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Not really. The whole point of down and upvoting the sources is because the sources themselves might be erroneous. Without an infinite cascade of the process I
by endisneigh 5y ago
Not really. The whole point of down and upvoting the sources is because the sources themselves might be erroneous. Without an infinite cascade of the process I described, relying on down and upvoting of specific claims is more tractable.
In other words, you might have a claim that's supported by an otherwise bad website, but the bad website actually has a morsel of legitimately factual evidence there. It would be up to the readers of the claim and sources to actually verify whether or not the underlying supporting evidence is true.
The other reason to do this is to build a corpus of "truth." Meta and Google are clearly capable of this, but choose not to do it for reasons.
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This is why it's important that the claim itself is not voted on, but rather the source. Otherwise brigading will happen (it can obviously still happen, but is less of a problem in face of some hypothetical pure truth).
I'd also add that inherently the problem of "determining the truth" requires consensus. What I'm proposing is simply a way to make said consensus be gathered transparently. Obviously there's no oracle of truth out there for us to consult and some variant of what I'm describing is inherently necessary.
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- nradov 5y agoNo that would never work. The flat earthers will all upvote each other's bullshit. And you are missing a fundamental concept in that for most fields of science there are very few objective facts or proven truths. If I write a post on Newtonian physics should I be "fact checked" for misinformation if I fail to state that it's only an approximation and doesn't always give correct answers? It used to be an accepted "fact" in medicine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Except that fact turned out to be wrong. How would Drs. Warren and Marshall have rated under your scheme? https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...
- endisneigh 5y agoyour example makes no sense - flat earthers are a minority, the cited claims would ultimately receive more down than upvotes. also, the point of the votes is to help readers understand things themselves.
- nradov 5y agoNo that makes no sense. Other people just ignore the flat earth bullshit, they don't even vote. There's no point to what you're proposing.
- endisneigh 5y agoOK, nice discussion.