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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.
We're entering the Age of Bullshit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Gloria Origgi brings up an interesting point of discussion. It purports to relate to the 'information age', but it has always been there.
Every time someone asserts a 'fact', we must evaluate their motives. If they don't have a discernable motive, we have to look to the source--where did that 'fact' originate, whose hands did it pass through? It's a tedious process but the only way to begin evaluating that 'fact'.
Unfortunately, we have to continually monitor our own belief in facts. They tend to become rooted to the extent that their source is forgotten. Those of us who adhere to a religion were probably indoctrinated before we were capable of rationally evaluating information. How can we now go back and confront those assumptions?
Thus, entire societies are pawns in a flow of 'information' circulating endlessly, invisibly in the ether causing a contagion that is nearly insurmountable.
Belief is a matter of accepting 'facts' without question. No sensible person would allow this. Every 'fact' can be evaluated for accuracy on a scale, say from 0 to 9. One gathers the best information available and gives a particular fact a value between those numbers. As more information becomes available, the score may change. It is never zero or nine.
But most people are averse to shades of grey. They need up or down; on or off; left or right; and nothing in between. They like slogans and easy solutions. No painful thinking required. If a fact is asserted loud enough, often enough, then it must be true. Educational systems perpetuate this problem by rote learning with no critical thought process allowed.
...omphaloskepsis often...
If only that were so. Unfortunately, until we can find perfect technology, developed by the Platonic ideal perfectly moral race of beings, technology is going to be used by bad people as a method of control and as a tool for tyrants.
https://www.theguardian.com/ne...
A good example is how we are learning that the best way to secure honest elections is to abandon technology for something much older (paper ballots, counted manually with lots of people watching).
You are welcome on my lawn.
Unfortunately, until we can find perfect technology, developed by the Platonic ideal perfectly moral race of beings, technology is going to be used by bad people as a method of control and as a tool for tyrants.
But you can make that very same argument about anything used by humans. The very paper ballots you seem to think are a solution were developed by the same immoral race of beings that have created everything since. Is that technology less susceptible to being used by bad people as a method of control or a tool for tyrants? Given the sham elections done with paper ballots in the various peoples' republics of the world, I don't think they're any more of a safeguard against political corruption than anything else.
If you have a scientifically or mathematically verified model but refuse to use it, the fault isn't with the model. The important part about paper ballots is that anyone and everyone can count them. That paper is used is immaterial, and that people can participate in the verification is the salient aspect of the system. So if you want to have an electronic voting machine, the important part is that everyone can look at the code and verify for themselves that it isn't doing anything untoward.
They are not making an appeal to authority in this case. They are making an appeal to stupidity and trying to convince them to entrust their discernment and reasoning to others. This in effect makes someone else the gatekeeper of their knowledge and subsequently their opinion. In the information age these news organizations are quickly becoming irrelevant as they no longer are the gatekeepers of information. People are waking up to the fact that we never really had a democracy due to the lies of the previous gatekeepers. This is an argument that has been made in the past by both fascists and socialists. Soon we will have a movement arise that offers one of these as solution to this problem. It will be interesting to see if people fall for the same lies that proliferated politics just 70-90 years ago.
The *only* force that motivates politicians to actually do something good for the world is public accountability.
Your optimism may be admirable, but you fail to realize a few important and inescapable facts:
1) Political power is sought-after by the most corrupt people in the world, and they are the ones who want it the most. Furthermore, people who naturally adhere to high moral standards and want to do good for the world generally do it through volunteering, charitable donations, etc. These people are not power-hungry and as such very rarely devote their lives to the kind of work one must do to attain power. So, the relative proportions of candidates begins with favoritism for the already-corrupt, by logical necessity.
2) The morally corrupt have an advantage over the morally pure during the campaign trail. They will straight-up lie to get votes, etc. So, they quickly eliminate any of the kinds of politicians you are thinking of. Once they have office, they form disgusting under-the-table alliances with rich and powerful special interest groups, in order to secure their own positions and further shut-out anyone that threatens their club with greater-good style legislation.
3) Lastly, it is a well known fact of human psychology that the human brain changes once a person attains power over others. Neural chemical changes go into effect, and a person's sense of what the "greater good" even means changes. They start to see "the masses" as petty, visionless, unable to figure out what is good for them, and generally undeserving of serious consideration. Further, they see other potentates as contemporaries who, though they may have differing agendas, actually understand a big-picture and are worthy of cooperation and special deference. This is why they do not bring charges against one another even when they are bitter rivals, and when they know that what the others have done is straight-up criminal. The old phrase is absolutely true: power corrupts.
The end result is inescapable: all politicians are evil. The only way to make them behave is to force them to behave through public accountability and devoted voter-pressure.