Everyone’s an expert (part 1)

Times was, I used to be able to spout off any random factiod I thought I knew, and the Internet took it as read truth.  The Wikipedia used to be great for this.  Now, my rants are pretty much limited to the blarg you’re reading right now– we’re probably all better off for it.  Most university professors scowl very deeply if a student references the Wikipedia in a footnote, which is fair, but not for the reasons most people think: Wikipedia is a bad reference source because it’s a derivative work, not because it may be inaccurate:  The student should be citing the original work, not someone’s summarized boilerplate.  Wikipedia has largely squashed the ‘inaccurate’ label through a zealous use and requirement of all statements must have footnotes.

But that raises a conundrum for many of us: where is truth?  Where is the expert?  Is the expert the one with the most experience?  Is the expert the one with the most money?  The most devotees?  Is truth simply the mob’s consensus?  Graduate school told me that truth is the logical sum of a tested thesis.  I spent 15 years being smug that I knew what that meant, only now to really see that when the Internet gave everyone a soapbox from which to preach, now social networks are giving everyone a Hyde’s Park corner complete with audiences.  Companies like bazaarvoice and pluck are setting up these cacophonies wherever possible (good for them).  These systems invariably include meta-rating systems to rate the reviews and the reviewers, in the hopes of crowdsourcing the good information from the bad.  In general, it usually works.  It is still, however, all based on a Kuhn-model of mob truth.

The NYT recently published an article on a new computer named “Watson” designed by IBM to play Jeopardy.  Another possible use they summized might be to find counter-factual statements to anyone’s gtiven declaration on the Internet.  In short: a bullshit detector.  I can imagine they will be able to monetize this thing into millions of dollars: every social network and review thread can now come with a robot that can read plain speech, offer immediate counter-responses to erroneous information, and perhaps even show us a numerical score for ‘trustability’ or ‘truthiness‘ (all the footnotes in that link– irony!). The downside here, of course, is that most reviews for most products will be reduced to little more than the barren subjectivism of American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat, I can dance to it.”

There is still salvation for quality content in quality reviews: hard numerical data, solid logic, and qualitative feature polarization.  I’ll explain myself on those in some upcoming posts.