Truth Markets

Google’s “In Quotes” as Truth Market?

rafefurst — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:49:14 +0000

Google Labs has a new service called “In Quotes” which might be usable to do a truth market of sorts. Here’s the suggestion I just emailed them on this topic:

I would love to use Google “In Quotes” to crowdsource measures of truth.

For instance, I just saw this:

“In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025,” said Mr. McCain during a campaign speech. [ Wed, 29 Oct 2008 Washington Times ]

I would like to be able to indicate on a scale from 0 (false) to 10 (true) whether I believed what McCain said is true (that we will achieve strategic independence by 2025). Everyone’s rating would yield an average number (let’s say it was 6.8). In addition, all other quotes that were attributed to McCain would have a truth index too, and the average of those numbers would be his dynamically updated “truthiness” rating. You could add a decay factor to allow for people’s reputations to change over time.

You could then sort quotes and people by their truthiness rating right along side date and relevance when people do searches on news items.

Additionally, you could get a truthiness rating for the sources by averaging the truth index of each quote they publish. Some media like to quote trolls so as to trump up gratuitous controversy, and this would separate those sources from the true investigative journalists.

Bet2Give

rafefurst — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:27:54 +0000

New twist on old theme, adding charitable giving with real money prediction markets. I like it.

BluBet.com

rafefurst — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:20:12 +0000

There are a number of play money prediction market sites, as Tech Crunch points out. But BluBet.com seems like a very well done implementation. Are there better ones out there for general topics or a wide range of topics?

Relatedly, there’s a Facebook app called iPredict which is cool in that it’s integrated into your existing network, but lame in that there’s not a lot of thought about the interface or marketing and so the most common prediction is “I will get lucky this weekend”.

Prediction: BluBet will come out with a Facebook app to interface with their site.

Hat tips to Jon Gunn and Bill Hessert

Wikipedia “Truthiness” Rating System

rafefurst — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:58:37 +0000

A research group at UCSC has implemented a system that color codes wikipedia entries based on a trust metric calculated on the people who make changes. Now we just need to get someone to implement a form of truth markets and combine the two…

Truemors

danielhorowitz — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:25:19 +0000

According to Valleywag, Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Truemors has launched with a host of problems. Malicious and frivilous listings, as well as gaming the system to manipulate rankings. Perhaps, if he incorporates markets or other decision making mechanisms, some of these problems can be ameliorated. Nonetheless, it appears at best his site will simply popularize the most well crafted and appealing rumors. Does popularity = truth? I don’t think so.

Our Mission

danielhorowitz — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:24:02 +0000

In case you missed the “Start Here” box in the top right hand corner of the page, I’ll restate our mission as well as briefly touch upon the proposed architecture and mechanisms for getting us there. The mission of truth markets is to Develop a globally trusted system for assessing the truth value of claims and the trustworthiness of claimants. Simple? Kind of? Good enough. Let the journey begin.

Truth markets are a variant on Robin Hanson’s idea futures, or the now more popular term, prediction markets. They key differences are that truth markets attempt to evaluate current truth, that is to say, if a politician or member of the media makes a statement today, we want to evaluate the truth value of that statement today. Additionally, all truth claims are tied to one or more claimants. From this, over time we are able to derive a “truth rating” to let us know how trustworthy a given claimant is. Hmmm, so people can be held accountable for what they say? Still interested? Stay tuned…

Welcome

rafefurst — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:23:12 +0000

We’ve moved the focus to WordPress here to enable more open discussion and participation.

To learn more about the truth markets concept, see the pages listed on the right under “Start Here”