

Ask HN: Can you score blogs by truthfulness? - read

I&#x27;m wondering if there&#x27;s a way to find blogs according to a custom search algorithm.<p>I know Reddit and HN rank posts by votes. But choosing stories that way suffers from side effects like:<p>(1) a story being popular because it&#x27;s so new<p>(2) a story being liked by a lot of people because of the way it&#x27;s written<p>(3) a story that is surprisingly eye opening says something people are not willing to believe, so they don&#x27;t upvote it<p>(4) something being incorrect.<p>I&#x27;d prefer to read stories ranked by other measures. The most important one for me being: whether what they say is true.<p>Is there an algorithm, tool or service that scores stories by truthfulness?<p>edit: changed truthiness to truthfulness
======
codezero
I've been thinking about this a lot with respect to user generated content and
although this is somewhat tangential, it appears that people provide the most
positive feedback for the version of truth that most resembles their own
version, not some third party, objective viewer.

I had originally thought this was a modern phenomenon, but it turns out it's
been going on for a long time.

Take for example Dürer's Rhinoceros:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer's_Rhinoceros](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer's_Rhinoceros)

His depiction is armor clad and has an extra horn, it looks fanciful, and yet,
another artist, Hans Burgkmair, produced a depiction that is basically true to
life, yet Dürer's print became famous and duplicated widely, and only one of
Burgkmair's prints is extant.

Slightly more anecdotal, for a while my dad collected maps and I bought him an
original from the 1700s that depicted California as an island, despite being
well mapped since the 16th century. It was something of a fanciful myth and
people preferred the "island" maps to display in their homes, while real
navigators had accurate maps.

Anyways, what I'm trying to get at is, if you want to measure truthiness, you
should do it relative to the observer, with some awareness that it's flexible,
assuming you are thinking of this as a way to match content to people. If you
just want some certificate of truth, because of the reasons above, it probably
won't take hold with the general population (they will dismiss it for not
agreeing with their beliefs)

------
seanccox
This is a really interesting problem. I work for a media organization and we
make our money by printing advertiser-friendly versions of stories. This
primarily involves framing political or economic risks as "opportunities",
omitting damaging facts/analyses, and exclusively quoting wealthy/powerful
people.

Most media companies do some version of this, with newspapers having among the
best reputations for getting at the truth, and advertorial supplements the
worst. Still, one key factor that I believe affects the "truth" of an article
is the revenue stream of the writer/publisher. If you want objective analysis
of anything, you probably have to stop reading newspapers/magazines run on an
advertising model, or at least be very, very selective.

There are a number of factors in play that can help determine the
"truthfulness" of an article: objective facts, sources, expertise cited,
existence of debate in the field being covered, etc... etc. As an editor, I
think you are trying to find an automated solution to an intrinsically human
problem, but maybe I'm just threatened because you're trying to outsource my
job to a machine. Ultimately, I think learning how to read deeply is something
that can be taught, but not set to an algorithm. At least, this appeals to my
desire for job security.

~~~
meowface
>This primarily involves framing political or economic risks as
"opportunities", omitting damaging facts/analyses, and exclusively quoting
wealthy/powerful people.

This seems a bit disingenuous and sleazy, depending on who exactly is
consuming this content.

~~~
seanccox
Indeed.

The company makes money from advertising, so advertisers are its most
important readers. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, for any media
that sells ad space. Some organizations maintain "Chinese walls" between the
ad side and the editorial side, but these are businesses and they ultimately
have to answer to their bottom lines. That's true for Fox News, the Washington
Post, or a Financial Times supplement – they are all chasing money with their
brand and curating content that conforms to the expectations advertisers have
of said brand. Rolling Stone is an 'edgy' magazine, so they publish articles
that critique America's rapacious capitalism, but they still run full-page
adverts for Apple products.

So, speaking as an editor, I believe it is possible to address some of the
questions about truth above with an algorithm, but not all. There isn't a
substitute for reading with a skeptical eye, doing one's own research,
balancing views from experts, and filtering that against the influence money
has on the source's position. A computer could make some of that easier, but
if someone offers me a digital product that helps me verify the truth of
articles I read, for the low, low cost of only $2/month, I'm still going to
doubt the veracity of what I'm getting.

I heard a story once that sort of speaks to the issues you describe. A group
of American journalists went visited Moscow in the late 80s to visit the
former Soviet counterparts. They discussed life in each others' countries and
shared perspectives on working conditions in their trade. One American asked,
"What was it like, being directed by the communists as to what you could and
could not print?"

A Russian journalist responded, "Much the same as being directed by
capitalists."

------
dangrossman
You want to rank by truthfulness and not truthiness. :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness)

------
fchollet
Collectively agreeing on what is "true" is not an easy problem. The
crowdsourced fact-checking of Wikipedia is probably what is the closest to
what you are looking for.

------
jerf
If you provide me the function that takes a chunk of text and returns its
truth value, I'll happily finish the aggregation service for you.

As a free bonus, I'll also filter comments for you.

------
Mz
I don't think it can be done. Every group has a group think. Facts that fall
outside some scope of their collective experience/understanding of the world,
get dismissed as tall tales.

