Veracity Values, Radical Truth and Global Individualism
April 10, 2009
This is not a fully formed idea, but I’m going to put it on ‘paper’ to see how it looks.
There appears to be a pretty good consensus, amongst European intelligentsia at least, that the world is now searching for a new economic and social paradigm. Socialism died in the 1980s. Free-market capitalism is in the intensive care unit and looking like its on its last legs. What else is out there ?
How about we all start telling the truth and allow everyone the freedom to decide themselves ?
Sound like free-markets to you ? Well, its not.
If you legislate the truth, the dynamic of competitive advantage changes dramatically. If everyone knows the way that everything is produced, then you should end up with infinite choice and mass customization right down to raw materials used and energy used to make them.
The idea of tailored markets enabled through technology is not new. There’s plenty of Silicon Valley scions working on just this. What is, I think, new is coupling this with the ability to massively link evidential data in a semantic web-style application to enable the individual to make an informed choice.
I call this concept ‘valuing veracity’.
Take two widgets physically identical in every way. One was made from ‘organically’ mined stuff in Sweden, the other from ‘chemically’ mined stuff in Congo by 12 yr old kids. Both were fabricated in the same Japanese factory and shipped to the consumer, one by plane, the other by boat. So which one do you want to buy ? Do you want the plane-shipped Swedish widget or the child-mined boat shipped Congolese widget ? Or do you want to imagine that you are getting the boat-shipped Swedish widget ?
The truth is that there is no way to tell them apart, so you might as well buy the one that provides you with the best satisfaction at point of sale (economists call this maximising the utility function).
BUT ! If you could tell them apart by looking at an audit trail of what the widgets materials are made of, how much they cost in energy/emissions terms, the working conditions, the local labour conditions, etc, etc. You could have a very different view on what constitutes maximisation of your utility. You might feel bad that your widget was made by 12-yr old kids and choose one that was made by 13-yr olds instead. Next year the 12-yr old’s widget line goes out of business (making all the 12 yr olds redundant) and there is a new 14-yr olds widget line available instead.
The example is fatuous, but it illustrates a point. If you change the information available you are likely to change what constitutes satisfaction. From then on its up to the individual on how they interpret their own minds.
So where do radical truth and veracity values come in ?
Radical Truth first – Jeff Jarvis (blog Buzz Machine) recently told of a workshop he carried out at this year’s Davos meeting. In it he asked groups to come up with concepts for redesigning banking. One team came up with the concept of Radical Truth. Basically making all decision-making open and all business streams fully accountable, all the way to the Main Street customer in order to rebuild confidence in the system.
Tim Berners-Lee recently called for all raw data to be published. Databases on anything you like should be available in raw form, not as press releases or handy journalist-digestible quotes, but as raw statistical data.
Before his talk at TED I was playing with using text-mining as a way to parse large amounts of data to divine trends in resource use and came up with a ‘certificate-based’ authentication system to track resources from production in order to embed their social cost of production. Not an absolute truth, but a measure of veracity or verifiability – a veracity value that would work in a similar way to security certificates, but have a sliding scale of values and links to the evidence trails.
So. Bring the ideas together – audit trails for every bought item, open databases and certificate-based authentication for those data and you get the ability to choose on a level that you never chose before.
You can’t do this in a completely free market because data is considered proprietary and there is no legal or economic compunction to tell the truth.
You need to have a really strong global trade policy to enforce the audit trails and a mechanism to support areas unexpectedly affected by consumer choice (maybe people don’t want New Zealand lamb because of the food miles, maybe they do because of the welfare standards, who knows which will outweigh the other).
I know. Immensely difficult to implement and looks politically unworkable, but I propose it anyway. We have the computer power now, we have the tracking technology (just about) and we are not really at all close to the global governance.
There you go – Veracity Values, Radical Truth and Global Individualism
Veracity Values
March 2, 2009
How do you know what is true ?
As a third party, how do you know that something is objectively true as opposed to subjectively true ?
Can you have such as thing as a truth ‘Richter scale’ ?
There are technological tools out there that should be able to help us with verification, even before the semantic web breaks through. Text mining should be able to pull out the key words and phrases of a document. You need to find a set of rules to feed the miner, but apart from that the issues with text mining seem to me to be logistical these days. Feed those results into the relevant search engines and databases and you should be able to automate the evidence gathering process.
Rate the relevance and ‘authority’ of the source and you could derive a ‘veracity value’ for the document.
Place some security around that veracity value and you have a ‘veracity certificate’ that has links to the evidence and a sliding scale of verifiable-ness.
The problem comes in identifying objective vs subjective. For example; take two academic papers, one on the physical qualities of a new metal alloy the other on Mayan cultural artifacts and their relevance to modern day Mexico. They have equal numbers of citations, equally authoritative reviewers, equal external coverage in conference proceedings and equal numbers and quality of references. How does a reader know which is objective and which subjective in nature ?
That’s something that humans do all the time, and frequently get wrong, but that AI has yet to approach.
Perhaps we leave that to the human for the moment and leave the automation at veracity.
The business model writes itself, so if anyone wants to try it get in touch 
Informational Sub-Prime Crisis
February 28, 2009
Opinion is currently so incredibly cheap when compared to evidence (my evidence for this is recursive and made of these very words). I wonder whether the information ecosystem is moving towards eventual collapse as the weight of opinion crushes objective data.
Think of it as an informational sub-prime crisis. Informational derivatives endlessly repackaged gaining legitimacy by reporting through authoritative sources without adequate information quality. At what point does that become unsustainable ? Maybe it doesn’t. Any information economists out there ? Is that even a thing ?
Catching up with the Digital World
February 28, 2009
This is a keynote speech delivered by Richard Sambrook of the BBC at the Media Re:Public Forum held at USC Annenberg in March 2008.
Interesting summary of the state of the art (a year ago), for me that’s pretty up to date. I’m on a bit of a catch-up right now.
I think that Richard’s concentration by omission on the conflict between objective and subjective realities is actually, though probably old news, still very relevant. The questioners (after 36:00) kind of prove that with their takes on his presentation.
I think that (subjectively of course) there is a set of tools out there allowing easy subjective reporting. The objectivity side of things is something that must be cultural.
For those interested in the objective truth, objectivity can be a rasion d’etre to the detriment of real politique. Whether driven by a moral purpose that information should be correct and hang the consequences, or whether they are fundamentally positive about the human condition. First hand reporting and hard data will always be a superior method of moving towards a better AKA a truer world.
For those whose focus is influencing change, whether it be getting the litter bins emptied more often or a major national political shift (some would argue that amounts to the same thing in the UK), maybe the weight of conviction is the lever that must be used to get closer to a subjectively ideal world.
Do we want Spock or Bones as our information go-to guy ? Spock may be hard work and not much fun at a party, but you know that you’re going to get the facts. Bones could be telling you want he wants your to hear or what he thinks you want to hear. Maybe that doesn’t matter in most circumstances. Maybe in some situations you want the passion. Maybe you need both. In either case you probably need to know which you are getting.
