I like this idea, but measuring the magnitude of negative effects is hard. You can't trust companies to report how many hours of sweatshop labor they use per unit, and in many cases that information is scattered between the manufacturers of many different parts and no one really knows. Similarly for energy used, types and amounts of toxins released, politicians bribed, small guys sued, and so on. It might also be a lawsuit magnet.
Yeah, cases where there's strongly motivated deception are a real test case for techniques for reasoning under noisy data.
I'd sort of like to see an effort like this that embraced both viewpoint pluralism and nymity/reputation.
That is, let anyone who wants to write an article making out a case for the net impact of a given practice, but have a social norm requiring that they actually register under their real names, and provide a mechanism whereby users of the system can easily get a summary of what sorts of claims a given user makes.
Maybe even introduce ...
Lately I've been thinking about all of the various services and products I consume and how pretty much all of them are bad for the world in one way or another, large or small. Some of the problems associated with them I am less concerned about. Some of them could be construed as good things (i.e. sweat shop labor DOES provide jobs, whatever impact it might or might not have on the overall quality of life).
In general I'd like to live my life having as minimal a negative impact on the world as possible. But "negative impact" is a hugely broad topic and there are a million variables to consider and I just don't have time.
The best solution, I think, would be to have a wikipedia-like website where individual people with knowledge of specific problems can start tagging specific products with the types of negative consequences associated with them, and (somehow) sort those consequences into categories that individuals can decide how much to worry about. Over time it could eventually become a fairly efficient way to track the utility value of things.
I'm sort of hoping something like this already exists, even if in an infant form, and that someone here knows about it. But I doubt it, so the I guess this falls mostly under the post category of "hey someone other than me should devote a bunch of time and energy to this project that I myself am not qualified to do." But maybe a few people here at least have a better idea than I do of the scope of the requirements for it, so the idea can be refined a bit.