To some the solution is straightforward, it's a stupid name, don't use it. For other, however, it's subverting the will of the people and specifically the will of people who took time out of there day to participate in a vote which they believed would result in the name of a new space station. There is an argument on both sides, so I propose a way that these types of polls can be implemented without such problems. Are real issue is this: When does the poll "trust" the right answer. Here we define trust explicitly as "Not coming from a flood of biased individuals"
As Nasan Bos (Et Al.) point out, research shows that it can be very difficult to develop trust in an online setting, as compared to face-to-face. This is further compounded if the individuals don't think they will interact in the future with other members of the community, or in this case the pollsters. In the case of the NASA poll, both of these issues are troublesome for creating a reputation system. As resnik states reputation systems must have three components
1)Long-lived entities that inspire an expectation of
future interaction;
2)Capture and distribution of feedback about current
interactions (such information must be visible
in the future); and
3)Use of feedback to guide trust decisions.
In this case we can't have at true reputation system, because we can't track users. We can all but give up on 1), unless we envisioned a universal voting website with users etc. and functionality like e-bay.(which is actually a good website concept, but that's another story). The problem we deal with occurs in (2) because the distributions of feedback about the current interaction is skewed, in our case, from individuals biased from TV who then flood the site. This immediately puts all other choices at a disadvantage. To counter-act this sort of flooding-bias, "High rated" names should be put on a "chopping block" and thus each vote actually consists of two voted: "One name to suggest" and "one name to reject." The result allows "down votes", or votes that take away from the total tally of the original voting count. This method could eliminate instances in anonymous voting where someone floods the poll with biased user. This feedback mechanism encapsulates component (3) because we allow feedback from the poll to further enhance the trustworthiness of the population by putting the population in a position to promote any name, and demote any popular name. What do you think?
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I am not surprised that Colbert's supporters put his name in the running for the space-node, since he did convince his viewers he was running for president last year. It seems like viewers are not getting the irony in his suggestions. Anyway, it seems like NASA did need to come up with a reputation system for the suggestions posted. Perhaps there could have been a minimum time requirement for how long you needed to spend on the website posting, ensuring that only dedicated and serious people would take the time to do that.
ReplyDeleteEither some people are very easy to convince or people would like the see the name Colbert on a spacecraft because it is funny. Your point about not being able to create a fully functional reputation system is valid because tracking has become increasingly difficult(as the push to keep user anonymous become more popular). A voting system of a result could help, but I could see this also being manipulated by the same group of users who want a silly name on a NASA spacecraft. What NASA could do is secretly create a Bayesian spam filter that would denote some words (and thus sequence of words) as spam. If it deduces that the entry is spam, then it should leave that entry up for 2 seconds, removed it, and say that due to its unpopularity, the choice was demoted. It's sneaky, underhanded and slightly wrong, but it works.
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