February 20, 2003
Conjectures on Truth and Quality
Conjecture on Truth:For you to accept a happening as absolutely true, you must either:
- Witness the veracity of the happening firsthand
- Have the happening reported to you by a source you know and trust absolutely
Conjecture on Quality:
A quality judgement is the same as a Truth judgement, except with the added variable of your own subjective preferences mixed in. Therefore, for you to accept an item as being high quality, you must either:
- Judge the quality of the item firsthand
- Have the item referred to you by a source that you absolutely trust can interpret your quality requirements (tastes) accurately
What technology can do for you is approximate the second requirement in both cases. However, there are tradeoffs.
For truth, if the happening is not reported by a source you explicitly trust as truthful, an alternative is for the happening to be reported by several independent and non-conspiring sources. This is corroboration. There is a loophole here in that if you don't explicitly trust any of the sources yourself, it is possible for them all to be fooled. You are choosing to trust a safety in numbers, rather than trusting one independent personally-known source.
For quality, it requires the recommending source to know your tastes. In the case of a source that knows only your tastes, it is difficult if not impossible for the source to judge your reaction to an item when that item's qualities do not have a relationship with the taste qualities you have shared.
If you want your source to be able to recommend items to you that you might like even when its qualities don't have a clear relationship with your communicated tastes, then it is necessary to compare your communicated tastes with those of several other participants to find commonalities. If any of these participants have judged the quality of the item, your probable reaction to an item can be extrapolated. But the requirement in this case is for the item in question to be rated by several sources before it can be recommended to you.
Therefore, if a happening is reported to one source unknown to you, and you hear of the happening through only that source, it is impossible for you to reasonably trust that it is true.
And, if you find an item through a recommending source, and you have not shared any preferences for qualities of that item, and no one else has shared opinions on that item, it is impossible for that source to predict if you would find it of high quality.
In either case, if you want to be exposed to new happenings of truth, or new items of quality that you haven't explicitly described beforehand, without witnessing these happenings and items first-hand, it is a hard requirement for these items and happenings to be rated by multiple sources before you can trust them.