Gregory's ServerSuppose you have a $100M batch of medicine but an inside saboteur has put poison in a few bottles and you can't determine which ones. How much is your inventory worth? $0 - or less since you have to dispose if it too. This is because the value depended on the provenance - having a reasonable basis to believe it's what it appears to be.
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3 comments
 Provenance of human written knowledge comes from a lot of places. Just because something was written by a human doesn't make it accurate or non-garbage. But the labor cost in producing misinformation that's hard to distinguish from meaningful writing in the same domain, together with a lot of systems we have in place, makes evaluating provenance a tractable problem. The ability to produce unlimited amounts of plausible-looking garbage at essentially no cost, and to crowdsource that kind of vandalism to millions of randos by disguising it as something fun, destroys that capability. It's a DDoS attack on written knowledge. |
For a lower stakes example, why is the organic produce in the grocery store more expensive? If you took the labels off and mixed it all together with the rest, it wouldn't be. The value at sale time is derived from a meticulous record keeping process that makes faking provenance comparable in cost to just doing it right.