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If I were to revise your summary, I would say that a marqt is a living online poll – you can vote on something today, but if you change your mind later, you can

If I were to revise your summary, I would say that a marqt is a living online poll – you can vote on something today, but if you change your mind later, you can change your vote. I'm not sure what you mean by incentivizing pollsters and respondents to game the results, but let me take a crack at what I imagine you're thinking about (please let me know if I'm totally off). Let's consider a scenario. Person X has a lot of influence, and so they tell everyone they know to marq their marqt true. In a world where the marqt has enough liquidity, there would potentially be a person Y that disagrees and also has influence, telling their followers to marq it false. And along the way people would add remarqs, allowing new voters to discern the nuance and existing voters to change their vote if they see a compelling enough reason why. The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is, which strengthens the validity of the number, which creates value, and whoever is responsible for creating that value should be rewarded, along with everyone else that voted and commented and participated in that creation of value. > But [facts] are objectively verifiable with evidence, not supposition or rhetoric. I would say everything is fair game. Evidence can be subjective too. Rhetoric can be quite convincing, especially if you have influence and repeat it over and over and others continue echoing it.

spdustin 3y ago
Evidence can be selective, yes, but by definition it is objective. Your last statement seems to be in opposition to your premise, because you’ve stated plainly how effective influence can be in creating an echo chamber, and “truth” then becomes merely a subjective construct, built within that chamber and becoming a constituent part of its world view. > The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is You’re describing the “wisdom of the crowd.” The scenario you’ve posited isn’t a version of the “wisdom of the crowd,” however. Rather, it seems to be a simple battle of resources. A popularity contest, if you will. Whoever has more “charisma capital” wins, because if the influence of a leader is wielded successfully, the executive function of the followers is short-circuited. History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. It becomes “us vs. them”, and objectivity goes out the window I’m favor of polarity. The “wisdom of the crowd” absolutely depends on a probabilistic, noisy distribution of individual cognition. When rhetoric and influence are at play in a battle of “true or not true”, the cognitive expression of each individual is no longer a probabilistic distribution of statistical noise; it’s a coin toss, with the more influential participants supplying their own, weighted coin to their followers. I feel like, as with most systems that rely on a group of individual cognitive perspectives and abilities, incentive or reward of any kind disqualifies that system from adhering to the vision you seem to have. I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd.
- arthurhur 3y ago
  > I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd. Well, you are clearly correct that five users does not represent the wisdom of the crowd! When I submitted this post, I had different expectations about what the response would be. I figured it would be more trollish or techish and less about deep epistemological debates over definitions of truth, but I'm still enjoying this! Okay, let's start with the objectivity of evidence. I think you're right – evidence may be objective, but evidence must be interpreted by individuals, and individuals may interpret evidence differently, thereby making the interpretation of evidence subjective. You might look up at the sky and say, "It is bright," but for someone that is blind, it is not bright. > History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. Of course I agree, and the whole reason why I wanted to build the app. The hive mind clearly gets it wrong so many times. My premise is that everyone believes that their version of truth is The Truth. In other words, they believe their subjective truth is objective truth. And I think the best way to settle everyone's opinions of what they believe is true is to essentially put it to a vote. And people have a hard time admitting when they were wrong, whether it's because of ego or what-have-you. But numbers don't lie. It's something that everyone can still agree on. If the hive is wrong, it is only in hindsight, because a majority was clearly convinced something was true, and the fact that we live in the digital age means that the time it takes for something to go from true to false (or vice versa) is becoming increasingly narrow, meaning it's more important than ever to keep a record of truth over time, so we have an accurate representation of history to learn from.

spdustin 3y ago

Evidence can be selective, yes, but by definition it is objective. Your last statement seems to be in opposition to your premise, because you’ve stated plainly how effective influence can be in creating an echo chamber, and “truth” then becomes merely a subjective construct, built within that chamber and becoming a constituent part of its world view. > The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is You’re describing the “wisdom of the crowd.” The scenario you’ve posited isn’t a version of the “wisdom of the crowd,” however. Rather, it seems to be a simple battle of resources. A popularity contest, if you will. Whoever has more “charisma capital” wins, because if the influence of a leader is wielded successfully, the executive function of the followers is short-circuited. History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. It becomes “us vs. them”, and objectivity goes out the window I’m favor of polarity. The “wisdom of the crowd” absolutely depends on a probabilistic, noisy distribution of individual cognition. When rhetoric and influence are at play in a battle of “true or not true”, the cognitive expression of each individual is no longer a probabilistic distribution of statistical noise; it’s a coin toss, with the more influential participants supplying their own, weighted coin to their followers. I feel like, as with most systems that rely on a group of individual cognitive perspectives and abilities, incentive or reward of any kind disqualifies that system from adhering to the vision you seem to have. I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd.

arthurhur 3y ago
> I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd. Well, you are clearly correct that five users does not represent the wisdom of the crowd! When I submitted this post, I had different expectations about what the response would be. I figured it would be more trollish or techish and less about deep epistemological debates over definitions of truth, but I'm still enjoying this! Okay, let's start with the objectivity of evidence. I think you're right – evidence may be objective, but evidence must be interpreted by individuals, and individuals may interpret evidence differently, thereby making the interpretation of evidence subjective. You might look up at the sky and say, "It is bright," but for someone that is blind, it is not bright. > History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. Of course I agree, and the whole reason why I wanted to build the app. The hive mind clearly gets it wrong so many times. My premise is that everyone believes that their version of truth is The Truth. In other words, they believe their subjective truth is objective truth. And I think the best way to settle everyone's opinions of what they believe is true is to essentially put it to a vote. And people have a hard time admitting when they were wrong, whether it's because of ego or what-have-you. But numbers don't lie. It's something that everyone can still agree on. If the hive is wrong, it is only in hindsight, because a majority was clearly convinced something was true, and the fact that we live in the digital age means that the time it takes for something to go from true to false (or vice versa) is becoming increasingly narrow, meaning it's more important than ever to keep a record of truth over time, so we have an accurate representation of history to learn from.