Wikipedia for free. They edit Wikipedia to get their agenda across - pedophilia, nationalistic bias, crank theories, whatever. No one cares about the truth enough (though they care a bit) to edit Wikipedia with the truth. The result is plain to see.

Now if you paid someone to establish the truth, then they have the right kind of incentive, namely money. Then they will write the truth.

Some thoughts about this from a philosopher (and Wikipedia editor) Michalal Huemer.




N.B. Huemer is a libertarian.

but we don't reach the end product until the end of infinity, or whatever those math types would say, right? the current product has lots of rubbish, but its not all rubbish. and under the current model, it will have more rubbish in 10 years, and more good content as well. but most of what is written everywhere is rubbish, its ultimately up to the reader to learn how to tell the difference.

while wikipedia claims they allow "anyone to edit," this is not really true depending how you look at it. it is limited to one those who are (semi?) literate, who have access to a computer and the internet, and those who would actually choose to edit. i admit that is still a huge pool, while a small percentage of the world's population. taking that group, everyone gets a free shot at editing, unless they become so disruptive that they get banned. if no one could ever get banned, would that be more of a true libertarian model? we have regulation, but its extremely weak regulation. i suppose that is as close to libertarianism as the real world gets?

I wonder if there's anyone who regularly reads Wikipedia, but doesn't regularly edit it, about whom that statement isn't true.

Every few months I'll check on Wikipedia articles about tax topics, like [[Earned Income Tax Credit]], and invariably there are always inaccuracies to correct. Generally the inaccuracies are due to either 1) someone misreading a news article or other source; or 2) someone relying on a news article or similar source which misunderstood something in the first place.

Totally. It's too bad there's not some sort of encyclopedia, or something.

Mostly illiterate as far as I can judge.

Money is not the only good sort of incentive, and it can be as rotten as any other incentive.
Your claim that the well known problems on Wikipedia are evidence that no one cares about truth is laughable. Whether or not the problems on Wikipedia are sufficient to consider it an ill-advised project is open for debate, but calling into question the motivation of all project members is dishonest.

The contention is not: ‘no one cares’, the contention is: ‘no one cares enough [to effect change]’. We could add a sophistication to the contention by saying that, there is a small cadre of those who: ‘do care enough’, but who lack the collective power to effect change. But really that would be a conceit, the system of Wikipedia ensures that only those who either care nothing [for the truth] or who only care a little, are able to prosper within the system. Of course any Wikipedia participant may claim that they care ‘deeply’, [about the truth], but if the very fact of their participation results in the continued function of Wikipedia as an ‘obfuscation engine’, then their claim is reasonably judged as dubious.

Wikipedia, like much of the notional Web2 ‘project’, is little more than a tourney ground for propagandists, where the thuggish competition concerns not the achievement of the triumph of virtue (neither intellectual nor knightly), but the capture of territory and the shaping of meaning within that territory. Some of the warriors on the field (we might smugly assert that WR is a sanctuary to some) may well have ‘truth or die’ on their standards but the nature of propagandism is that it doesn’t allow a value for overarching ‘truth’. Propaganda values obfuscation as much as it values partial presentation of the truth, and Wikipedia is exquisitely structured to promote obfuscation, in the face of which the only effective opposition to a prevailing propogandism ( either on a single article or across a cabalistic string) is contra propaganda.

To be a WP player, one has to be either motivated to capture territory (set operant paradigms for articles, categories and projects, or simply scent mark an area with offensive, obscurist or asocial text/content), and/or engage in meaning shaping. Beyond that all else is mere tactics. I actually applaud the efforts of some of Wikipedia's propagada warriors because IMO, (whatever their motivation) there is some propaganda that is so harmful that it must be challenged. But I've no illusions about these propaganda wars being anything to do with 'truth', or even basic acuracy, at best it's a question of harm reduction.

A.virosa

I am challenging this notion that the number who care is so small as to be insignificant. What you are saying may well be true if you are only referring to Career Wikipedians, and other people who draw the attention of a review board like this one, however there are many people who contribute top notch articles in areas that they are qualified to do so, and in topics where only a nutjob would bother creating a controversy around the topic. Often there is a little debate about key aspects, however the concept of compromise is feasible.
Maybe I am overestimating this, and it would be nice to see stats or effective debate on the topic; my guess is that the greater percentage of the encyclopedia is made up of really mundane content which comes pretty damn close to 'truth'.
IMO, the "success" of Wikipedia in the real world, ignoring Google rankings, is in having that mundane content about a very broad set of topics. Attempts to portray Wikipedia as a cesspool of agenda-driven propagandists and players are not going to be received very well as that disregard what the typical viewer, and editor, goes to Wikipedia for.

And, I often see positive changes on Wikipedia. Sometimes it is ahead of the game, but often it is not, and it is the latter that is focused on here. Sometimes the change process is two step forward and one back, but the collective direction is improving roughly in step with the demand for improvement.

Fair enough. Wikipedia provides a convenient and relatively accurate resource on the mundane topics. I would further acknowledge that many of Wikipedia's most agenda-driven propagandists put in a substantial amount of work on maintaining the accuracy of the mundane topics, as a way of "paying their dues" and earning the right to control content on a handful of propaganda topics. Perhaps Wikipedia could be salvaged by a system where all controversial topics are tagged, and the reader is warned that the content of those articles is shaped by the opinion of the editors (who should preferably be named.) Of course, the thrill for the perpetrators is largely defined by being given the opportunity to present their particular POV as authoritative, on a par with all those articles about geography and Pokemon figures.