What a great article. I have so many random comments. > If you have a few million dollars, you can even set up your own parody of the scientific process: your

What a great article. I have so many random comments. > If you have a few million dollars, you can even set up your own parody of the scientific process: your own phony experts, in their own phony think tanks, with their own phony publications, giving each other legitimacy by citing each other. (Of course, all this is a problem for many fields, not just climate change. Climate is special only because there, the future of life on earth might literally hinge on our ability to get epistemology right.) And yet, the author presumably believes that only (or mostly) the climate change deniers do this? How can an unbiased but completely uneducated (regarding climate science) possibly know? > Now, would those with axes to grind try to subvert such a system the instant it went online? Certainly. For example, I assume that millions of people would rate Conservapedia as a more trustworthy source than Wikipedia—and would rate other people who had done so as, themselves, trustworthy sources, while rating as untrustworthy anyone who called Conservapedia untrustworthy. In what sense is that "subverting," unless you're assuming that one source is "truly" more trustworthy than the other? > But here’s the thing: anyone would be able to see, with the click of a mouse, the extent to which this parallel world had diverged from the real one. They’d see that there was a huge, central connected component in the trust graph—including almost all of the Nobel laureates, physicists from the US nuclear weapons labs, military planners, actuaries, other hardheaded people—who all accepted the reality of humans warming the planet, and only tiny, isolated tendrils of trust reaching from that component into the component of Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe. How does that help? If there's a "truly true Truth" out there, why should an unbiased uneducated person trust the broad connected graph over the smaller isolated one as the source of that Truth? > As long as I’m fantasizing, the point would be that, once people’s individual decisions did give rise to a giant connected trust component, the recommendations of that component could acquire the force of law. Oh. Crap. That's terrifying. > In other words, Google takes a link structure that already exists, independently of its ranking algorithm, and that (as the economists would put it) encodes people’s “revealed preferences,” and exploits that structure for its own purposes. If you like the idea of revealed preferences (I do), let's try a polycentric legal system where organizations offer services like law enforcement and dispute resolution and people can choose to pay for those services from whichever provider they like best. This largely solves the biggest problem of democracy, which is that a good legal services in a democracy are public goods and are thus likely to be underproduced. Good legal services in a polycentric legal system are not public goods, which is a good thing. Of course, it has its own problems, like what about really poor and really rich people.