No, actually, it takes that into primary consideration. It simply
extrapolates out to Internet scale by asking "what if everyone did
this?"
Well, and then by extrapolating what we know of past spammer behavior
and current spammer capabilities.
And, as you know (or should), any datum obtained by extrapolation is of
at least slightly doubtful value.
Not that we (FWVO "we") shouldn't extrapolate. But we shouldn't
confuse extrapolations with facts.
[...] and B) large numbers of incompetent users -- which is what we
have -- do not en masse magically become competent.
Actually, at many tasks, they do. Not individually, of course, but en
masse; individuals' input needs statistical processing to produce the
more-competent output, though this can sometimes be as simple as just
taking the mean. (See _The Wisdom Of Crowds_.)
One of the repeated mistakes made in the anti-spam field over the
past twenty years -- and I'll admit to making it too -- is to presume
that just beause spammers aren't doing something today, that they
can't do it tomorrow.
Indeed. But it is equally wrong to presume that just because they can
do something, they will. And, even if they do, this is not a static
field; even something that ultimately gets defeated may be useful,
either in the interim or in what it teaches us.
Spammers have proven to us that once something starts to catch on,
they will invest the time to figure out if they can turn it to their
advantage.
Some of them. Spammers are no more a homogenous class than
anti-spammers are. This - FWVO "this" - may well prove to be useless
against certain classes of spammer, possibly even actively harmful.
But that is not to say that it will be useless against all spammers,
nor that it won't prove to have overall positive value. (Not to say
that it will, either, of course.)
Of course, that's all generalities. As for the specifics of this
particular instance, I see this as a space in which standardization is
actually a bad thing. Even stipulating that your extrapolations are
dead on, your dismal outlook is predicated upon there being one
widely-deployed system; postulating dozens of TiS systems, each
slightly different and incompatible, leads me to a much more hopeful
outlook. And that's what research often is: trying dozens of things to
see what we can learn from them.
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