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Say Goodbye To the Information Age: It's All About Reputation Now (aeon.co)
An anonymous reader shares an essay on Aeon magazine by Gloria Origgi, an Italian philosopher and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS : We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the 'information age', we are moving towards the 'reputation age', in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.
[...] The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from 'fake news' and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
[...] The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from 'fake news' and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
In other words, if it came out of any politician's mouth, it's a lie.
FTFY
The article is an appeal to authority of the worst kind. Let's hope it gets the reputation it deserves.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Quit with the false equivalency, it's lazy and not true. No politician is your perfect soulmate, but some legitimately try to improve the world. Find those, vote for those, and live with the fact that they aren't perfect. Pretending all politicians are as bad as the worst just gives more power to the worst of the worst, because we might as well elect them if all politicians are the same.
The author of the book, Gloria Origgi, is saying nearly the opposite of what many posters think she is saying.
She is saying you need to understand how you acquire knowledge and she says you need to examine the sources of that knowledge.
There's no blind trust anywhere in her writing.
She is also making two cases.
One is that reputation-trusting is how things actually work in the modern world.
There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.
Two is that you should not blindly accept new information.
Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities?
For three simple cases:
You cannot personally verify the moon landings.
You cannot personally verify the efficacy and dangers of vaccines.
You cannot personally verify the predictions of climate scientists.
All these things come from other sources, and ultimately you will need to choose and defer to the authority of one or another of these sources as being an objective authority, if you are going to accept new knowledge. And because ultimately you will be making decisions based upon the reputation of these sources, you should be aware that you are making that decision based upon a trust of reputation.
but some legitimately try to improve the world.
Exactly, and that's why I voted for Trump.
Troll detected.
By definition, a leader whose doctrine is "my country first" isn't out to improve the world. Best case scenario is that he/she is out to improve their country. In most cases, improving their country for the select few that he/she likes. In Trumps case, well, do your math.