Ben Hammersley.com: Metadata and truth
Indeed, it is the presence of metadata in the first place that allows us to make probablistic guesses towards what data is to be trusted, and what isn’t. A document marked up with dates and topics and creators’ details has this many more points of fact through which to detect falsity. A document with nothing but a name, a date and some content has very little through which we can measure trust programatically.
This is another way to looking at how we manage relationships: the more we know about a person and their habits, quirks, and tendencies allows us to to know when they are acting out of character. So with a document or artifact attributed to them.
This brings to mind the section of “The Tipping Point (see link on main page) where we learn that primate brains are as big as they are for social purposes, to manage the relationships of society, remember faces and other identifiers.