Consumerium and pubwan
This is offered in the spirit of "compare and contrast," as was AnewGoAndPubWan at WikiWorld.
Consumerium seems to focus primarily on matters of conscience, whereas pubwan seeks transparency for its own sake.
normative criteria
This is offered not as a suggested Consumerium activity, but is a red herring. It is a well-known fact that authoritarian concepts such as norms and competitive concepts like criteria are decidedly off-topic for Consumerium. It is hoped, nevertheless, that this feeble attempt at elucidation of the concept of normative criteria can provide some insight on the nature of Consumerium.
The word "normative" in this context should be taken as "normative as contrasted with positive," NOT "normative as contrasted with abnormative."<a href="#eno">1</a> The concept of a normative/positive dichotomy is lifted from Langham's mercilessly preachy, mind-bendingly boring, but nevertheless pregnant tome Price Theory. It's uncertain from whence he lifted it, but it seems to be in common use in numerous disciplines. Maybe that means we can blame trolls. In any event, without further adieu...
To distill my (mis?)conception of the normative/positive dichotomy in as few words as I can, I would venture that "normative" is to "positive" as "w:de jure" is to "w:de facto." As I recall, Langham in his characteristically pugnacious style compared "normative" to something along the lines of "wishful thinking" and "positive" to "empirical." The present author, of course, wishes to remain Agnostic.
The apparent cultural tendencies of Consumerium, like those of the present author, seem to indicate an admiration for many ideas some would regard as normative. If normative is (?) to subjective as positive is to objective, this might explain the tolerance, or even encouragement, of factionalization.
The idea that selection (or design) criteria can be normative may have applications to EFA. The MOO (multi-objective optimization) method roughly fleshed out in the EFA piece seeks to "rank order preferences" in two dimensions which we might call "signum" ("more is better" vs. "less is better") and (high vs. low) "priority." In the Consumerium EFA piece, we denote degrees of signum as "min" or "max," and degrees of priority as "hi" or "lo." I have dubbed this (WLOG?) the "maxhi schema." "Maxhi" corresponds roughly to the w:Newspeak expression "doubleplus good."
The idea that norms are subjective would seem to imply that different people assign both different signa and different priorities to different selection objectives.
It is the present author's guess that disagreement over priorities would be found to be more common than disagreement over signa, were a population of people to encode their personal normative preferences using the maxhi schema. Correspondingly, one might expect controversies over signal (adjective form of signum?) issues to be more along "factional" lines.
I propose considering a "user template" for coding normspecs (normative specifications). This template should have certain qualities...
- A blank one would be simply a list of variables.
Hopefully variables with ordered domains are not too classicalist a concept to be palatable to egalitarian-ish factions. In the spirit of MOO, variables in this context can also be called "objectives."
- The master template should encode all
equations describing relations between variables. Since Consumerium implements Media Wiki, which in turn (at least in Wikipedia) implements a TeX-like representation of mathematical notation, this could be(?) implemented in the short run, no? Can we assume mathematics is palatable to Consumerium?
- It should be possible to submit large amounts
of subjective (personal) normative information into the public domain in a way that does not compromise people's legitimate demands for privacy. Database "views" may facilitate this process, but a more vigilant form of data security may be needed.
- The database schema should facilitate
detection of certain patterns in normative data points, especially areas of consensus. For example, a broad consensus on a "min" value for a signal dimension of several objectives might lead to a tentative list of "social bads."
- In the event that a modicum of (expletive deleted) classicalism
is palatable, areas of non-consensus may have potential for what economists call "w:gains from trade." An interesting question is whether there is a non-cynical way of "exploiting" such discoveries. Another is whether non-analytical methods already in use by "everyone" (i.e. the amoral but superintelligent Invisible Hand) represent a "best of all possible worlds" solution to the aggregate MOO, in which case Consumerium and pubwan alike are mere exercises in intellectual masturbation. Is it true that Consumerium is based on a hypothesis that such solutions, while optimal, may be "unhealthy?"
- A primitive taxonomy of factions may be
derivable through distance vectors or some other quick and dirty (and SQL-friendly?) method.
- Hopefully such normspecs can be
used to define selection criteria for EFA-based database queries from databases that are both empirically researched and incomplete-information-aware.
<a label="eno">1Actually the present author delights in the abnormative.</a>