A fellow asked,
My response was straightforward:
But then I pointed out that an advantage of the Internet is that organizations can use it to create inexpensive new forms of `credibility filter'.
You do not have to depend on the old mechanisms of banks, insurance companies, and encyclopedias, all of which were and still are trust based institutions.
One modern mechanism is to provide tags tell you how others judge reputations. (And provide MD5 sums or an equivalent to ensure that you receive the information as intended.)
Take a look at how Slashdot does this. (Slashdot is an online news and commentary site for `nerds'. I am not saying that it provides the only or best mechanism, merely that its method is good enough for its forum. As far as I am concerned, Slashdot's level 5 items are far better than its level 1 and less than one-tenth as commonplace. To me, Slashdot shows how to provide reviewing services that are probabilistically OK.)
The Slashdot trust-building mechanism makes use of randomly selected, temporary judges who also fit additional criteria.
Basically, a judge, called a `moderator' in Slashdot, must be logged onto the system. Of course, if you are successful, many hostile people will log on, or a few people will log on with many aliases.
Presume that millions of dollars can be spent in an attack. (Funding can come from PR and advertising, from an organization of believers, or from the covert operations budget of another country.)
The Slashdot mechanism requires that a judge be a long time regular and willing to serve. Note that these characteristics are open to abuse by a well-funded opponent.
Also, a judge must be judged well by other judges. The practice is called `metamoderation'.
Each judge receives a number of points. Points expire three days after the last judgement. Moreover, each judgement costs a point. When a judge uses all his or her points or after they expire, he or she stops being a judge.
The latter conditions means that a fraud must first gain the respect of other judges and then wait until randomly chosen to be a judge. Obviously, a well funded opposition can undermine such a constitution, but that is expensive.
A similar trust-building mechanism can be applied elsewhere. With a backstop, for example, it can be applied to governance. Without a backstop, people will trust what they believe which may be quite foolish, as was the belief that tuberculosis germs could not develop resistance. (That belief, acted on by US politicians in the 1980s, has cost a fortune.)
While some may disbelieve a particular investigator, temporary judges will know several. It is likely that temporary judges will not not know investigators personally, but they will have figured out whether to adapt their judgments to the results of those investigations.
And the rest of us can, probabilistically speaking, come to depend on these judgements.
Trust-building is not so necessary when an organizational system compensates: that is why is is useful to make the Christian presumption that people are Fallen, even if you are not Christian. In politics, that presumption leads you to figure that `power corrupts' and to install various `checks and balances'. Otherwise, you will call for `virtuous rulers', yet find that you are ruled by frauds who pretend to be virtuous but are not.
But many governing systems lack checks and balances. Even with them, and with better policies, it helps to bear in mind, as Michael Froomkin said, that
So far and fortunately, advances in technology have enabled us to deal with the trust issues that arise as more and more people deal with strangers. We need to adapt our current institutions and create new ones that continue to benefit.
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