Show HN: Marqt.org lets you vote on the truth

So, and forgive me for being reductionist: is this essentially an online poll marketplace that incentivizes pollsters and respondents to game the results? If not, can you help me understand how my (admittedly reductive) summary is incorrect?

“Truth” is fairly universally defined as the true or real state of a system or matter. Facts aren’t necessarily immutable, I would agree, since future verification efforts may include additional data, or the state of a system or matter changes over time. But they are objectively verifiable with evidence, not supposition or rhetoric.

If I were to revise your summary, I would say that a marqt is a living online poll – you can vote on something today, but if you change your mind later, you can change your vote.

I'm not sure what you mean by incentivizing pollsters and respondents to game the results, but let me take a crack at what I imagine you're thinking about (please let me know if I'm totally off).

Let's consider a scenario. Person X has a lot of influence, and so they tell everyone they know to marq their marqt true. In a world where the marqt has enough liquidity, there would potentially be a person Y that disagrees and also has influence, telling their followers to marq it false. And along the way people would add remarqs, allowing new voters to discern the nuance and existing voters to change their vote if they see a compelling enough reason why. The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is, which strengthens the validity of the number, which creates value, and whoever is responsible for creating that value should be rewarded, along with everyone else that voted and commented and participated in that creation of value.

> But [facts] are objectively verifiable with evidence, not supposition or rhetoric.

I would say everything is fair game. Evidence can be subjective too. Rhetoric can be quite convincing, especially if you have influence and repeat it over and over and others continue echoing it.

Evidence can be selective, yes, but by definition it is objective. Your last statement seems to be in opposition to your premise, because you’ve stated plainly how effective influence can be in creating an echo chamber, and “truth” then becomes merely a subjective construct, built within that chamber and becoming a constituent part of its world view.

> The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is

You’re describing the “wisdom of the crowd.” The scenario you’ve posited isn’t a version of the “wisdom of the crowd,” however. Rather, it seems to be a simple battle of resources. A popularity contest, if you will. Whoever has more “charisma capital” wins, because if the influence of a leader is wielded successfully, the executive function of the followers is short-circuited. History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. It becomes “us vs. them”, and objectivity goes out the window I’m favor of polarity.

The “wisdom of the crowd” absolutely depends on a probabilistic, noisy distribution of individual cognition. When rhetoric and influence are at play in a battle of “true or not true”, the cognitive expression of each individual is no longer a probabilistic distribution of statistical noise; it’s a coin toss, with the more influential participants supplying their own, weighted coin to their followers.

I feel like, as with most systems that rely on a group of individual cognitive perspectives and abilities, incentive or reward of any kind disqualifies that system from adhering to the vision you seem to have.

I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd.

> I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd.

Well, you are clearly correct that five users does not represent the wisdom of the crowd! When I submitted this post, I had different expectations about what the response would be. I figured it would be more trollish or techish and less about deep epistemological debates over definitions of truth, but I'm still enjoying this!

Okay, let's start with the objectivity of evidence. I think you're right – evidence may be objective, but evidence must be interpreted by individuals, and individuals may interpret evidence differently, thereby making the interpretation of evidence subjective. You might look up at the sky and say, "It is bright," but for someone that is blind, it is not bright.

> History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader.

Of course I agree, and the whole reason why I wanted to build the app. The hive mind clearly gets it wrong so many times. My premise is that everyone believes that their version of truth is The Truth. In other words, they believe their subjective truth is objective truth. And I think the best way to settle everyone's opinions of what they believe is true is to essentially put it to a vote.

And people have a hard time admitting when they were wrong, whether it's because of ego or what-have-you. But numbers don't lie. It's something that everyone can still agree on. If the hive is wrong, it is only in hindsight, because a majority was clearly convinced something was true, and the fact that we live in the digital age means that the time it takes for something to go from true to false (or vice versa) is becoming increasingly narrow, meaning it's more important than ever to keep a record of truth over time, so we have an accurate representation of history to learn from.

DONT sign up to this with your real details, there is quite literally a public endpoint to list all users along with their information

https://marqt.org/api/v1/makers/

Thanks for that. I have shut off public access to that endpoint and, after reading your post 38 minutes after you posted it, had immediately shut off all access to the API while I was looking into it.

It was something I was debating before launching because of something Tom Christie mentioned below, and I probably misread it.

> In many cases I think it's a shame that folks would choose to disable the browsable API in any case, as it's a big aid to any developers working on the API, and it doesn't give them more permissions that they would otherwise have. I can see that there might be business reasons for doing so in some cases, but generally I'd consider it a huge asset. Although, in some cases there may be details shown (like the names of custom actions) that a non-public API may not want to expose.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11898065/how-to-disable-...

In the spirit of openness and transparency, I thought it would be a good gesture to open up the API for people to poke around, but I see your point and have turned off that endpoint.

To be fair though, adding a remarq does show your full name to the public, because if you are willing to defend your marq, you should be willing to do it with your real name. The marqt switches, however, only show user handle.

In order to sign up, you only provide three things: full name, username, and email. That endpoint did allow you to see email, so I shut that off. But the other two – full name and username – would be part of any public profile.

I'm unclear how crowdsourcing will land at the truth. Even ignoring the potential for abuse and gaming the results, It seems like you would land not at truth, but at the least common denominator of how people understand things, which is quite different than facts.

I hear you. I mean, there has been an entire field of study devoted to defining what truth is for basically as long as the written word has existed.

My basic premise is that: 1. Truth is subjective. 2. Truth is dynamic.

I believe that truth is defined by what the majority of people says is true. And that that truth can change if the majority of people change their mind. Basically that empirical truth > ideal truth.

So, for example, "The sun revolves around the earth." If you lived in 250 BC, that was a true statement. Obviously, today it is not true, but if you were around when Galileo was persecuted, you might be on the fence given the evidence and data that came out after Copernicus' discoveries and possible concern over what the ruling class may have done to you if you openly expressed your thoughts. Basically, that period signaled a shift in what was deemed true.

This means that something we believe to be true today can potentially be false tomorrow, and I built this app to be able to track how "truth" changes over time, because now truth doesn't change over centuries, but month/weeks/days/minutes.

A lot of the thinking behind marqt came from the stock market (obviously, based on what I named it). There are buyers and sellers that buy something if they think it is cheap and sell something if they think it is expensive. Where they meet is the "true" price – at that moment, you can't sell it higher than what people are willing to pay for it or buy it cheaper than what people are willing to buy it.

The other aspect of the stock market is that "markets move." Just because a stock trades for a certain price right now, it changes literally by microseconds due to a myriad of factors, whether they are earnings, changes in balance sheets, correlations, interest rates, macro events, or speculation.

I think now, especially with the decentralization of media channels and how effectively the internet has increased the speed of discourse, people have a hard time trusting what they hear and read. But people trust numbers. If I told you about a movie you haven't heard of and you wanted to know if it was worth watching, you would probably look up the rating on Rotten Tomatoes. People also generally trust polls (or at the very least don't dismiss them), on the condition that the sample size properly reflects the population it is polling. And the more people you sample evenly, the more accurate the number will reflect the population.

So the idea was to build something like a voting system for truth. But instead of being stuck with your choice, you can change your mind if the circumstances change.

I am a child of the 80s and 90s, and for the entirety of my childhood, we were told that saturated fats and cholesterol were the worst things you could eat. That was true. We were shown a food pyramid that was a model of what we should eat, from most to least, with carbohydrates at the base and fat at the top. Decades later, we are now in the middle of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity after companies peddled low fat, high sugar products to the masses, making them believe they were eating healthy because "these cookies have 0g fat" and "I can't believe it's not butter." Now, certain cholesterols and fats are actually good for you, and avocado toast and butter blended into your coffee have made their way into the culture of "wellness," while health experts now tell us to avoid carbohydrates.

It was true that Iraq was acquiring massive quantities of yellowcake to build weapons of mass destruction before we went in there and found no nuclear weapons.

Bernie Madoff was a brilliant hedge fund manager before he was a fraud.

I would have loved to see how truth and facts changed from January 2020 through 2022. "Masks are effective in stopping the spread of COVID-19." "The Biontech Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective in stopping transmission of COVID."

You saw it in prediction markets the evening of the 2020 election, as Florida and some other states were being reported, as the markets fluctuated with high volatility. I built Marqt.org to be able to capture those moments in history.

OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people. Truth is not subjective. At all. If it is subjective, it is an opinion. You are setting yourself up for opinions masquerading (marqterading?) as truth. You can wrap all the philosophy you want around that, but that isn't going to change your results into truth.

The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth. People learn over time. What we thought was true in the 80s doesn't mean that truth changed, it meant that we were wrong. If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie.

>OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people.

That's a pretty gross way to dismiss philosophy and steamroll all nuance in that discussion. Appeal to popularity at best. You're taking a huge philosophical discussion and stating your opinion on it as fact, which is the opposite of curiosity.

Yes, the fact that we can both disagree on the definition of truth gets to the heart of the subjectivity of truth. I just believe that it can be quantified the same way we elect politicians and value companies.

Consider a presidential election. If you think about it, your vote is claiming "Candidate X should be president," and whether that is your opinion or what you believe to be true, it is capturing a moment in time and your vote reflects that. Leaving aside the nuances of the Electoral College, etc., that is good enough to choose the leader of the free world.

Consider a movie. If it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, chances are it's a good movie.

Now, those numbers can change. You may not like the job the president is doing, so you might no longer agree that "Candidate X should be president." Or, perhaps culture shifts and a movie that was initially panned but was oddly prescient or has enjoyed a cult following might be revisited in a different light later on. That is what I want to track.

If you want to buy a stock for a company at a certain price, the price is what it is. You can't say, "Look at their balance sheet, they lose money every year! It should be zero!" The price is what it is, and that is what I consider to be true, whether you agree or disagree. And if you look at a chart of those prices over history, you will see the record of what was true when, and you will see spikes in the graph that are records of the change in narrative around that company. That is what I am trying to do with the history tab, which gives you a graph of sentiment over time.

> The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth.

The errors or mistakes of yesterday are only errors today. They were true yesterday, and it means that what we accept as true today can be a mistake or error tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the future, so the best thing we can do is capture this moment and say, this is the best we've got today, maybe it changes tomorrow.

> If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie.

Of course, I see your point. Look at Iraq. Cheney lied, but everyone believed him. But they (the media, the politicians, the public) believed him enough for it to be "true enough" to invade a country. When we went in, what we then believed to be true no longer held true.

These are the moments that are most compelling to me, because eventually when people get called out for lying, they will deny it. Or they will not admit they were wrong. And the media will simply scrub archives of patently wrong stuff if they get called out on things.

However, if someone tells a "lie" but they believe it to be true, are they really lying?

I hope I am making my point clear enough, but I welcome your criticism and it's the reason why I built the app. I hope you try it out.

a lot of the times misinformation is about vague statements or gross generalizations.

so for me a lot of these statements the answer is "it depends"

Agreed. I just kicked it off with some initial ideas, but the idea is that open-sourcing a knowledge base will eventually run the entire range, from axiomatic statements (like F = ma) to incredibly subjective ones, like some of the ones in there right now.

You could also use it to suss out where the "it depends" range lands. For example, you could add an entire set of slightly different marqts, like "Joe Biden is a [great, good, decent, okay, effective, bad, horrible] president" to see where volume/engagement spikes the highest and where things are more even.

The marqt maker will accept any statement you create, so I hope you will add some marqts of your own!

Also, the remarq system is meant to flesh out the nuances. So, for example, "given these circumstances, this is why I marqed this statement true." I haven't added any remarqs of my own yet because I was hoping to see how users would respond to the UI flow first.

So forgive my, "adversarial," questions here, but you seem to be encouraging adversarial thinking, which is laudable, but also invites adversarial thinking onto the construct you're building as well.

Marqt, much like prediction markets, is not seeking truth, it's creating a map of a showcase of whoever bought into a particular market's emotions.

It sounds like you're motivated by creating a repo of human feedback reinforcement data which could then be used to further train or fine-tune LLM's, perhaps even to sell, is that correct?

> important for society to accurately define truth in an age when information travels (and changes) faster than ever, and when LLMs so confidently lie and have been heavily prompted to avoid controversial topics.

Yeah, I don't think what you're building is getting at the goal of, "truth," it's getting at the goal of building something sellable per my question above. To the extent that someone will be willing to buy that human feedback database is a function of what they may be trying to accomplish.

Much like in the world of so-called prediction markets, I see several of your markets as being heavily biased toward speculation and feelings, as opposed to a pragmatic approach to predicting a future outcome. What I mean by that is, you could create a really excellent scientific model and way of monitoring under what conditions a dam will break, or you could poll local people around a dam whether they feel like it will break, and you may get wildly different means and variances from the two methods. In all likelihood, there is no extra new synthesized knowledge about empirically what will physically happen with the dam that a group of average people off the street will have about that dam, in the context of a society with functioning infrastructure and tens of thousands of working dams. What you will have is a database on people's emotions about the dam, or perhaps dams in general, or the company behind the dam, etc.

So what are you really doing to, "make the world a better place?" You're not, you're making it worse by selling a vision of, "truth," that is actually muddling certain applications of practical engineering or scientific predictions further.

I think if you instead tweaked your pitch and just honestly stated that it's a repo of groups of people's feelings on various topics (and who those groups are, to the extent that you can figure that out), and not a way to, "beat LLM's with real truth," then it would be a lot more responsible.

On the other hand, you could just be a troll trying to actively muddle the truth further, in which case you can just ignore my advice, that's fine too.

> Inside the marqt maker is a fine-tuned BERT model that roughly ensures the statement is sensical, grammatical, and not a question.

Can BERT conduct logical reasoning? So further to the above, it sounds like you're using an LLM to clean human feedback data, if that's the real crux of your plan, to make reinforcement data cheaper, and everything else is a sort of 4D chess, bravo, cool project!

That was a very thoughtful comment. Let me attempt to unpack it.

My first motivation is that I believe network effects can be used to represent empirical truths and track how they change over time. The more people vote on a statement, the more accurate the sentiment around that statement will be. You can check this comment out for more context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819443

The presumed winners behind prediction and finance markets are the market makers that choose what markets they will make, and either charge a commission or collect the bid/ask spread. Anyone that is on the other side of that transaction opens themselves up to financial risk.

In the marqt, anyone can be the marqt maker and there is no financial downside.

It is more of a UGC model where the creator that builds engagement earns the points for all activity generated inside their marqt. However, there is no financial risk for participants in this system – you either vote true or false, and then try to write the best reason why you are correct (which you are both rewarded for also). You are only penalized if someone downvotes you as unremarqable (side note: you can only downvote a remarq that matches your marq, so if you marq a marqt false, then you can only downvote a remarq that is also marqed false, and those downvotes cancel if you change your marq to true).

Keep in mind that "marqs earned" are just numbers that represent activity. I'm not sure how karma is calculated on HN, but it's a similar concept.

What I am basically trying to do is think through how you might go about building and evolving something like Wikipedia using the pithiness of Twitter, as verified by Stack Overflow, while compensating creators like YouTube.

Do I think this can be used to train LLMs? Of course you could train an LLM on such a dataset. But I believe information and facts change over time, the same way sentiments around companies and weather change over time, as represented by changing stock prices and temperature. So instead of a static database, it would be a living knowledge base that could be referenced at any point.

For example, imagine a situation where you could ask, "What's the marqt say about who is responsible for the government shutdown right now?" and you could see, "Well, right now, the marqt says that 54% of people believe that Republicans are responsible." I'd rather open-source that for anyone to put out there instead of having to rely on some media outlet.

Okay, so to directly answer your question about whether I'm trying to build something sellable, the answer is yes. But who gets paid in the marqt should be the actual people that create value – anyone that makes a marq, adds a remarq, makes remarqable/unremarqable votes, or makes a marqt – and I want to track the amount of value that users create in the system so that they can eventually monetize it. It's not controversial to imagine a world where AGI replaces human labor, and if that happens, I want to have built a system where humans can be compensated by AGI for maintaining its "intelligence." I have an idea for how it would work (which I can go into, if you want), but it would only be later down the line, if we can actually build up a resilient network of truth.

I understand your reaction to the marqts I kicked things off with, but the idea is that anyone can create a marqt, and much the same way Wikipedia was limited and criticized when it first started, I believe an open-source knowledge base has exponential potential. There's a little more context in this response I posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35815567

In response to your anecdote about the dam, I think about it the way efficient markets work. If all the information is out there, then trusted sources would asymmetrically influence everyone else's votes, unless they lose that trust. But, generally speaking, the more votes, the better. And regarding your thoughts about sentiment, I think that it plays a stronger role in the grand scheme of things. There was a world where people were paying astronomical sums of money for cheaply manufactured masks and alcohol. There was a world where a crypto shell company was worth billions of dollars. There was a world where under-water mortgage backed securities were rated AAA. What's most interesting to me is when that moment changes, because no one can predict the future. And eventually the future becomes the present.

I could keep going, but maybe I'll stop here for now. Hopefully this answers most of your questions. Feel free to follow up with any other thoughts or get clarifications. But I really hope you try out the app and let me know what you think.