Related to: Could auto-generated troll scores reduce Twitter and Facebook harassments?, Do we underuse the genetic heuristic? and Book review of The Reputation Society (part I, part II).

Today, algorithms can accurately identify personality traits and levels of competence from computer-observable data. FiveLabs and YouAreWhatYouLike are, for instance, able to reliably identify your personality traits from what you've written and liked on Facebook. Similarly, it's now possible for algorithms to fairly accurately identify how empathetic counselors and therapists are, and to identify online trolls. Automatic grading of essays is getting increasingly sophisticated. Recruiters rely to an increasing extent on algorithms, which, for instance, are better at predicting levels of job retention among low-skilled workers than human recruiters.

These sorts of algorithms will no doubt become more accurate, and cheaper to train, in the future. With improved speech recognition, it will presumably be possible to assess both IQ and personality traits through letting your device overhear longer conversations. This could be extremely useful to, e.g. intelligence services or recruiters.

Because such algorithms could identify competent and benevolent people, they could provide a means to better social decisions. Now an alternative route to better decisions is by identifying, e.g. factual claims as true or false, or arguments as valid or invalid. Numerous companies are working on such issues, with some measure of success, but especially when it comes to more complex and theoretical facts or arguments, this seems quite hard. It seems to me unlikely that we will have algorithms that are able to point out subtle fallacies anytime soon. By comparison, it seems like it would be much easier for algorithms to assess people's IQ or personality traits by looking at superficial features of word use and other readily observable behaviour. As we have seen, algorithms are already able to do that to some extent, and significant improvements in the near future seem possible.

Thus, rather than improving our social decisions by letting algorithms adjudicate the object-level claims and arguments, we rather use them to give reliable ad hominem-arguments against the participants in the debate. To wit, rather than letting our algorithms show that certain politicians claims are false and that his argument...

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