What is TruthBear?
TruthBear is a new platform that I've been working on to let people get high quality information they can trust.
We live in a world where there is a deep schism between people - you've probably noticed. It is perfectly reasonable that people have different views on moral issues. But there is an underlying reality. And although we can't directly access it, what we've seen is that people cannot even agree on simple facts - what has happened, and what is happening. None of us has a monopoly on what is true, but we can work together to reconverge on reality.
In my mainline career as an investment professional, I've been fortunate to have access to high quality news sources, and to work with people who thought deeply about the world, and were happy to share their conclusions. Being uncertain about the world - what is happening, and how it might affect us - is a great source of insecurity for many people. My hope is that TruthBear allows us to understand the world together, and to remove that source of insecurity.
The idea is that you decide what topics you care about. You can see information that other people have collected about them, and contribute your own sources. And then you say what you believe, and why you believe it. An example of a belief might be something serious, contemporary, with global importance like "Iran's nuclear weapons program has effectively resumed" or a more niche topic like "Homework in primary school does little to improve learning".
TruthBear tracks your beliefs along with the beliefs expressed by people in your extended network - your friends, their friends, the experts and celebrities that you follow. Where their beliefs align with yours, that makes them more credible to you, and where you disagree that reduces their credibility. A Bayesian updating algorithm tracks the credibility of everyone in your network.
Crucially, credibility weights are individual. You and I will assign people different credibility weights based on how well aligned they are with our different views.
Once you have these credibility weights, you can do several things. First, on any given topic, you can see what the most credible people in your network believe, on a credibility-weighted basis. But more importantly, you can see what the most credible people you know are thinking about - often, the bias shown by traditional sources isn't in flat misrepresentations, but in what they select to show you. You can decide what you click, but you can't decide to click something you were never shown.
You can get updates as understanding evolves. I'm sure I believe lots of wrong things that have been debunked. I got the initial message, but I never got the update. The TruthBear platform can let you know when credible people move away from a belief you have, so you can see whether something changed.
The TruthBear protocol allows people to make attestations about what other people believe. This allows people or autonomous agents to track the belief statements that prominent public figures make in interviews, and write in articles and blogs. So, even in advance of them joining TruthBear, the beliefs of our political, business and academic leaders can exist in TruthBear. The end goal of TruthBear is for it to be a human network for humans, but in advance of everyone getting there, we can still have this information on the platform.
Timelines in TruthBear are broadly immutable (you can retract, but the retraction is visible). This frees us from news-cycle length attention spans. Having a record of what was important to us in the past allows us to revisit it and see whether it resolved, and what the resolution was. Immutable timelines also reduce the incentive for opportunistic flip-flopping - if the facts change, you can change your mind, but you can't change the past.
TruthBear is open and peer-to-peer. It's important that there is no centralized control. You are free to write your own client; you are free to modify the one I've written; you can see the internal workings; you can change the parameters if you want. The idea is that we already have social networks with algorithms based around attention. TruthBear is an information tool with an algorithm that you control, based around credibility rather than attention-seeking.
Hopefully that sounds great. So, where are we? I have defined the core protocol, and created a reference implementation in Python. There's a library and command-line program for controlling timelines. The TruthBear web application that most users will interact with has been through several iterations - I'll describe that process in another post. There have been limited private trials to figure out what works in practice and what doesn't. I hope to have a version that people can actually use within a couple of months.
In the next post I'll go into more depth about how TruthBear works in practice.