Tag Archives: information transmission

Online reviews should include more facts

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Online reviews are a public good and increase social welfare, but they could be improved by including more concrete data. For example, a restaurant or grocery store review should list the prices of specific foods. A review of a bar or function venue could estimate the number of tables and seats and the distance between tables, thus quantifying how cramped the room is. Currently, most reviews on Google Maps, Yelp and other similar sites are vague, just stating that the reviewer had a bad or great experience, that the staff were helpful or not, etc.
The purpose of a review is (hopefully) to help others (although some people just write rants to vent their emotions). Facts in reviews would help others more than opinions. Photos of the establishment and the food are useful, because they provide factual information. Some photos are more helpful than others. For example, it is more useful to see the inside than the outside of a venue. It is not very useful to see a picture of the outdoor sign of the establishment, but a readable photo of the menu conveys lots of information. In the future, Google Maps and competitors could automatically extract text from photos that contain it, and display the information in search results. Then photos of the menu, or of prices in a grocery store would be even more useful.
The idea for this post came from fruitlessly searching the web for current prices of groceries in different supermarkets in town. It would have been helpful if recent reviews of these supermarkets had included prices of at least some items.
The grocery price comparison apps that I tried had the limitation that the prices were for specific branded products and per package (e.g. Organic Carrots 500g), not per kilogram of a generic product (e.g. 1kg of carrots). This made it difficult to compare general pricing across shops, because each shop has a different range of brands, and only the price of the exact same brand can be compared.
An easy fix to improve the apps would be to allow users to specify which differently-branded products should be treated as identical, for example “Coles orange juice 2 litres” is the same for me as “Woolworths orange juice 2 litres”. Merging similar products would also reduce the memory requirement of the app, because the product database would have fewer entries to keep track of.

Religion is wrong with positive probability

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When a person says that some god wants X or rewards X and punishes Y, then how do they know? They, a limited human, claim knowledge of the mind of a god. When asked how they know, they say either that the god told them directly (using some revelation or sign perhaps) or that the god told some other person (a prophet) in the past, who passed on the message in the form of a book or an oral tradition. They certainly do not have replicable experimental evidence. If some other person was told, then recall the telephone game (children whispering in each other’s ear change the message radically) and people’s general lying, misunderstanding and misremembering. In any case, at some point a god must have told a person.
Let us look at this unavoidable transmission link between a purported god and a human. Could not an evil spirit have impersonated the god to the human (if evil spirits exist in their religion)? Or could it have been just a hallucination, dream, false memory? Psychology shows false memories are easy to induce (Brainerd and Reyna 2005 “The science of false memory”). How could a human tell the difference? Plenty of people in insane asylums claim not only to know a god’s will but also to be a god.
If there is a method for distinguishing real revelations from gods from false ones, how do you know it works? Either a god told you directly that it works or a person told you. In both cases we arrive at the previous question: how do you know it was a god and that you (or the other person) understood and remember the message correctly? If there is a method for finding and verifying good methods of distinguishing real from fake revelations, how do you know that works? And so on. Everything eventually relies on belief in the claim of a human. There is always a positive probability that the human imagined things that were not there or is deceiving self or others. Any religious claim is wrong with positive probability.
The next fallback position for advocates of religion is that even if it is wrong with positive probability, it does no harm to believe it. But how do they know? Back to the question about knowing the mind of a god. Why cannot a god reward nonbelievers and punish believers? And which religion out of the multitude in the world should one believe for maximal benefit? Some religions claim that a wrong religion is worse than none (heresy worse than paganism), some the opposite. To compare the expected benefit from believing different religions and from atheism, one needs to know the size of the rewards and punishments and also their probabilities. All this reduces to (conflicting) claims by humans about the will of a god. Which are wrong with positive probability.