"The deniers and their think-tanks would be exposed to the sun; they’d lose their thin cover of legitimacy."
Don't we have the ability to do this now by visualizing or analyzing citations? A set of "fake" think-tanks which promote bogus ideas should be identifiable as a mostly-disconnected component of a graph today. We don't need to get each think tank's explicit opinions about the others. Aaronson points out this single-purpose inquiry would encourage gaming, but analyzing a graph built for other incentives may give more "honest" results (at least for a while).
Don't we have the ability to do this now by visualizing or analyzing citations? A set of "fake" think-tanks which promote bogus ideas should be identifiable as a mostly-disconnected component of a graph today. We don't need to get each think tank's explicit opinions about the others. Aaronson points out this single-purpose inquiry would encourage gaming, but analyzing a graph built for other incentives may give more "honest" results (at least for a while).
And we have, at least five years ago: http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/01/using-pagerank-to-ass... . You can follow links from there to a project called EigenFactor, academic research about shortcomings of PageRank in this application, and more.
Results of such analyses should be used as input to human thought processes and not some sort of legislative robot.