Comment by mnau
9 days ago
Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.
"Tragedy of commons" is a false concept that obscures greed and selfishness and often lawlessness. Even its originator (Hardin) accepts that it does not describe actual history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359
The use of the word Tragedy in the name I think makes it easier for people to excuse themselves when they monopolize the commons. “Oh it’s a tragedy humans are just selfish we can’t avoid it.” The tragedy is that people are comfortable excusing others selfish, greedy behavior by saying it’s innate.
There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment.
My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything.
Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which creates distrust across the entire group, because people hate being taken advantage of.
> Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default ...
... towards an in-group, yes. Not towards out-groups, as far as I can tell.
Though for some reason this tends not to apply to solo travellers in many, many parts of the world.
Lots of debate, yes, but very little about the basic fact that Hardin's formulation of "the tragedy of the commons" doesn't describe actual historical events in pretty any well documented case.
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And that human can use A.I. again. It won't help.
I would argue that it can be circumvented, not that it won't help. If a human uses his/her signature for content farm, it can be flagged as such.
It could be interesting to have a search engine that only shows results that have human attestation via digital passports. Of course I'd prefer that to work without necessarily revealing the identity of the poster, similarly to how anonymous "sign-up tokens" for accounts would work, to prevent sybil attacks.
Couldn’t those attestations be sold?
Whitelisting non–slop is sufficient and gets you Marginalia Search. It's usually obvious, upon a quick glance, whether a website is slop.
Marginalia doesn't actually use whitelists though, but it does give preference to results from known human websites, as well as sites that are linking to and being linked from that set.
I suppose you meant SNR is getting lower.
Trees of trust, self-organizing as closer nodes to your agents are trusted more.