Re: Digital Press Passes and Decentralized Public Key Infrastructures

On 7/22/21 5:04 PM, David Karger wrote:
>
> An infrastructure that categories trust by context would be powerful, 
> but I fear it would be too complex for most people to manage.   That's 
> why the tool we're building uses a generic notion of trust.  Because 
> what you are trusting is not people's expertise on a particular topic, 
> but rather their tendency to only opine on topics where they have 
> expertise.  Thus, your dermatologist who opines on heart transplants 
> should not be trusted.
>

I agree 100%.  To make it a bit more concrete, a key item on the list of 
things that should be seriously damaging to one's credibility is making 
a claim (without suitable disclaimers) outside of one's area of 
credentials. I think most professionals with credentials are quite good 
about this.

I see this all the time as a customer/client/patient, where the 
professional is careful not to speak on a subject where they don't have 
the expertise/credentials. As a recent example I had an xray, and the 
technician kind of hinted that everything was fine, but was clear about 
how only the doctor could "read" the xray and give me the result.

The problem is that when someone breaks these rules, (1) they are too 
often rewarded, and (2) there's no good way to get the word out that 
they are breaking the rules.  I'm hoping a technical solution could 
address (2) and that might even be enough to address (1) as a side-effect.

But as an informal starting point, we can nudge people toward condemning 
people who misuse their credentials.

       -- Sandro


> On 7/22/2021 3:49 PM, Annette Greiner wrote:
>> One important angle on this question is the context of a statement. A 
>> list of who’s trusted and who isn’t would need to include who is 
>> trusted _in_what_context_. For example, a physician who specializes 
>> in dermatology cannot prima facia be taken as an authority on heart 
>> transplants, nor vice versa. Part of the misinformation landscape 
>> we’ve seen of late is characterized by people getting credit for 
>> roles in which they have no expertise because they have credit in 
>> some other high-profile role. It would be a serious error on our part 
>> to develop a mechanism of people generating lists of those who they 
>> consider trustworthy without reference to context.
>> -Annette
>>
>>> On Jul 21, 2021, at 9:21 PM, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us 
>>> <mailto:bob@wyman.us>> wrote:
>>>
>>> The best answer to the question "Who decides who is in and who is 
>>> out?" is probably "Who cares? Do whatever feels good." The important 
>>> thing in building a curated list is to simply build it.
>>