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Before cryptocurrencies, we believed we needed a central authority to create money, too. We currently have to trust arbiters of fact because we have no systema
by Jeff_Brown 7y ago
Before cryptocurrencies, we believed we needed a central authority to create money, too.
We currently have to trust arbiters of fact because we have no systematic way of evaluating the work of journalists, nor of aggregating the distibuted verification efforts that millions of people perform daily. If that work were easily navigable, our collective intelligence might improve.
In a previous comment[1] I suggest a software solution. I've already written part of it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664084
- headmelted 7y agoI had a read at this but I’m not sure how reliable consensus is for something that is ultimately unprovable. With cryptocurrency I have mathematically provable truths to rely on. With consensus I’m relying on collective opinion. If something sounds believable to most people it would be accepted as true by any such mechanism. If the last four years have taught us anything, it’s that this is a terrifying prospect.
- Jeff_Brown 7y agoI'm not proposing a consensus mechanism. Rather, a mechanism that allows anybody to encode anything, and anybody else to run searches over it, systematically. It would make it easier to inspect the data behind anybody's opinions, and thereby, I hope, make us collectively smarter. Yes, systems to encode and query data already exist, but what they can encode is limited, and the way to encode or search for it is difficult. It's hard to think of information that Hode cannot encode, and the way of getting data into or out of it is extremely close to ordinary natural language.