It looks like you're going to https://rationality.org rather than http://rationality.org. CFAR doesn't have a SSL certificate (but maybe should get one through Let's Encrypt).

Yes, you'd want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It's the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.

The anti-vax thing is one of the hardest cases. More often, people are just accidentally wrong. Like this exchange at Hacker News, which had checkable claims like:

• "The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically"
• "There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK"
• "Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US."

There would also be a useful effect for observers. That Hacker News discussion contained no citations, so no-one was convinced and I doubt any observers knew what to think. But if a fact-checker bot was noting which claims were true and which weren't, then observers would know which claims were correct (or rather, which claims were consistent with official statistics).

If these fact-checkers were extremely common, it could still help anti-vaccine people. If you're against vaccines, but you've seen the fact-checker bot be correct 99 other times, then you might give credence to its claims.

I'd prefer the framing that it's not a fact-checker, but rather an inconsistency-detector. Rather than "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is wrong", it'd say "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is in conflict with the view held by The Lancet, one of the world's most prominent medical journals". Or in 1930, it might have reported "this bot detected the claim that continents drift, which is in conflict with the scientific consensus of leading geology journals".

It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread - two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says "The UK is a much more violent society than the US" and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it's upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.

Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one's choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.

My thinking with that - not that I've thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond "interesting crazy idea" - was that one's emotions about a product can genuinely affect one's enjoyment of it.

Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy's frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother's cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I'm not sure about that.