Value and Veracity

Tech Debug recently pointed out a big loophole in Wikipedia’s referencing system.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Make up a “fact.”
2. Write your fact on a Wikipedia entry without citing a reference.
3. Wait for a journalist from some “respectable” news organization to come along and mention your fact in a publication.
4. Edit the Wikipedia entry to cite the publication.
5. Watch as the world reels in confusion.

So this sounds pretty dumb, but apparently it actually happened with Sasha Baron Cohen’s Wikipedia entry (with the Independent being the “respectable” news organization), and now nobody in the world is sure whether or not he had a career in finance before switching to acting.

We probably underestimate how common this is. One little inaccuracy on Wikipedia can reach thousands of readers in a relatively short time. If the misinformed go on to replicate this inaccuracy, then the mistake becomes exceptionally hard to correct.

It appears that philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who advocated an anarchistic view of (scientific) knowledge, has won.

If, like me, you don’t have time to read Sach’s new book, take an hour to watch his recent talk at Google. It starts out a bit slow but is ultimately worthwhile.

One great point I hadn’t heard before was for direct carbon taxes over a cap & trade system: since carbon emissions are almost exactly proportional to the carbon in coal that comes out of mines, plus petroleum from oil wells, plus maybe a couple other sources, we can very efficiently monitor and tax the carbon coming straight out of the source (eg, the quantity of coal coming out of the mine) rather than monitoring the emissions out of every smokestack at every power plant and factory. Cap and trade does have the theoretical advantage of setting a well-defined limit on emissions, but it comes with a much larger implementation cost.

As Sachs says, financial types might find the idea of a carbon market sexy, but considering the failures of some recent “financial innovation,” I think it’s prudent to avoid a complex financial solution when a simple and effective tax-based solution is available.

Thanks again to Jamie for this tip and another one: haikus on financial markets.