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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.
Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).
This is simply arguing for dystopia and forsaking a new Enlightenment, a new Renaissance, because "eh, it's too hard to care."
Reputation is emotional and therefore non-objective. Animals can construct hierarchies based on reputation. We are human beings with all the tools to shape our reality. Why should we forsake our intellect for an animalistic way of life? Because it allows us to be controlled by whoever is at the top of the hierarchy dispensing reputation? This article, this idea, is poison.
mature citizen
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Yep, this is a propaganda stunt.
The message here is "blindly trust your favorite source, here's a falsely sophisticated argument for why it's okay for YOU, the smart he/she/xe/.... that you are, to do so". If listened to it could have terrible effect on society, especially if its effective on the "tech sector", the people who have pretty much the only jobs that matter in the "second industrial revolution", the people who have the power to contest the will of their employers and prevent dystopia.
If the horrors that mass surveillance + AI + automation offer us are to be averted, it is YOU that are going to have to stand up, and in order to do so, you will need a philosophical grounding in order to coordinate your efforts with your peers.
This trash article is an attempt to subvert that grounding.
This article takes the noble assumption that people actually want the truth instead of the warm, comforting embrace of the self-reaffirming echo chamber. I know more than a few people who turn to questionable news because they don't want their view of the world challenged. As long as these people exist, there will be a market for this sort of information.
Back in my age we called it "argument from authority". And even then we knew that it's bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ad verecundiam
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to-authority/
You know, lumping all politicians together like this really isn't any better than any other form of bigotry. It comes from the same place, and causes all the same problems. It's particularly harmful here, of course, because while racial or ethnic bigotry undermines our ability to live together in the same country, this undermines our ability to have a country at all. Even monarchies have politicians.
The keystone principle of representative government is that politicians are not all the same and that citizens can maintain their government by carefully choosing between those politicians. You may argue that this principle has proven to be unreliable, and I'd agree with you there with the present case in point, but that's a far cry from claiming that it's a total failure.
Good critical thinking should never be abandoned because we defer to the source of the arguments put forth. From many religions to Hitler this has proven over and over again to be a bad road to go down. Completely untrustworthy people can be right sometimes. The most rigid researcher can make a mistake. I agree that truth and validity are becoming more important. The way to recognize them, and to distinguish sound arguments from unsound arguments is to apply good critical thinking skills. Unfortunately Logic is a university level course. It really should be taught in Jr. High, and touched upon in Elementary. This would certainly boost the IQ of the general populace...which is maybe why it isn't taught. Politicians and governments get away with too many things because the people they rule don't seem to have very good bullshit detectors.