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21:17, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page The ratings system, the media, and overcoming bias (Created page with "{{Main|Ratings system}} ==What's wrong what we have?== Traditional mass media is biased toward the status quo. It relies on corporate advertising, uses government sources for the bulk of its information, and is very reluctant to break out of traditional left-right boxes. Chomsky accuses it of “manufacturing consent” per the title of one of his books. The consent in this case is for a “Washington consensus” in world affairs and a general bias toward “free” m...")
20:54, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Thoughts on identity (Created page with "To determine if there is a real person claiming to be named X (i.e. person claims identity X) * I have met X in person N times. Consistency of physical appearance of X (to determine if it is same real person in each case) * X looks like/sounds like/dresses like a,b,c … Measure “activeness” of an identity (higher activeness requires increased work to maintain a false identity and also increases the chance for contradictions to be detected). There are many things...")
20:06, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page A straight average algorithm with continuous input distributions, complex trust, and intermediate results (Created page with "{{Main|Aggregation techniques}} In this previous post we discussed an algorithm for modifying probabilities using a more complex trust factor, one involving random lying, bias, and biased lying. We also discussed a simple case of combining continuous distributions using Bayes, straight averaging and trust-weighted averaging. However, the continuous distributions in this case did...")
18:33, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Avoiding feedback (Created page with "<span id="methods-of-preventing-feedback"></span> = Methods of preventing feedback = Say we have a fully-connected trust network that looks like: <kroki lang="graphviz"> digraph G { fontname="Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif" node [fontname="Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif"] edge [fontname="Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif"] layout=dot alice -> bob [dir="both"]; alice -> carol [dir="both"]; carol -> bob [dir="both"]; } </kroki> And ''alice'' wants ''bob''...")
17:32, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Arrow's theorem (Created page with "MCDM can be used for voting but runs into [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/ Arrow’s impossibility theorem]. Kenneth Arrow, an economist, won a Nobel prize in 1972 for his contention that it is impossible to extract a social order of preferences from individual preferences while also adhering to fair voting principles. To get some understanding of this, it is useful to imagine a scenario where we are trying to choose between Policy A, B, or C. Suppose...") Tag: Visual edit
15:44, 10 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Cardinal voting systems (Created page with "<h2>Cardinal Voting Systems</h2> A cardinal voting system is one where voters give an independent rating to each preference, in contrast to merely ranking their preferences. This requires more information but avoids Arrow’s paradox and provides higher quality results, especially for policy-level decision making. It is frequently the case that voters care a great deal about a few subjects and are mostly indifferent to the rest. An ordinal voting system forces a ranking...")
15:48, 9 September 2024 Pete talk contribs moved page Privacy in the subjective and community-based ratings system to DELETE Privacy in the subjective and community-based ratings system
15:36, 9 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Identity trust in the subjective ratings system (Created page with "{{Main|Privacy, identity, and fraud in the ratings system}} <h3>Establishing trust in a subjective ratings system</h3> Incidentally, the subjective ratings system mitigates the problem of multiple manufactured identities coming from the same person. People could certainly manufacture public/private key pairs and present them as new identities over the network. But each public key “identity” would only be trusted to the extent that it meaningfully interacte...")
20:44, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page The ratings system in light of our current institutional failures (Created page with "{{Main|Ratings system}} Recent and past supreme court decisions are an important reason we are constructing the ratings system. Over time we have realized that the courts, rather than objectively assessing the law, are in fact biased. Our present system of checks and balances, one that was <i>deliberately designed into the system</i>, is breaking down. What better way to prevent this outcome than to have a continuous check, by the people, on institutions using technolog...")
20:02, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Hysteresis (Created page with "{{Main|System modeling}} We have identified hysteresis as a necessary component of social systems, as it certainly is in natural systems. Generally speaking we want our ratings system, and associated decision-making systems, to not fluctuate wildly in their output. We especially want to prevent rapid fluctuations in policy based on the whims of the moment. So we’d like to build some hysteresis into these systems and understand any hysteresis that’s already built-in...")
19:59, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Software for social and economics modeling (Created page with "We’ve discussed the need for systems thinking and optimization at the societal level. Our argument has been that an objective, rigorous approach to problems will both improve public policy and quiet partisan discord. Community members will literally have to become knowledgeable about modeling social systems. Needless to say, education will have to be made available to folks in this area. In this vein we might provide an overview of the types of software that exist for...")
19:57, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Societal optimization (Created page with "{{Main|System modeling}} We have discussed optimization as the basis for policymaking in our ratings-based communities. Given its rigorous nature, optimization provides not only an analytical tool by which to measure outcomes, but also a method by which political rancor can be reduced. Not many people will sustain emotional debate when faced with a requirement to produce objective functions. An objective function is simply an equation that tells us what variable we wan...")
19:56, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Systems thinking (Created page with "{{Main|System modeling}} If political philosophy is a good required course for building a new society, then an even better one might be system dynamics, sometimes referred to generally as systems thinking. Our discussions of optimization and Pareto fronts presuppose a society well versed in this subject. Systems thinking was pioneered by the computer engineer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Wright_Forrester Jay Wright Forrester] at MIT. He turned his attention to soc...")
19:53, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Multi-criteria decision-making methods (Created page with "{{Main|System modeling}} This section primarily addresses the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentially_all_pairwise_rankings_of_all_possible_alternatives PAPRIKA] method by [https://www.1000minds.com/decision-making?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=20315873486&utm_content=150520272373&utm_term=decision%20making%20process%20software&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiArLyuBhA7EiwA-qo80Noemh5EsGq1GMdWy_qRDUBqhRtx8eKfx2DiXutN8BYFwD9w8-HOwhoCyq8QAvD_BwE 1000minds.com]...")
19:46, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page System modeling (Created page with "System modeling as expressed here refers to creating rigorous (ie mathematical to the extent possible) models of society and the effects of proposed policies. The idea is that through diligent modeling, simulation, and optimization we can make better socio-economic decisions without succumbing to futile ideological debate and political rancor. The ratings system will potentially transform society for the better and require a large amount of time from its members. We ant...")
16:30, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page More argument mapping tools and proposed ideas for our own such tool (Created page with "{{Main|Logic}} Last time we reviewed [https://carneades.github.io/ Carneades], an academic argument mapping tool/language. Here we will review some more such tools and propose an argument mapping system for our purposes within a trust network. <h3>[Argdown](https://argdown.org/)</h3> Argdown is a markdown system for making arguments and creating debates. It has a graphical visualizer w...")
16:29, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Software for argumention -- IBM Project Debater and Carneades (Created page with "{{Main|Logic}} <h3>IBM Project Debater API</h3> IBM maintains an [https://early-access-program.debater.res.ibm.com/ “early access program” for Project Debater] which includes a Python API. You must login as Guest and accept the agreement before getting access. The following installation procedure was followed: <pre>$ pip install debater-python-api $ pip install tqdm (not included in above install for whatever reason)</pre> Upon attempting to run one of the exam...")
16:28, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Informal logic and fallacies (Created page with "{{Main|Logic}} <span id="informal-logic"></span> == Informal Logic == Most informal logic is based on analyzing arguments, written in plain English, for known fallacies. Fallacies can occur in all types of arguments (deductive, inductive, abductive) but in deductive arguments a fallacy is regarded as an invalid argument, equivalent to a math mistake which can be established using the rules of inference and equivalence discussed before Internal:FromGitlab/Deductive_&_...")
16:27, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Deductive & inductive arguments and use cases (Created page with "{{Main|Logic}} <h2>Deductive Arguments and Use Cases</h2> Deductive arguments are ones where the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. They can be reduced to symbolic form and proven in the same way that we prove math theorems. They aren’t as common as inductive arguments (more on those later) but they form the foundation for all arguments and have significant applications of their own. Let’s take an example of a deductive argument that might be used i...")
16:25, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Prolog for deductive proofs (Created page with "{{Main|Logic}} <h2>Intro to Prolog</h2> SWI-Prolog was used here, from which the 64-bit Windows version was installed. Versions for Linux and other OS’s exist. It is distributed with the Simplified BSD license. https://www.swi-prolog.org/ SWI Prolog presents the user with a command prompt in which to enter queries and an editor for entering facts. Any editor can be used but the built-in one offers some syntax highlighting. After saving an edited file use the followi...")
16:23, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page More methods for propositional logic, syllogistic logic, and quantificational logic (Created page with "<h2>Other ways to establish truth in propositional logic</h2> <h3>The short truth table method</h3> As we saw last time, the truth table method requires <math display="inline">2^n</math> rows to complete an analysis of any propositional argument. Clearly this becomes untenable as the number of variables <math display="inline">n</math> increases. One simpler technique is to work backward...")
16:22, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Thoughts on symbolic logic to assess the truth of arguments (Created page with "<h2>Assessing validity using propositional logic</h2> Symbolic logic can be used to assess the validity of arguments without distracting, or even deceiving, ourselves with English verbiage. Here we will confine ourselves to propositional logic in which propositions (or statements) have a truth value and can be combined together to form conclusions. Let’s look at an example: P1) John is at the Library or he is Studying (L or S, ie <math display="inline">L \lor S</mat...")
15:44, 8 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Logic (Created page with "One of the central goals of the ratings system is to help people think better. Logic is a fundamental aspect of that, along with having reliable factual information.")
21:16, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy differences between the subjective and community ratings system (Created page with "<span id="differences-between-the-community-and-subjective-ratings-system"></span> == Differences between the Community and Subjective Ratings System == Last time, Eric ran through various schemes of increasing complexity designed to mitigate trust concerns in the subjective ratings system (SRS). In the next section, we will take a look at these and see how they apply to the community ratings system (CRS). But...")
19:44, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Differential privacy, secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption (Created page with "==Differential privacy== Eric gave us a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy reference] to the idea of differential privacy (DP), a technique used to anonymize datasets with personal or sensitive information. In DP we introduce some statistical noise into the answer each person gives in a way that gives that person plausible deniability while still providing a reliable aggregate statistic (eg an average). The simple example given to beginners is to imagi...")
19:33, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Ideas for encryption in aggregators (Created page with "<span id="deniable-authentication"></span> = Deniable Authentication = While I don’t have a concrete use case in mind right now, it seems like we may encounter a use for ''deniable authentication''. These systems allow the participants to be confident about the authenticity of the data exchanged, but the participants can later deny that they generated the data and a third party could not prove otherwise. “Off The Record Messaging” is an implementation of deniable...")
19:31, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy in ratings aggregation (Created page with "Let’s say our aggregation technique is a straight average. This is a subject we covered before and decided that the privacy-enhanced version of it would include each node only passing on summed values to the next node up. That way, the final node that performed the aggregation (and presumably reported it) would have no knowledge of the individual components making up the average. But this may be scant comfort to...")
18:46, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Thoughts on a privacy preserving, simulacrum resistant identity verification mechanism (Created page with "{{Main|Privacy, identity, and fraud in the ratings system}} <span id="the-digital-absence-of-natural-personhood"></span> == The digital absence of natural personhood == There are many situations in which it is desirable to limit participation (in a community, discussion, event, entitlement, vote, or anything else one can participate in) to natural persons only. Let us define “natural person” as a single living, breathing organism experiencing consciousness, sapienc...")
18:43, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Thoughts on identity in communities (Created page with "{{Main|Privacy, identity and fraud in the ratings system}} Last time we decided that communities would want to solve the identity problem especially in the case where they were handing out precious goods to their members. We wouldn’t want to allow individuals to pose as fake people to increase their handout. What kinds of goods would these be? Well, one might be a freely distributed basket of basic goods/services that every citizen is entitled to. A community might d...")
18:42, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Fake identities and ratings (Created page with "{{Main|Privacy, identity, and fraud in the ratings system}} Last time we discussed identity verification and how to tell if someone is a real person. Dan brought up a particular case: Someone introduces himself to multiple independent people as a different person every time. Say he has 100 fake identities that he does this with. Then he uses the 100 fake identities to rate someone. His motivation, perhaps, is to increase his friend’s average rating by introducing a bu...")
15:54, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy and fraud (Created page with "We should consider that privacy and fraud go together. If privacy means no one knows what we are doing and can never know, then this is exactly what fraudsters want. We have been thinking so far of a system that starts with privacy and then works toward non-privacy depending on the situation. We might instead, just as a thought experiment, think of a system that starts with no privacy and then works toward privacy depending on the situation. Let’s limit this to financ...")
15:48, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Rawls and privacy (Created page with "{{Main|Privacy, identity, and fraud in the ratings system}} <h2>Rawls and Privacy U99</h2> Rawls does not directly address the issue of privacy rights but we can infer that he would believe in a right to privacy as part of his basic liberties principle. If we go behind the veil of ignorance, and consider what our basic liberties should be, most of us would reasonably include a personal right to privacy. This means the government, and others, cannot snoop on our private...")
15:40, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy in the subjective and community-based ratings system (Created page with "<h3>The subjective and community-based ratings system</h3> Last time Dan reminded us that we are contemplating first a subjective ratings methodology in a peer-to-peer network. Everyone would have their own network of contacts, choose their own categories for ratings, algorithms for aggregation, weights for aggregation equations, etc. Individuals would identify themselves to their peers of choice with a public key or similar methodology. Their opinions would be encrypte...")
15:10, 7 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy, identity, and fraud in the ratings system (Created page with "The concept of privacy is central to how the ratings system will be designed. Privacy settings will allow users to change the levels of privacy at either the personal (subjective) or community levels. So the first way to understand privacy in the context of the ratings system is to see how it might exist in both its subjective and community forms.")
19:21, 3 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Internal:Brainstorming 27 – Freedom of speech, cont., smart people, progress moving to Main namespace (Created page with "==Freedom of speech, cont.== Last time we discussed freedom of speech as a right to be protected, or at least encouraged, by the ratings system. Dan’s view was that freedom of speech is too general and needs to be broken down into separate categories. So let’s do that and consider how the current legal mechanisms handle each case vs. the ratings system. Defamation/slander/libel – The ratings system is a good natural way to handle this. It can distinguish first th...")
21:18, 2 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Bayesian & Non Bayesian Approaches to Trust and Wang & Vassileva's Eqn (Created page with "<h2>How Bayesian Approaches Restrict our Thinking, particularly on Trust</h2> If we adopt a non-Bayesian approach, it opens the door to many possible ways that Probability and Trust can be assigned. If you’d prefer to skip to that, just go to the next section. This section is somewhat of an essay on how/why, in a Bayesian approach, our thinking becomes more limited. Bayes restricts us in both a hard technical sense and more generally in how we think about the informa...")
19:51, 2 September 2024 Dan talk contribs created page Internal:Security and hacking issues related to information rating systems (Created page with "When we envision a world where an information rating system heavily influences social status and a community’s decision making process, it is obvious that there will be people who will be highly motivated at times to “cheat the system”. Leo recently asked “How secure is the rating system against hacking/cheating?”, so this is written as a partial answer to that question. It is only a partial answer because “how secure a system is” tends to be an open-ended...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched
16:04, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Bayes and certainty (Created page with "{{Main|Technical overview of the ratings system}} <span id="introduction--bayes-pulls-toward-certainty"></span> == Introduction – Bayes pulls toward certainty == We’ve already discussed the fact that Bayes pulls in favor of certainty. If we combine a 99% opinion with a 10% opinion we get 91.7%. But if we increase the 99% to 99.9% the combined opinion rises to 99.1%. If we increase yet again to 99.99% the combined opinion rises to 99.91%. We summarize this below to...")
15:55, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Error bars and a problem with Bayesian modeling (Created page with "<h2>Error Bars for Incomplete Analyses</h2> During last week’s meeting (6/19/23) Eric suggested the idea of putting error bars around incomplete results as they stream in. To do this we can compute the Pcomb for all the nodes in the network, whether they’ve answered or not, by putting P=50% on the nodes that haven’t answered. This way they don’t affect the calculation and the calculation can remain as simple as possible: just compute as if you have all the infor...")
15:21, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Modification to the Sapienza probability adjustment for trust to include random lying, bias, and biased lying (Created page with "{{Main|Trust}} In the last iteration on this subject we modified the probability adjustment for trust to include lying and bias. We noted that the lying was random in nature, that is, the lie would be distributed evenly among all options that were not the truth. Here we modify this assumption by allowing, in addition, lying that is biased toward a particular o...")
15:16, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Modification to the Sapienza probability adjustment for trust to include lying and bias (Created page with "<h2>Review of Sapienza's Probability Adjustment Equation</h2> Sapienza’s paper (https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1664/w9.pdf), which is the basis for our modeling approach, uses the notion of trust between nodes to adjust the node’s probability of getting a particular answer. Each node is first assigned probabilities for a particular outcome (eg 60% Red, 30% Blue, 10% Green). Then, based on trust, the nodes’ probabilities are adjusted (or smoothed, as Sapienza puts it) up...")
14:53, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Trust attenuation and the inadequacy of single-value trust factors (Created page with "During last week’s meeting (6/7/23) we discussed, among other things, trust attenuation: Attenuation in Trust Networks. Let’s start by following up on some points that were raised about this: ==== Why we're not using a tree topology ==== The examples show a single straight line representing the originating client (top-node) to the server (leaf node) that answers the query. The rest of the tree is simply not show...")
14:41, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Attenuation in trust networks (Created page with "<h2>Review of Cycling</h2> During last week’s call we discussed, among other things, the effect of cycling and how it can badly distort confidence results: Effect of Cycling in Trust Networks. To summarize briefly, if Trust=1.0 for all nodes, then cycling will rapidly lead to a confidence of 1 (100%) for a given question (if probabilities for most of the nodes are above 50%). However, if Trust < 1.0 then t...")
14:31, 1 September 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Effect of cycling in trust networks (Created page with "This discussion will show how cycling in trust networks rapidly leads to an incorrect answer (Pcomb) which is often much higher than the answer you would get in a non-cycling network. The divergence between answers, however, depends on trust. If trust is low the answers will tend to converge and will be equal when trust is zero. If trust is high the answers will be very far apart. Suppose we have a trust network composed of four Nodes 0, 1, 2, 3 with the following conne...")
21:34, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Trust/Probability/Population graphs algorithm (Created page with "== Trust/Probability/Population Graphs Algorithm U99== This algorithm is a variant of Eric’s trust-weighted histogram (TWH) algorithm and can be conceived of as follows. Start by plotting probability on the x-axis and trust on the y-axis for each source. Now draw lines to represent intervals in the x and y-axis (eg 0-0.2, 0.2-0.4, etc). Each rectangle (ie bin) in the resulting grid will contain some...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched
21:26, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Allowing for more than predicate questions in the trust-weighted histogram (TWH) algorithm (Created page with "The <code>trust_weighted_histogram</code> (TWH) algorithm was discussed last time but only handles predicate questions. Indeed, it only handles single valued probabilities under the assumption that the other probability in a predicate distribution is (1-P). Although the examples that exercise it are actually provided as a two-valued distribution [P, 1-P], the algorithm ignores the 2nd value. This was corrected using the <code>trust_weighted_histogram_sets</code> algorit...")
21:14, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Privacy enhancing straight average algorithm (Created page with "The straight average algorithm discussed previously was modified to obscure trust information as it works up the tree, thus enhancing privacy. The previous algorithm communicated all trust-modified probabilities up to the head node, where the average would be calculated. This could potentially lead to reverse engineering the trust information associated with those probabilities. The new algorithm only communicates the sum of the probabilities at each node along with the...")
21:01, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Population distributions and graphical output with privacy (Created page with "Last time we discussed probability distributions (either binned or continuous) in which each distribution was the result of a single source’s answer. We learned how to combine such distributions via Bayesian or averaging techniques. But another way to present respondents’ information is to simply transfer it to the top-most node and display it in a graphical or tabular form. The top node (the guy asking the...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched
20:50, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Binned and continuous distributions (Created page with "{{Main|Aggregation techniques}} <h2>Introduction</h2> The simple predicate question we’ve been considering can be turned into one requiring a distribution, aka a probability density function. For example, if we ask whether it will be Sunny or Cloudy tomorrow the respondent can answer by saying: # Sunny or Cloudy. # % chance of each. This is, in a sense, the coarsest distribution possible and is the type of answer we have been considering so far. # An actual distribu...")
20:40, 30 August 2024 Pete talk contribs created page Trust-weighted histograms (Created page with "<span id="dans-proposal-for-trust-weighted-histograms"></span> === Dan’s proposal for trust-weighted histograms === This is my (@efrias) interpretation of an algorithm Dan proposed after the July 24th meeting. It behaves differently from previous algorithms: * the output of this algorithm is a histogram that could be presented to the user as-is * previous algorithms used the trust factor to pull stronger opinions towards the center. In other words, previous algorithm...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched