How knowledge can be validated without fear of individual bias.

Break problems down to their smallest parts — Rene Descartes

We are living in a misinformation age.

The information age was supposed to provide simple, free, and easy access to more knowledge than any generation before us. In actuality, the more information we have, the less we all seem to know.

A major contributor to this problem is the biased, centralized sources most people use to consume news and information.

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, so the future of humanity’s intellectual freedom depends on the ability to validate knowledge independent of any central authority.

So just as Bitcoin and Ethereum adjudicate transactions without a central authority, so too must humanity devise a method to validate its knowledge in a decentralized way.

However, a valid concern about decentralized knowledge validation is the possibility of bias. After all, if one is going to crowd-source critical analysis to one’s peers, what reassurances does one have that a group of a saboteurs is not going to edit our collective knowledge base?

The threat is very real. The credibility of Wikipedia, for instance, has been badly damaged by examples of extreme bias. The bias is so large that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger published a blog to explain why the site can no longer be trusted.

Decentralized decisions without bias

To eliminate bias in its knowledge validation juries, Knowledgecoin’s algorithms break every claim into its smallest components, and distribute them across its decentralized network until the claim has been vetted.

This is akin to testing a chemical formula by distributing information about its atomic components to a decentralized jury of chemists and physicists. For example, the jury must vet H (hydrogen) and O (oxygen) before it can continue to the relationship between the two.

The jury’s output is then redistributed in larger information chunks for further jury validation, e.g., H2O, etc., until the entire formula has been validated or invalidated.

The case of chemical formulas being broken down to their atomic elements is a useful analogy for the algorithmic strategy used for any claim. For any claim being vetted, the idea is the same: analyze it into its atomic elements of meaning, and vet each layer of meaning in ways that eliminate bias.

Knowledgecoin atomizes claims

Knowledgecoin atomizes claims, and distributes them semi-randomly throughout its jury system. This is so that at the lowest level of verification each isolated validator verifies only a single atom or unit of meaning independently of its larger context, and thus cannot detect any ideological implications, eliminating the possibility of bias at the base level.

The process is semi-random because jury members must maintain an accuracy rating based on previous jury activity: only reliable jury members are eligible for random jury selection.

The atomizing stage is only the first stage. The same algorithms used to atomize claims are then reversed to recombine them.

For example, the claim “water is H2O” would first be broken down into its meaning atoms, “water”, the “is” relation, “H2” (further broken down to “H+H”), and “O”, and juries would be presented with data sets that include pictures of bodies of water, the word “hydrogen” paired with the atomic symbol “H”, etc.

The next round algorithm redistributes the combined results to the jury, which validates the original claim, “water is H2O”.

The Knowledgecoin system scores and rates validators at each level — akin to Amazon seller ratings — and allows only competent jurors at any level, L1, to be selected at any higher level, L2.

In this way, a juror’s reliability is rated similar to a captcha competence rating: if the majority of the decentralized jury votes that a certain captcha picture is of a traffic light, but an individual juror votes that the picture is not of a traffic light, then that juror’s competence rating goes down.

The Knowledgecoin algorithms, therefore, are designed to preserve the wisdom of crowds, while eliminating the problems of group think.

In short, the Knowledgecoin blockchain protocol is the solution to the problem of misinformation and bias in the adjudication of truth claims.

About the Authors:

Rick Repetti: Professor of Philosophy at CUNY, Vice President at the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), and Chief Philosophy Officer at Knowledgecoin.io.

Mark Gleason: Mark Gleason is a Chief Enterprise Architect, Venture Capitalist, and Board Member at Knowledgecoin.io.