Philosophical Research:Rating Hub

This is a tentative thesis portal which may be expanded out into a category or namespace.

The point of this project is to devise a method of rating non-fiction information sources for whether they contain education or misinformation. Many such systems of analyzing information have existed before, but none of them have considered the prospect of rating information both A) for accuracy to the material world and B) for being intelligible to people of all education levels and of all ideologies or belief systems. In the real world, philosophies and ideologies are a common wall against the actual intelligibility of information. Information sources regularly expect people to be blank slates and to inherently respect the notion of "being neutral" when in reality human beings always come into an information source with some existing ontology of the world which filters how they will interpret the credibility of the source and the meaning of the statements. In the end, successful communication cannot be achieved without carefully considering what ontologies, signifiers, and propositions people already have and would use to discover or communicate concepts themselves. This may not always be possible for a source aimed at many groups of people, but in any case, there are guidelines sources can follow to broadly approximate this kind of authentic connection.

Videos, articles, or works from a particular source will be rated qualitatively based on some open rubric of useful questions. Works should not be rated numerically, but on something more resembling a pass-fail system. The rubric should not be taken as closed, but more as an open list which has a particular set of questions at one time (which may be noted on each rating entry) and a different or longer set of questions at another time. The rubric should be regarded as something of a set of testing hurdles where further and further hurdles can be added to try to discover a single point of failure. As such, it is important to record the set of questions or number of questions used for each entry and a date or version identifying what list of questions it was based on. The rating of particular works may change as the rubric is expanded, prompting any rating applying to the source as a whole to be recalculated.

Why give works and sources ratings? Social platforms such as YouTube have a terrible problem. They are based in vicious competition between all the individuals that create anything on them. Even if nobody intends to overshadow anyone else, everyone is competing for the same pool of limited attention and connection. This can sometimes give channels the incentive to totally discredit and attack each other as people for tiny things just so more of the limited attention pool can go to the supposedly "nice" or "enlightened" people. Solidarity is ruined. But, what if instead of people discrediting each other everyone was just shown the best in everybody and an honest record of their mistakes? This would encourage Marxist outlets and progressive sources across the world to work together. Rating sources on their performance could, counter-intuitively, allow people to look at lower-quality sources more charitably and nudge them to fix their mistakes.

One note on sources: there will be some number of sources which are perfectly okay to put on a rating page but would not be considered "notable" for the purpose of coding into ontology Items in the main ontology project. In many cases, it is better to take propositions out of the sources or works and code them into Items while mentioning where the proposition came from on those pages, while only giving the sources and works themselves rating pages. This is very often true with video channels, while it would not necessarily be true for something like stacks of issues of popular magazines that happened to be receiving rating pages.

The following system can be used for coding either the results of test-questions or works as a whole: "G" / Good, "NG" / Not Good, "U" / Unknown, "N/A" / Not Applicable, "E" / Excepted.

Ratings

YouTube

• YT/communistsofamerica
• YT/DaemonSultan
• YT/PlanetCritical
• YT/PredictiveHistory
• YT/SocialismForAll
• YT/swcclectures2031
• YT/Miscellaneous

Possible rubric questions

Ideas for rubric questions - not guaranteed to be good ideas

Country-internal or country-independent questions

• Is this description or argument scientifically accurate? ("Scientific consensus test") - P201
• Is this description or argument historically accurate? Does it present the set of events that have happened as far as anyone can tell or does it present another unverifiable set of events? ("Historical accuracy test") - P202
• Can one take this description or argument and identify the historical progression of tangible objects and processes it is describing? ("Object test") - P206
• Does this description or argument strictly put which figures are in authority and which authority figures people side with over what factually happened? ("Figurehead test")
  • May be used to fail conspiracy theories. Rather hilariously highlights a lot of historical Trotskyist arguments as actually being conspiracy theories.
  • "The proletariat" is not an authority figure. "Stalin" or "Trotsky" do count as authority figures.
• Is this description or argument unnecessarily opaque for its intended educational level? ("Dirac test") - P203
• Is this description or argument so terribly boring and full of monotone writing that normal people would not be able to focus?
• Would this description or argument make somebody with ADHD look like they have totally normal executive function when they choose to stop listening to it?
• If normal people saw this description or argument, would they actually care that this was the answer? Is the description or argument answering the wrong question rather than the questions everyone actually wants answered? ("Question-begging test") - P207
• Is it possible this description or argument would sound completely stupid if the author just woke up, got out of bed and touched grass? ("Sunny test") - P214
• Does this description or argument spend so much time on describing problems most people already know about it takes time away from contemplating solutions? ("Althusser test") - P208

Country-external questions

• Does this description or argument heavily rely on concepts or terms that normal people may fail to comprehend or reject as being coherent concepts? ("Signs test") - P213
• Will everything in this description or argument become irrelevant to anybody else the day its particular speaker stops selling products? Is the description or argument solely a description of a particular business territory designed to be mutually exclusive with everything else even when it stops existing? ("Billboard test")
• Would this description or argument be intelligible to a peasant? ("Peasant test")
• Would this description or argument be important to a Common Raven? (Replace this with any wild corvid of choice.) ("Raven test")
• Would this description or argument be inherently objectionable to Leon Trotsky? - P204
• Would this description or argument look ridiculous if you brought it from the United States and showed it to people in China? ("China test")
• Would this description or argument become utterly nonsensical to somebody who had never ever heard of Cartesian-style formal logic? ("Descartes test") - P205

Agenda questions

• Could this description or argument be used to argue for shooting Black people to death to "protect" the people of United States towns? ("George Floyd test")
• Could this description or argument be used to argue for invading Vietnam? ("Vietnam test")
  • A test that many anticommunist fables and propositions attempting to talk about "utopias" fail.
• Could this description or argument be used to argue for inadvertently shattering China into multiple countries? ("Three Chinas test")
  • This test mostly applies to works claiming to clear up misconceptions about China that just make things more confusing.
  • This test squeaks by the "signs test" on the merit that it can be used to mark works "U / Unknown" due to the sheer creation of contradictory narratives between multiple people. No need to worry about whether individual members of the audience care about having an accurate picture of China or hate China, because obfuscating the story around China violates the principle of giving accurate factual accounts of recent history.

Nuance questions

• Do any of the problems identified with this rubric constitute fatal problems in context, or could they still allow information to be communicated and learning to happen anyway? - P299
• Is the description or argument being studied too full of personal or subjective experiences to evaluate with a focus on its factual content? If so, mark the work E / Excepted.
  • This is, for example, for video channels mostly containing factual arguments but suddenly containing a channel announcement detailing life events. The channel announcement is considered "non-notable" for rating purposes.