6 ms·

Goodhart's law: if you rely on a social signal to tell you what's good, you'll break that signal. Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text.

Goodhart's law: if you rely on a social signal to tell you what's good, you'll break that signal. Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun?

GlumWoodpecker 4y ago
The scary part is that this doesn't seem too far off, with the current proliferation of large language models like the GPTs..
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Parent was definitely not referring to these at all /s
  - perihelions 4y ago
    (I ninja-edited my comment in the first minute; the parent might have responded to a less clear version, since they posted at +3 minutes. I added "AI" in a revision).
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      OK, sounds reasonable. I didn't see the edit either, was just thinking about the myriad of LLM articles on the front page recently.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      You sound way too human to be an AI then
    - dang 4y ago
      If you want to, you can always set 'delay' in your profile to the number of minutes (up to 10) that you would like your comments to be visible only to you. This puts the stealth back in stealth editing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html I rely heavily on this because it's somehow only after the comment is 'real' (i.e. staring back at me from a real HN thread) that I notice most of the edits I want to make.
  - Biganon 4y ago
    [flagged]
siva7 4y ago
Who says this isn't already happening?
- echelon 4y ago
  Reddit better hold their IPO soon or they'll get caught up in this. Pretty soon there will be dozens of different GPT/LLM-powered Reddit spam bots on Github. Some of them no doubt for political trolling. [1] Phone, then ID-based verification is a stop gap, but IDV services will have to spin up to support the mass volume of verifying all humans. [1] I kind of want to do this from an innocent / artistic perspective myself. Perhaps a bot that responds with a bunch of rhetorical questions or onomatopoeia. Then I'd scale it to the point people start noticing and feeling weirded out by it. "Is this the new Gen Alpha lingo?" Alas, I have too many other AI projects.
  - siva7 4y ago
    The Anti-AI\GPT-Detection will soon be a multi-billion dollar industry
    - _cenw 4y ago
      And it'll silently remove your real posts too, faster than the horrible moderation on reddit ever could!
- ChrisKnott 4y ago
  I just tried to find a FOSS tool for converting MS Outlook .pst file to .mbox. I first tried Google; the results are dominating by commercial crap. Then I tried the "google reddit" trick to try and find some real people's opinions... but look at all the blatantly bullshit comments on this Reddit thread; https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/ae4cdg/good_pst_to_mbox_converter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/ae4cdg/good_ps... --- (if anyone is wondering, the best option for Windows is to use 'readpst' command via WSL. Comes in the 'pst-utils' package).
  - siva7 4y ago
einpoklum 4y ago
Your comment is the best. It's the real deal!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ryan69howard 4y ago
  This comment summarizes it best. We need more discussion like this!
s9w 4y ago
[dead]
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun? Definitely already the case, you really think Rust and SQLite would get more than a couple of upvotes otherwise? :D
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Then how do you explain the Go hype HN went through just before the current rust hype? Where "[ordinary tool] in Go" was the formula for upvotes. Then again, maybe Google had some mandatory HN time for their employees, that would be enough to explain that :D
klabb3 4y ago
Content based auto moderation has been shitty since it’s inception. I don’t like that GPT will cause the biggest flood of shit mankind has ever seen, but I am happy that it will kill these flawed ideas about policing. The obvious problem is we don’t have any great alternatives. We have captcha, and we can look at behavior and source data (IP), and of course everyone’s favorite fingerprinting. To make matters worse: abuse, spam and fraud prevention lives in the same security-by-obscurity paradigm that cyber security lived in for decades before “we” collectively gave up on it, and decided that openness is better. People would laugh at you to suggest abuse tech should be open (“you’d just help the spammers”). I tried to find whether academia has taken a stab at these problems but came up pretty much empty handed. Hopefully I’m just bad at searching. I truly don’t get why people aren’t looking at these issues seriously and systematically. In the medium term, I’m worried that we’ll not address the systemic threats, and continue to throw ID checks, heuristics and ML at the wall, enjoying the short lived successes when some classifier works for a month before it’s defeated. The reason this is concerning is that we will be neck deep in crap (think SEO blogspam and recipe sites but for everything) which will be disorienting for long enough to erode a lot of trust that we could really use right now.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >The obvious problem is we don’t have any great alternatives. There's always identity based network of trust. Several other members vouch for new people to be included.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    Maybe even push that a level higher and have org to org vouching as well (so it can scale and reputation propagates social bubbles.) Bootstrapping remains somewhat an issue.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      One somewhat popular solution for bootstrapping is to allow people to buy in, paired with quickly banning those members in cases of rule violation. It's by no means perfect, but it puts a real price on abuse and thus reduces it a lot
robertlagrant 4y ago
Maybe we need a social network based on physical exchange of trust.
- api 4y ago
  That’s mostly what the person to person phone system was.
groestl 4y ago
Next keyword: market of lemons. If you can't rely on said signals anymore, you must treat every item the same (untrusted), which drives out the legitimate players from the market. We have a lot of lemon markets, we can probably infer from them what the social result will be..
Nowado 4y ago
You can do it already. It's a normal order for a copywriter, nobody will bat an eye when you post an offer. It costs cents/dollars per 1000 words instead of fraction of a cent, but that's not exactly outside of reach of a funded startup.
charlieyu1 4y ago
I hope it breaks the current system of requiring references in job search as well
- paulcole 4y ago
  This system is already essentially broken. Either you worked at a large business that only gives out dates of employment and job title by policy or you are in complete control of who the hiring company talks to. The first time you don’t get a job because of a reference you gave you learn a lesson. If it ever happens again, it’s on you.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    What's really an alternative. At least where I live, a multi-year gap in your CV is going to set off more red flags than an honest "It didn't work out between us".
    - paulcole 4y ago
      Don’t give them your boss’s name. Give them a coworker’s name. Give them a friend’s name and have them lie for you. If a company is proactively contacting people you don’t give them contact information for, that’s not requiring references — which is the process I (and the comment I replied to) was talking about. If a company knows where you’ve worked, they can contact them if they want.
      - moneywoes 4y ago
        What’s the solution for the latter point you mentioned? If they proactively contact someone as part of their verification?
        paulcole 4y ago
        Then you’re fucked if they check and the reference is bad and they care. Either you take your chances, leave it as a gap in your resume, or you make something up. In the past, I’ve extended the time I was at either the company before/after and then leave the one in the middle off. Smaller gap is easier to explain and you just need a coworker at the one you stretched to cover for you - or have it be somebody who wasn’t there during the time you added. You can also just say you did the “freelance” thing and then talk about whatever you want. I’ve also just been 100% honest and said, “I didn’t like this job and left on bad terms. I’d rather you not contact them.” Just have to read the situation and make your best guess as to what is going to get you the job.
is_true 4y ago
I'm sure it's already happening in the "books" threads
vidarh 4y ago
We'll be back to the 1990's "software agents" craze take two: Needing AI driven agents that seek out and index and evaluate content on our behalf, and seek to negotiate with each other for recommendations with currency being trust based on how "your" agent evaluated prior results. I'm hoping to put an AI between me and my e-mail inbox this weekend (I had ChatGPT write most of the code; it's not much); not fully automated, but evaluating and summarising and categorising. I might extend that to e.g. give me an "algorithm" for my Mastodon timeline (despite all of the people insisting on reverse chronological, I'm at a few hundred people I follow and already can't keep up), and a number of other sites I visit. For most of these things latency does not matter, so e.g. putting them through llama.cpp rather than something faster is fine, and precision isn't critical (I won't trust it to automatically reply or automatically reject anything, but prioritisation an categorisation where missteps won't have any critical impact.
Alex3917 4y ago
> We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments You're forgetting the millions of additional comments that will be written by humans to trick the AI into promoting their content. Even worse, currently if you ask Chat GPT to write you some code, it will make up an API endpoint that doesn't exist and then make up a URL that doesn't exist where you can register for an API key. People are already registering these domains, and parking fake sites on them to scam people. ChatGPT is creating a huge market for creating fake companies to match the fake information it's generating. The biggest risk may not be people using AI-generated comments to promote their own repos, but rather registering new repos to match the fake ones that the AI is already promoting.
- permo-w 4y ago
  I feel like you’re overstating this as a long term issue. sure it’s a problem now, but realistically how long before code hallucinations are patched out?
  - ptato 4y ago
    Nobody knows.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      undoubtedly not long
  - lanternfish 4y ago
    The black box nature of the model means this isn't something you can really 'patch out'. It's a byproduct of the way the system processes data - they'll get less frequent with targeted fine tuning and improved model power, but there's no easy solve.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      this is clearly untrue. it’s an input, a black box, then an output. openai have 100% control over the output. they may not be able to directly control what comes out of the black box, but a) they can tune the model, and they undoubtedly will, and b) they can control what comes after the black box. they can—for example—simply block urls
dorian-graph 4y ago
That's what Product Hunt has felt like for a long time—and LinkedIn too.
rwallace 4y ago
This is the first time I've ever posted an XKCD link here, but I think the occasion calls for it. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
precompute 4y ago
Now is the time to cultivate friendships and to make networks that persist online, and are verified via irl meetups / contacts. People who pull that off now will be in much, much better shape in the future. GPT's output is apparent to a discernible eye right now, but according to the power law, it won't take much "novel" input to train upon to make that discernment useless. Then, the only internet community that could be dependably reliable would be your group of irl verified people.
- password4321 4y ago
  I would phrase it more as we're pretty much out of time to have initiated online-only relationships.
  - precompute 4y ago
    Agreed. It's very difficult now to build communities that have lasting impact, because everyone's saturated with info as-is. Contributions to niche communities now rely on a societal "outsider" status, which means there's basically a couple of people that contribute heavily and very few onlookers. Everything else is either gamified or comes from video games / gambling. On the bright side, it's THE time to cultivate close friendships and to seek like-minded people. The entire phenomenon of popular attention hugging a community to death does not exist any longer. You can now have OG members persisting with notions for a long time and building a shared mythos with a small group of friends, because information is now more accessible than ever. Obviously, most people aren't part of these communities. The people that are "drifting" alone are given to wasting their time on charismatic attention-seekers that talk a big game (twitch/e-celebs) but deliver nothing of value. So there's also room in the market for charismatic folk with some technical expertise to rally people to their cause, but only very briefly. This is because the number of people half-committing and then jumping ship is likely the highest it's ever been. Also, platforms have now resorted to paying people to stay on their platform (youtube / tiktok / sponsorships / twitch boosting streamers / etc.) to combat occasional ennui, ironically exacerbating the issue.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Best methods for that? Local meetups?
greesil 4y ago
How do you know we aren't already there?
soheil 4y ago
Stop making up laws. You'll do much more good dismantling existing ones. And non-social signals like # of commits, # of pull requests cannot be faked? We need signals among the noise. Sometimes signals are noise we just need to calibrate.
wpietri 4y ago
I mean, there have always been shills. What's changing now is the cost of shilling is dropping from dollars per comment to fractions of a cent. Troll farms used to be a lot of work to put together, but soon they'll be aaS. Those of us who are careful internet readers have spent years developing good heuristics to use textual clues to tell us about the person behind the text. Are they smart? Are they sincere? Are they honest? Are they commenting in good faith? Those skills will soon be obsolete. The folks at OpenAI, who are nominally on a mission to make sure AI "benefits all of humanity", have condemned us to a life sentence of fending off high-volume, high-quality bullshit. Bullshit that they are actively working to make harder to detect. And I think the first victims of that will be internet forums where text is the main signal, places like this and Reddit.
vehemenz 4y ago
Maybe more appropriately, Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

GlumWoodpecker 4y ago

The scary part is that this doesn't seem too far off, with the current proliferation of large language models like the GPTs..

rzzzt 4y ago
Parent was definitely not referring to these at all /s
- perihelions 4y ago
  (I ninja-edited my comment in the first minute; the parent might have responded to a less clear version, since they posted at +3 minutes. I added "AI" in a revision).
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    OK, sounds reasonable. I didn't see the edit either, was just thinking about the myriad of LLM articles on the front page recently.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    You sound way too human to be an AI then
  - dang 4y ago
    If you want to, you can always set 'delay' in your profile to the number of minutes (up to 10) that you would like your comments to be visible only to you. This puts the stealth back in stealth editing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html I rely heavily on this because it's somehow only after the comment is 'real' (i.e. staring back at me from a real HN thread) that I notice most of the edits I want to make.
- Biganon 4y ago
  [flagged]

siva7 4y ago

Who says this isn't already happening?

echelon 4y ago
Reddit better hold their IPO soon or they'll get caught up in this. Pretty soon there will be dozens of different GPT/LLM-powered Reddit spam bots on Github. Some of them no doubt for political trolling. [1] Phone, then ID-based verification is a stop gap, but IDV services will have to spin up to support the mass volume of verifying all humans. [1] I kind of want to do this from an innocent / artistic perspective myself. Perhaps a bot that responds with a bunch of rhetorical questions or onomatopoeia. Then I'd scale it to the point people start noticing and feeling weirded out by it. "Is this the new Gen Alpha lingo?" Alas, I have too many other AI projects.
- siva7 4y ago
  The Anti-AI\GPT-Detection will soon be a multi-billion dollar industry
  - _cenw 4y ago
    And it'll silently remove your real posts too, faster than the horrible moderation on reddit ever could!
ChrisKnott 4y ago
I just tried to find a FOSS tool for converting MS Outlook .pst file to .mbox. I first tried Google; the results are dominating by commercial crap. Then I tried the "google reddit" trick to try and find some real people's opinions... but look at all the blatantly bullshit comments on this Reddit thread; https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/ae4cdg/good_pst_to_mbox_converter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/ae4cdg/good_ps... --- (if anyone is wondering, the best option for Windows is to use 'readpst' command via WSL. Comes in the 'pst-utils' package).
- siva7 4y ago

einpoklum 4y ago

Your comment is the best. It's the real deal!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ryan69howard 4y ago
This comment summarizes it best. We need more discussion like this!

s9w 4y ago

[dead]

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun? Definitely already the case, you really think Rust and SQLite would get more than a couple of upvotes otherwise? :D

wongarsu 4y ago
Then how do you explain the Go hype HN went through just before the current rust hype? Where "[ordinary tool] in Go" was the formula for upvotes. Then again, maybe Google had some mandatory HN time for their employees, that would be enough to explain that :D

klabb3 4y ago

Content based auto moderation has been shitty since it’s inception. I don’t like that GPT will cause the biggest flood of shit mankind has ever seen, but I am happy that it will kill these flawed ideas about policing. The obvious problem is we don’t have any great alternatives. We have captcha, and we can look at behavior and source data (IP), and of course everyone’s favorite fingerprinting. To make matters worse: abuse, spam and fraud prevention lives in the same security-by-obscurity paradigm that cyber security lived in for decades before “we” collectively gave up on it, and decided that openness is better. People would laugh at you to suggest abuse tech should be open (“you’d just help the spammers”). I tried to find whether academia has taken a stab at these problems but came up pretty much empty handed. Hopefully I’m just bad at searching. I truly don’t get why people aren’t looking at these issues seriously and systematically. In the medium term, I’m worried that we’ll not address the systemic threats, and continue to throw ID checks, heuristics and ML at the wall, enjoying the short lived successes when some classifier works for a month before it’s defeated. The reason this is concerning is that we will be neck deep in crap (think SEO blogspam and recipe sites but for everything) which will be disorienting for long enough to erode a lot of trust that we could really use right now.

coldtea 4y ago
>The obvious problem is we don’t have any great alternatives. There's always identity based network of trust. Several other members vouch for new people to be included.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Maybe even push that a level higher and have org to org vouching as well (so it can scale and reputation propagates social bubbles.) Bootstrapping remains somewhat an issue.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    One somewhat popular solution for bootstrapping is to allow people to buy in, paired with quickly banning those members in cases of rule violation. It's by no means perfect, but it puts a real price on abuse and thus reduces it a lot

robertlagrant 4y ago

Maybe we need a social network based on physical exchange of trust.

api 4y ago
That’s mostly what the person to person phone system was.

groestl 4y ago

Next keyword: market of lemons. If you can't rely on said signals anymore, you must treat every item the same (untrusted), which drives out the legitimate players from the market. We have a lot of lemon markets, we can probably infer from them what the social result will be..

Nowado 4y ago

You can do it already. It's a normal order for a copywriter, nobody will bat an eye when you post an offer. It costs cents/dollars per 1000 words instead of fraction of a cent, but that's not exactly outside of reach of a funded startup.

charlieyu1 4y ago

I hope it breaks the current system of requiring references in job search as well

paulcole 4y ago
This system is already essentially broken. Either you worked at a large business that only gives out dates of employment and job title by policy or you are in complete control of who the hiring company talks to. The first time you don’t get a job because of a reference you gave you learn a lesson. If it ever happens again, it’s on you.
- _cenw 4y ago
  What's really an alternative. At least where I live, a multi-year gap in your CV is going to set off more red flags than an honest "It didn't work out between us".
  - paulcole 4y ago
    Don’t give them your boss’s name. Give them a coworker’s name. Give them a friend’s name and have them lie for you. If a company is proactively contacting people you don’t give them contact information for, that’s not requiring references — which is the process I (and the comment I replied to) was talking about. If a company knows where you’ve worked, they can contact them if they want.
    - moneywoes 4y ago
      What’s the solution for the latter point you mentioned? If they proactively contact someone as part of their verification?
      - paulcole 4y ago
        Then you’re fucked if they check and the reference is bad and they care. Either you take your chances, leave it as a gap in your resume, or you make something up. In the past, I’ve extended the time I was at either the company before/after and then leave the one in the middle off. Smaller gap is easier to explain and you just need a coworker at the one you stretched to cover for you - or have it be somebody who wasn’t there during the time you added. You can also just say you did the “freelance” thing and then talk about whatever you want. I’ve also just been 100% honest and said, “I didn’t like this job and left on bad terms. I’d rather you not contact them.” Just have to read the situation and make your best guess as to what is going to get you the job.

is_true 4y ago

I'm sure it's already happening in the "books" threads

vidarh 4y ago

We'll be back to the 1990's "software agents" craze take two: Needing AI driven agents that seek out and index and evaluate content on our behalf, and seek to negotiate with each other for recommendations with currency being trust based on how "your" agent evaluated prior results. I'm hoping to put an AI between me and my e-mail inbox this weekend (I had ChatGPT write most of the code; it's not much); not fully automated, but evaluating and summarising and categorising. I might extend that to e.g. give me an "algorithm" for my Mastodon timeline (despite all of the people insisting on reverse chronological, I'm at a few hundred people I follow and already can't keep up), and a number of other sites I visit. For most of these things latency does not matter, so e.g. putting them through llama.cpp rather than something faster is fine, and precision isn't critical (I won't trust it to automatically reply or automatically reject anything, but prioritisation an categorisation where missteps won't have any critical impact.

Alex3917 4y ago

> We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments You're forgetting the millions of additional comments that will be written by humans to trick the AI into promoting their content. Even worse, currently if you ask Chat GPT to write you some code, it will make up an API endpoint that doesn't exist and then make up a URL that doesn't exist where you can register for an API key. People are already registering these domains, and parking fake sites on them to scam people. ChatGPT is creating a huge market for creating fake companies to match the fake information it's generating. The biggest risk may not be people using AI-generated comments to promote their own repos, but rather registering new repos to match the fake ones that the AI is already promoting.

permo-w 4y ago
I feel like you’re overstating this as a long term issue. sure it’s a problem now, but realistically how long before code hallucinations are patched out?
- ptato 4y ago
  Nobody knows.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    undoubtedly not long
- lanternfish 4y ago
  The black box nature of the model means this isn't something you can really 'patch out'. It's a byproduct of the way the system processes data - they'll get less frequent with targeted fine tuning and improved model power, but there's no easy solve.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    this is clearly untrue. it’s an input, a black box, then an output. openai have 100% control over the output. they may not be able to directly control what comes out of the black box, but a) they can tune the model, and they undoubtedly will, and b) they can control what comes after the black box. they can—for example—simply block urls

dorian-graph 4y ago

That's what Product Hunt has felt like for a long time—and LinkedIn too.

rwallace 4y ago

This is the first time I've ever posted an XKCD link here, but I think the occasion calls for it. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

precompute 4y ago

Now is the time to cultivate friendships and to make networks that persist online, and are verified via irl meetups / contacts. People who pull that off now will be in much, much better shape in the future. GPT's output is apparent to a discernible eye right now, but according to the power law, it won't take much "novel" input to train upon to make that discernment useless. Then, the only internet community that could be dependably reliable would be your group of irl verified people.

password4321 4y ago
I would phrase it more as we're pretty much out of time to have initiated online-only relationships.
- precompute 4y ago
  Agreed. It's very difficult now to build communities that have lasting impact, because everyone's saturated with info as-is. Contributions to niche communities now rely on a societal "outsider" status, which means there's basically a couple of people that contribute heavily and very few onlookers. Everything else is either gamified or comes from video games / gambling. On the bright side, it's THE time to cultivate close friendships and to seek like-minded people. The entire phenomenon of popular attention hugging a community to death does not exist any longer. You can now have OG members persisting with notions for a long time and building a shared mythos with a small group of friends, because information is now more accessible than ever. Obviously, most people aren't part of these communities. The people that are "drifting" alone are given to wasting their time on charismatic attention-seekers that talk a big game (twitch/e-celebs) but deliver nothing of value. So there's also room in the market for charismatic folk with some technical expertise to rally people to their cause, but only very briefly. This is because the number of people half-committing and then jumping ship is likely the highest it's ever been. Also, platforms have now resorted to paying people to stay on their platform (youtube / tiktok / sponsorships / twitch boosting streamers / etc.) to combat occasional ennui, ironically exacerbating the issue.
moneywoes 4y ago
Best methods for that? Local meetups?

greesil 4y ago

How do you know we aren't already there?

soheil 4y ago

Stop making up laws. You'll do much more good dismantling existing ones. And non-social signals like # of commits, # of pull requests cannot be faked? We need signals among the noise. Sometimes signals are noise we just need to calibrate.

wpietri 4y ago

I mean, there have always been shills. What's changing now is the cost of shilling is dropping from dollars per comment to fractions of a cent. Troll farms used to be a lot of work to put together, but soon they'll be aaS. Those of us who are careful internet readers have spent years developing good heuristics to use textual clues to tell us about the person behind the text. Are they smart? Are they sincere? Are they honest? Are they commenting in good faith? Those skills will soon be obsolete. The folks at OpenAI, who are nominally on a mission to make sure AI "benefits all of humanity", have condemned us to a life sentence of fending off high-volume, high-quality bullshit. Bullshit that they are actively working to make harder to detect. And I think the first victims of that will be internet forums where text is the main signal, places like this and Reddit.

vehemenz 4y ago

Maybe more appropriately, Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."