
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6: Prioritizing Trustworthiness in the book Holy War for True Democracy.
DG trustworthiness scores on Internet identities are weighted by two things:
- A confidence value that the judge provides when submitting a judgment (see the earlier section titled “Judgments”)
- The trustworthiness score of the judgment reviewer
Remember that each judgment will be reviewed by a higher level DG member. The subject of the judgment will have an opportunity to review, too, if the subject so desires.
When computing the overall trustworthiness score for an Internet identity, DG algorithms will weight high confidence judgments more than low confidence judgements and will weight judgments from people with high trustworthiness scores more than judgments from less trustworthy people. Initial algorithms might use a simple fractional multiplier approach for the weighting factors, but over time mathematicians and social scientists might come up with improved mathematical approaches.
Therefore, DG software algorithms will calculate a consensus judgment score that takes into account the various confidence and DG scores of the judges and reviewers, which will usually produce a consensus opinion based on conclusions from informed, trustworthy people. Note that this approach contains a good deal of subjective opinion, so the results will not be precise. Nevertheless, they will tend to show which information sources are reliable and which are not, with written documentation to back up the judgment. Furthermore, these scores will motivate information providers to be trustworthy to avoid public rebuke.