Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

Reputation is key.

Having studied game theory for systems of agents producing results and content, I feel fairly confident in this conclusion: the only reliable long-term design to incentivize beneficient, truthful behavior involves assigning good reputation in return for good behavior, and assigning future rewards/attention based on past reputation.

Based on this, I postulate that any good news feed algorithm must use reputation scores based on past history to choose what to believe and what to show when a new story comes out. Humans of course do this instinctively, which many modern news organizations will have discovered too late as they sell out their integrity, accuracy, and priorities.

Remember what von Neumann said about arithmetic attempts to generate random numbers? Similarly, anyone who attempts to algorithmically determine "truth" based on instantaneous metrics is living in a state of sin.

Think back to the US election you can't just "decide" that the story of thousands of Ohio ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton was true. http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/

You can't just decide that the story of a protester with a rape Melania was true http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-...

You can't just decide for yourself that climate change isn't true.

The consequences of people deciding for themselves would be globally disastrous.

The preoccupation with objective truth is a relatively recent notion, and only of interest to what appears to be a minority of the population. The rest are happy to have their biases confirmed, it doesn't much matter whether it's true.

The difference between now and 30 years ago, is that now if someone actually cares about getting to the bottom of something, the tools for doing so are much more accessible, making the ongoing prevalence of bullshit that much more frustrating. We're not getting any stupider, but the gap between the informed and the disinformed or uninformed has widened substantially.

Even here on HN, when it comes to the handful of subjects I'm knowledgable in, it's pretty common to see some masterclass bullshitting holding top spot in a thread.

We do pay (indirectly) pay Facebook and Google and we do not get this filtering service at all.

Education is a non-solved problem, and you may as well say "society will fix it", to get a better approximation of what Education entails.

Education on a subject is influenced and affected by

1) Student health, motivation, previous education, available time, availble security, water, electricity, nutrition, parental nutrition, parental education, stability, age, and so on.

2) Education and subject matter is affected by development of the country, politics of the country, cultural importance of the subject, job demands, payment/funds available for education, structure of educational systems and more.

So in other words, its not "fixable".

Do note, that if you developed a way to transpose both information and meaning and expertise, a la matrix, into someones brain directly - you would not only "solve" education, but you would also be able to program legions of soldiers/attackers/drones with the same technology.