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There could be a difference between a human-manipulated restaurant which still has some real business and a totally fake restaurant which can be manipulated how

There could be a difference between a human-manipulated restaurant which still has some real business and a totally fake restaurant which can be manipulated however you like. Thinking along the lines of something I read on HN recently, using Benford's Law[1] to catch fraud in accounting data - the essential principle is that fraudsters are constrained by some unmassagable numbers, like the monthy total or some important transactions, so the figures they do change end up altering the overall distribution in some unrealistic way. But if you can generate your own dataset (and make sure it follows Bendford's), that fraud marker disappears. TripAdvisor might be able to detect when your restaurant is behaving very different to how it's expected to, based on some past or present data - but there's less indication something has gone wrong if you just create a new restaurant out of thin air that behaves totally consistently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Or their fraud detection is just not very good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  But the question wasn't "why did TripAdvisor not catch this restaurant?", it was "why might a good fraud detection system not catch this restaurant?", because an answer to the second question is required for TripAdvisor to be able to claim that its system is any good.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    > because an answer to the second question is required for TripAdvisor to be able to claim that its system is any good Not really, the expectation of any sort of honesty in public communications, be it from the government, corporations, or individuals, is a thing of the past.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      >is a thing of the past. No, governments, corporations, and people lied just as much in the past. It's just more transparent to see these days.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        The “no” isn't warranted, because the grandparent didn't say honesty which previously existed had eroded, but that the expectation of honesty had eroded. Consistent dishonesty with that becoming more transparent is one explanation of that observed effect, not a refutation of it.
        mistermann 9y ago
        I'd also disagree quite vigorously that dishonesty is perfectly constant over the last 50 years as well. You don't have to go that far back to find a time where most politicians were generally concerned with the welfare of citizens, above all other things. Now, for whatever reason, that seems to be a secondary (at best) goal on both sides of the aisle.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > You don't have to go that far back to find a time where most politicians were generally concerned with the welfare of citizens, above all other things. It's really hard to establish what people in either the present or the past value above all other things, but certainly the idea that political science might be primarily self-interested actors and that those devoted above all to the public interest were notable exceptions is ancient rather than novel.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

Or their fraud detection is just not very good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

ivanbakel 9y ago
But the question wasn't "why did TripAdvisor not catch this restaurant?", it was "why might a good fraud detection system not catch this restaurant?", because an answer to the second question is required for TripAdvisor to be able to claim that its system is any good.
- mistermann 9y ago
  > because an answer to the second question is required for TripAdvisor to be able to claim that its system is any good Not really, the expectation of any sort of honesty in public communications, be it from the government, corporations, or individuals, is a thing of the past.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    >is a thing of the past. No, governments, corporations, and people lied just as much in the past. It's just more transparent to see these days.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      The “no” isn't warranted, because the grandparent didn't say honesty which previously existed had eroded, but that the expectation of honesty had eroded. Consistent dishonesty with that becoming more transparent is one explanation of that observed effect, not a refutation of it.
      - mistermann 9y ago
        I'd also disagree quite vigorously that dishonesty is perfectly constant over the last 50 years as well. You don't have to go that far back to find a time where most politicians were generally concerned with the welfare of citizens, above all other things. Now, for whatever reason, that seems to be a secondary (at best) goal on both sides of the aisle.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > You don't have to go that far back to find a time where most politicians were generally concerned with the welfare of citizens, above all other things. It's really hard to establish what people in either the present or the past value above all other things, but certainly the idea that political science might be primarily self-interested actors and that those devoted above all to the public interest were notable exceptions is ancient rather than novel.