[ExI] Finally!

[BillK]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 2:14 PM, spike wrote:
> I have been looking for some means of multiplying opinions by the level of
> information in the opinion holder.  We have an informal way of doing that
> now: we find subject matter experts.  But we don't have a way to rigorously
> scale the value of an opinion, or map how an opinion might be influenced by
> external factors, such as religious or political views.  The canonizer might
> do something like that, or have the capacity to be expanded in that way.
>
>


I fear we are working in a small backwater while the tide of ignorance
sweeps past us.

A nice article published a few days ago..
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-talk-huppke-obit-facts-20120419,0,809470.story>

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012
In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
By Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune reporter    April 19, 2012

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18,
after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs
and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its
years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from
injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West
steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of
theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

"There was an erosion of any kind of collective sense of what's true
or how you would go about verifying any truth claims," Poovey said.
"Opinion has become the new truth. And many people who already have
opinions see in the 'news' an affirmation of the opinion they already
had, and that confirms their opinion as fact."

"American society has lost confidence that there's a single
alternative," she said. "Anybody can express an opinion on a blog or
any other outlet and there's no system of verification or
double-checking, you just say whatever you want to and it gets
magnified. It's just kind of a bizarre world in which one person's
opinion counts as much as anybody else's."

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister,
Emphatic Assertion.
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BillK