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I think it should be possible to build something that generalises the idea of Web of Trust so that it's more flexible, and less prone to catastrophic breakdown
by akoboldfrying 2y ago
I think it should be possible to build something that generalises the idea of Web of Trust so that it's more flexible, and less prone to catastrophic breakdown past some scaling limit.
Binary "X trusts Y" statements, plus transitive closure, can lead to long trust paths that we probably shouldn't actually trust the endpoints of. Could we not instead assign probabilities like "X trusts Y 95%", multiply probabilities along paths starting from our own identity, and take the max at each vertex? We could then decide whether to finally trust some Z if its percentage is more than some threshold T%. (Other ways of combining in-edges may be more suitable than max(); it's just a simple and conservative choice.)
Perhaps a variant of backprop could be used to automatically update either (a) all or (b) just our own weights, given new information ("V has been discovered to be fraudulent").
- hinkley 2y agoTrue. Perhaps a collective vote past 2 degrees of freedom out where multiple parties need to vouch for the same person before you believe they aren't a bot. Then you're using the exponential number of people to provide diminishing weight instead of increasing likelihood of malfeasance.
- nottorp 2y agoBut do we need an infinite and global web of trust? How about restricting them to everyone-knows-everyone sized groups, of like a couple hundred people? One can be a member of multiple groups so you're not actually limited. But the groups will be small enough to self regulate.
- hinkley 2y agoWhat’s that going to do about all of the top search results and a good percentage of social media traffic being generated by SEO bots? Nothing. You want to chat with a Dunbar number of people get yourself a private discord or slack channel.
- nottorp 2y agoThe Dunbar number of people could vouch for small web sites they come across. Or even for FB accounts if they choose to.
- hinkley 2y agoI suspect a lot of people here are the ones in their circle who bring in a lot of the cool info that their friends missed out on. This still sounds like Slack.
- nottorp 2y agoWe're talking about webs of trust aren't we? Not about chat rooms. I'm hypothesising that any such large scale structure will be perverted by commercial interests, while having multiple Dunbar sized such structures will have a chance to be useful.