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.