TCM

Should "voluntary self-criticism" become widespread, I expect to rate all of my posts as suitable for children of all ages, suitable for hypersensitive feminists, suitable for Jews and Gentiles alike, and so on. Regardless of whether I'm advocating post-birth abortions or forced encheferation of Muslim girls.

heh. I had a feeling you or someone else would would say this. as I wrote, I don't like the self-rating idea very much for the reasons you bring up and because of the pressure on authors to rate their material in certain ways. but I can see how self-ratings might coexist with a market rating system.

I believe the whole debate about PICs-type ratings and other "voluntary self-labeling" has taken us astray.

whoa, keep in mind that PICS involves "market ratings" as well. in my mind this is the key part of the proposal and most important element as I have been writing. although others have suggested they saw it exactly the opposite. we will see what happens in practice.

I don't see calls for authors to voluntarily self-rate their print works, nor do I see calls for newspapers to have articles rated.

in a sense this happens at the beginning of works. recall in Huck Finn how Mark Twain warned against what people should not read the book. columnists will sometimes say, "this is about [x], don't read it if you don't like [x]". but I agree it is somewhat silly at times for authors to rate their articles. but keep in mind we are using the word "ratings" in a very general sense. it makes total sense for authors to decide the "keywords" for their articles, for example-- and in the PICS rating system, such a use is possible.

I say it's a waste of our time to even be thinking or worrying about how to implement an infrastructure for ratings.

hmmmmmmmm, I seem to recall earlier letters in which you advocated a market-type rating system in which services could rate things, in the way that stocks are now rated, doctors/lawyers could be rated, etc.-- let a thousand ratings services bloom. (or maybe we were talking about reputations. in my mind, they are mostly interchangeable--hence my interest in "rating" systems). perhaps in the future people should be very careful to distinguish their opinions on "self-ratings" vs. "market ratings" because people seem to be conflating the two and have widely divergent opinions. also I want the reader to keep in mind that PICS supports both (and therefore to criticize it on the ground of one alone is not wholly sensible). I point out that market ratings exist and are everywhere around us. a credit rating is in fact a kind of "market rating" in the sense I am using the word-- rating of some "thing" or "person" by another entity. In fact, building such an

infrastructure could make later imposition of "mandatory voluntary ratings" (Orwell would be unsurprised) a greater likelihood.

my fear too. hopefully, designers can try to oppose it in their writings ala the Bill of Rights. but it is always the case that powerful technology capable of great good can be twisted into great evil by the evilminded. if the system is always championed as voluntary by definition, I can't see too many sinister scenarios taking place. the problem would be if people gradually lost this understanding over time. unfortunately there is ample precedent for that kind of thing again in our government, where the concept of "of, by, and for the people" seems to have become blurry, to say the least.