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.

Comments

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[Cornwallis]

In other words, if it came out of any politician's mouth, it's a lie.

FTFY

Malicious crock of shit

[ohnonononono]

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

she

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.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[PopeRatzo]

Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).

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).

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Objectivity is established through equivalent reports from multiple observers.

That's it. Everything boils down to that, because all any individual has to go on is subjective experience. You can't establish objective facts about reality by yourself, it is a logical impossibility (you might be hallucinating, crazy, emotionally biased, and so on). This is how science works and has always worked.

Mathematics is just a modeling tool; the formulas upon which we rely have been established as reliable via the process I just mentioned above. Mathematics doensn't produce objectivity; it is a highly-refined product of our methods of producing objectivity (and it took many centuries of refinement to get to it's current state).

So, individuals now swim in an ocean of information, which includes quite a lot of bullshit. How are we to discern truth from falsehood? The same way we always have: we look for verification from multiple sources that we trust.

That is all we have ever had to go on, and the Internet hasn't changed that at all.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

User ID > 5 million.

Achievements = 2

I guess you don't have enough reputation to be trusted.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

(Hit post too soon) No wonder you dis reputation. You dont have any.

I would argue in favor of reputation because I have an achievement score of 34 and I have karma to burn

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[jenningsthecat]

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."

Technology also provides us with the impossibility of the both-broad-and-deep analysis of raw data that we need to navigate even the present, never mind the future. That's because it presents to us with a huge amount of complex data about a huge number of important topics. Additionally, that same technology is itself an ever-rapidly expanding source of complex raw data. This is true even for those of us who have the intelligence, knowledge, and interest to have this discussion - how much more applicable is it to those who don't have these things?

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.

Humans are animals; we have always constructed "hierarchies based on reputation", and probably always will. This is analogous to programming in a higher level language. Even if you're capable of understanding and programming the 'bare metal', (which most programmers probably aren't), you probably don't get out a hex editor and analyze the code that your compiler has produced - you trust the reputation of the compiler based on its past performance. You trust it to do the appropriate job until you see some behaviour that gives you cause for mistrust, at which point you then investigate more deeply. If you keep encountering problems then the compiler loses your trust, at which point you either do something to improve it, or move on to a different development environment. Civilization is built on this kind of 'abstractive shortcut', and most of the technology we rely on simply wouldn't exist at this point in time without it.

mature citizen

she

Yep, this is a propaganda stunt.

This assumes facts not in evidence. It also strikes me as "emotional and therefore non-objective".

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".

FTA: "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? (emphasis mine) ... ... These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source (emphasis mine), something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations". Translated to my previous analogy, this might say "keep evaluating your compiler's behaviour and results, but don't waste time looking at every line of object code without good reason". It really doesn't sound to me as though she's advising people to "blindly trust" anything. She's simply acknowledging that we can't personally evaluate all of the data available about all of the things that affect us, because it's just too big a job and it takes too much time.

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

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[jarkus4]

Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).

Not really, since we need to establish facts first that we use to gain those insights. Average person is pretty much unable to establish facts about any non reproducible events - we need to rely on others to provide us those and rate their "truth" by their reputation and number of matching reports. Unfortunately if there are big players (eg countries) involved with their own agenda those methods become seriously insufficient.

For example the recent poisoning in the UK: UK points at Russia and they point at someone else eg Ukraine. Both have some motive and potentially ways. How are we supposed to verify the facts in the absolute way? We can basically only choose to believe the side we trust more, in other words reputation

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[PopeRatzo]

But you can make that very same argument about anything used by humans.

That's true, but technology's efficiencies are potentially (I would say "especially") capable of making mass control more efficient.

That's why we have to be very, very careful about the technology we adopt. It's not morally neutral, as we've been told since the Industrial Revolution. Technology may be morally fungible, but it's not morally neutral.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[AmiMoJo]

In the future everyone will have multiple identities. Like people have multiple credit cards and select one per transaction.

There will be a huge market for bootstrapping new identities. Reputation merchants will have to develop spam filters, and the false positives are going to be brutal.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The public has a collective IQ of 50 which seems to decrease proportionally as the mob size increases. The "information age" has created the most powerful weapon system on the planet.
And the nation-state actors have successfully exploited the tool to silence facts with hyperbolic opinions multiplied and distributed by the millions of botnets that are steadily evolving greater capabilities and purpose. And using the internet to support state ambitions is very cost effective. It's safer, cheaper, and faster than inserting foreign agents into the target country looking to affect changes or influence the locals.

We live in a world where people have chosen sides on almost every issue we face today and they will do anything to defend their side no matter how many pesky facts get in the way. The only thing that matters is making sure their side "wins" the argument. Not "resolve" the argument. Not "settle" the argument. Only "winning" the argument matters. And winning the argument also includes being able to attach blame for the problem on someone. As if attaching the blame to someone actually solves whatever dilemma being fought over. And when one side or the other feels that they have "won" their argument they quickly drop the subject and go hunting for the next outrage to argue over. Actually addressing the things being argued over gets lost in the shuffle.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[thinkwaitfast]

Postmodernism rejects your concept of an objective natural reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[clovis]

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.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[alvinrod]

That's true, but technology's efficiencies are potentially (I would say "especially") capable of making mass control more efficient.

You can probably argue that incrementally back all the way to the first cave paintings as well though. There's always going to be some new danger on the horizon, but I don't think this presents a long term concern. If something is detrimental towards human survival, those traits which enable it or succumb to it will be selected against in the long run. That may seem painful right now, but it's no less so than the mound of corpses it took to develop an immune response to all of our past threats.

It's always in someone's best interest to let the next genie out of the bottle and even though it will leave another mound of corpses on the landscapes of history, it will move the species as a whole forward. I suppose modern society has afforded people the freedom and ability to go live off in the woods and away from it all, but I think that's just burying one's head in the sand.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[PopeRatzo]

If something is detrimental towards human survival, those traits which enable it or succumb to it will be selected against in the long run.

It is estimated that 150-200 species become extinct every day. Natural selection didn't save them, and there's no reason to believe natural selection will save us.

Plus, the ability (some might say, "propensity") of humans to do harm to each other (and themselves) develops much more rapidly than the mechanisms of natural selection.

You can probably argue that incrementally back all the way to the first cave paintings as well though.

No, you probably can't.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[skids]

Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).

Well judging from social media platforms just now realizing they need more than a single "like" button, that possibility is far from realized.

From TFA:

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.

...this won't happen unless it can be monetized. Sure OSS solutions may emerge, but the general population will only use the services that had the budget to advertise, and those will be the ones who think they have a way to recapture the advertising revenue and generate an ROI for their shareholders.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[denzacar]

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).

That's not abandoning technology.
No more than choosing cooking with an oven instead of by pouring gasoline over food, lighting it on fire and declaring "Dinner's ready! Eat up while it's hot!"

Democracy requires human participation - not human automation. Even when it comes to security and certainty of the vote.
And neither should be sacrificed because of modernity, speed, cost or whatever.

As for "perfect tech made by perfectly moral people"... Please...
Technology is just another word for TOOL. Tools don't have morality. Nor can morality be applied to them.
A shovel is a shovel is a shovel whether you use it to plant a tree or dig a mass grave.

And Plato was an idiot with limited understanding of the world (and that's being generous) but with a HUGE ego to think that he's gonna settle all the questions for everyone else.
Just like any other navel-gazing philosopher out there, usually either too lazy, too drunk, too horny or all of the above to make that final leap and start a religion with themselves as either a god or prophet.
That's disregarding all those philosophers too lazy and too intellectually stunted to reach any conclusion other than "Because god".

There's already a perfectly moral race of beings. Same as there ever was. They're called humans.
The only race on the planet with ACTUAL morals and moral hangups.
Just ask grizzly bears. Or lions. Or even rabbits. See how they do on the moral scale.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[PopeRatzo]

And Plato was an idiot

He was a loser and had terrible ratings. SAD!

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Xylantiel]

So... don't believe everything you read, especially if someone has paid for you to read it (targeted ads). Seems fairly obvious. It seems to me that the "new" thing is the effectiveness of targeting and that finding accurate information on platforms that optimize engagement may be disfavored. Hint: once a user finds solid info, they stop looking, so that solid info is likely to be suppressed by a system optimizing engagement. Reporters know perfectly well how to properly source their articles. That's why we have a term for it... journalism. But finding a properly sourced article these days can be surprisingly hard.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Kjella]

Unfortunately if there are big players (eg countries) involved with their own agenda those methods become seriously insufficient. For example the recent poisoning in the UK: UK points at Russia and they point at someone else eg Ukraine. Both have some motive and potentially ways.

In this particular case I think the situation is exactly the same as it would be 50 or 100 or 500 years ago, obviously we've always had to judge the credibility of information. Heck, you need to do that if you're trying to determine who stole cookies from the cookie jar. But technology has given us a lot of mostly objective information in the form of photos, videos, logs and other electronic records, you don't need to rely on trust and reputation if you have a surveillance camera record who steals cookies. And I think technology has made it much harder to keep the lid on actual events, these days it's pretty much just North Korea that's unaware of the conditions in the "outside world". In fact, some go way too far in filming accidents and such.

Of course it only moves the conspiracy theories from what happened "Holocaust didn't happen" to why it happened "9/11 was a false flag operation" so you can't win those over. But I mean the people who scream "fake news" is very well aware of this whole trust/reputation thing - it's just that they've decided that mainstream media is a big hoax. The MSM have been bought/duped/are being controlled by the evil forces behind the conspiracy and thus the order of cause and effect is reversed, the conspiracy is true and thus the less mainstream media agree with the conspiracy the less trustworthy they are. They're already past the point where they'd consider the possibility that the conspiracy is the hoax.

I think it comes down to humans not being able to deal with access to billions of opinions, I mean in a village you could have a hundred people and one village idiot. What one person told you was a crackpot theory, what a hundred people told you was probably true. But with the Internet even the craziest of crazy theories can gather enough followers that you can get trapped in an endless trail of blogs and YouTube videos and crackpots referring to other crackpots until it's like hundreds of people have told you #pizzagate is true. And it kinda doesn't help that millions of people think it's false because you can't really relate to a million people. You just know that "lots" of people agree with you.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[careysub]

If you have maybe a million dollars worth of equipment and a 3 meter or so telescope (which costs a lot more than a million dollars) you can. To actually detect the signal coming back requires a powerful laser, and some sophisticated detection equipment. The mirrors aren't very large and they are a long way away.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[AmiMoJo]

This is why the "new media" has put so much effort into destroying the reputations of the "legacy media" and in inflating their own. They have made turning a zero trust blog into a reputable news source an art.

As well as simply making their blogs look like proper news organizations and doing endless stories about how corrupt the "MSM" is, they rely on syndication a lot. A story that originates on Infowars will likely be dismissed by a lot of people, but once it's been slightly re-worded and re-posted on other sites and then spread on social media the true source has been obscured, making Infowars' poor reputation less of an issue. It also allows them to have a version of the story for hard-core conspiracy theorists and one more mainstream one for "normies".

Re: Malicious crock of shit

[phantomfive]

You can read the studies done (for example, with vaccines and autism) and then estimate the probability that those scientists actually lied in their papers (or got the control group mixed up or something). You can always ask "How do we know?" And the answer is there for you. Complain that it's hard or takes effort, but don't lie to yourself that it can't be verified.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[tbannist]

But technology has given us a lot of mostly objective information in the form of photos, videos, logs and other electronic records, you don't need to rely on trust and reputation if you have a surveillance camera record who steals cookies.

Unfortunately, that's not really true. Photos can be doctored, videos can be generated, logs and electronic records can be altered or falsified. You still need to rely on trust and reputation to tell you that the objective information that you have been provided is both truthful and representative. And always remember that in addition to faking the evidence you are given, someone can also hide the information that they don't want you to see.

The crazy conspiracy people have lots and lots of "evidence" that they will show you that "proves" their conspiracy is true. Moon landing hoaxers will show you video of the flag on the moon "waving in the wind" to prove it was filmed on earth, however, they won't show you other video where it's not moving or tell you that the video was taken immediately after the flag was planted (and thus a more plausible explanation is that the flag is still vibrating from the pole being stuck in the ground).

The problem is not just evidence, which can be manufactured, but also framing which can be used to persuade people to overlook inconvenient truths.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[anvilmark]

Already being done: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/...

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

The end of your last sentence is the key to understanding the limits on the first. It is not enough for everyone to be able to look at the code, they must also have the ability (not just the permission) to verify for themselves that it is doing what it is supposed to do. That means that they must be able to do two things, understand how the code accomplished what it accomplishes AND know that the code they are looking at is indeed the code being used on the machines.

The thing about having a scientifically or mathematically verified model is that everyone whom you expect to use that model must be able to do the verification for themselves AND a significant number of them must have actually done so...enough that everyone who hasn't knows someone they trust who has done so...which brings us to what this article is talking about, reputation.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[Rick Schumann]

Hear, hear.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[q4Fry]

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.

This is interesting, but I'm not sure how helpful. The internet allows a nominal budget to build an enormous corpus of self-supporting and self-citing literature promoting falsehoods. It is mentally exhausting to determine the truth content for oneself. I'm pretty sure this is by-design.

My wife sent me something she heard that upset her. I thought it sounded suspicious, so I pulled up the source. The website purported to be American, but a quick whois showed a Macedonian registrar for a Slavic name at a Danish address. Somehow, though, this source wound up cited by a national radio programme (and not even talk-radio; this was music).

I bring this up because my wife here is reputation-delegating out to me. And here I am, blindly (but quite confidently) making assumptions about agitprop registered in another country.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[HeckRuler]

but I don't think this presents a long term concern. If something is detrimental towards human survival, those traits which enable it or succumb to it will be selected against in the long run.

Detrimental towards human survival? Like travelling faster than 30mph? Because we routinely place ourselves in situations that evolution has had NO WAY of preparing us for. Natural selection operates on the scale of GENERATIONS. And thanks to low selective pressure, we're nearly identical to humans of 2000 years ago. While there was a period of seperation where some groups started drifting their own way, that's been muddied by a lot of out-breeding. In an evolutionary sense, sure, long-term we've really got no worries. Other than extinction. In the short term though, I'm plenty well worried about three generations of soul-crushing 50% unemployment. Thanks to technology. Not to be a luddite or anything, but they had legitimate qualm and they represent about the worst-case scenario. We've been through this once before, we don't want a repeat.

Re:Malicious crock of shit

[denzacar]

Not only that, all his relationships never moved beyond being platonic.

That assumes...

[toejam13]

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.

Re:That assumes...

[0100010001010011]

You make the assumption that everyone wants the same thing. Not everyone watches Entertainment Tonight and talks politics on Facebook.

I would pay money, good money, to participate on a website with quality discussion. I would imagine other people are the same.

Some people are always trying to outrun the "Eternal September" that came to their platform. Facebook used to require a college e-mail account.

Re:That assumes...

[Anonymous Coward]

If online forums have shown us anything, it is that the hivemind chooses the more comfortable solution, not necessarily the factually correct one. When they happen to be the same great, but reputation tracking for online behavior will only produce Gattaca-like clones who conform as closely as possible to the hivemind.

A rough example: the majority of US citizens believe in Christianity, but when laid bare, the notion of a zombie-man resurrected from the grave who wants you to drink his flesh and blood is pretty ridiculous. However, the hivemind revolts against the idea that it might be ridiculous with all manner of justifications. But the fact remains underneath all the excuses that a significant portion of the mythos is completely bonkers. And most people believe the mythos, at least enough to admit to being in the group publicly. People will go to any length to justify their beliefs if it is uncomfortable for their mind.

I don't have a solution to propose, other than reputation management and hivemind voting is a failure and must be avoided.

Re:That assumes...

[tinkerton]

On the one hand it explains something important about what makes us work. On the other hand it looks more like a strategy paper for the PR industry to me. At least I'm sure that's how it will be treated and what are already the operating guidelines. Forget about truth, reputation is how you get people to do what you want them to do. One track has been to control the channels of authority, say the NYTimes. Another track is to get a grip on the low authority media like facebook.

A lot of words for a simple concept

[Opportunist]

Back in my age we called it "argument from authority". And even then we knew that it's bullshit.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[fustakrakich]

The article is an appeal to authority of the worst kind. Let's hope it gets the reputation it deserves.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[taustin]

And it's nothing new. In fact, it's as old as the news media is. What the article describes is exactly how newspapers and TV news work (or fail to). The only difference is that the barriers to entry are marginally cheaper. Very marginally.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[0100010001010011]

Back in my day we called it 'moderation'. For example you're discussing on a website where you trust the people to moderate out comments that aren't worth reading.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[Kjella]

Back in my age we called it "argument from authority". And even then we knew that it's bullshit.

Sure, but I'd rather take medical advice from a doctor and legal advice from a lawyer than the other way around. It doesn't mean the most senior expert is always right but I'd say this "fallacy" is equally often used to dismiss people with actual education, experience and merits to take decisions that will eventually turn out to be stupid, wrong or unworkable but couldn't be shot down on the spot. Though I suppose the flip side are geezers frozen in time that insist you do things the way they've always been done. But if you strand me and Bear Grylls on a deserted island you can bet I'll follow his every word as gospel, even if he is wrong he's a helluva lot less likely to be wrong than I am.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[Opportunist]

The fallacy is to assume someone is right axiomatically because he "should" know, not that you value anyone's argument equally no matter his background. If Stephen Hawking said that at the center of a black hole is a little green man holding a pink teapot, I'd want to hear his proof. Likewise if you said it. The difference is probably that in the former case I'd do it out of genuine curiosity how he comes to the conclusion, in your case I'd do it because I really need a good laugh.

That is the difference.

The ONLY thing "authority" changes is whether hearing someone's proof for an outlandish claim is probably not just a waste of time. Not that you should believe him simply on faith. EVERYONE has to prove his claim. If my doctor said I have cancer I'll probably want him to show me how he comes to the conclusion. If some faith healer tells me I have cancer I'll probably tell him to go to hell.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[micahraleigh]

C'mon guys. The US Constitution explicitly gives journalists the right to tell us what is true.

Also equally as valid is: "I saw a movie once that said ..."

Voters and independent opinions just clutter things up.

Re:A lot of words for a simple concept

[nine-times]

I think you're misunderstanding what an "argument from authority" is, and why its' considered bad. The real problem is that the support or agreement of an authority figure is used in place of a logical argument.

So let's say that I are arguing, and you're saying that we should do [X] and I'm saying we should do [Y]. We're both presenting an argument, and I say, "Well Joe thinks I'm right, and Joe's very smart. Therefore, I must be right." That would be an improper argument from authority. However, the recognition of that as a logical fallacy doesn't mean it's unreasonable to recognize authority, or to consider the reputation of information when assessing an argument. When considering a simple statement of fact, there's often not any kind of logical argument to be had.

Consider the question, "Was Joe at the store yesterday afternoon?" How are you going to argue that logically? Let's assume Joe isn't wearing a tracking device, and there aren't cameras or any other particular hard evidence to consult. It's not as though you're going to find an argument relying totally on a priori principles to prove whether he went to the store or not. You're going to consult a bunch of evidence. Does Joe say he went to the store? Does anyone else claim to have seen him at the store? Does he have any photographs or physical evidence of being at the store yesterday?

But people can lie, and evidence can be fakes. Different accounts may seem to contradict each other. You're forced to assess the trustworthiness of the witnesses and evidence. Maybe Joe says he didn't go to the store, but Bob says he saw Joe there. You know Joe is a compulsive liar, and that Bob has a reputation for being honest to a fault. In this case, it's not unreasonable to place higher confidence in Bob's statements. In fact, it is unreasonable to say, "We have to treat both of their stories as equally reputable because trusting Bob would be an argument from authority."

That's not to say that Bob couldn't be lying or mistaken. It's just to say that, when relying on information from a third party, it makes sense to evaluate their authority and reputation. When there's nothing to judge their statements by except their authority and reputation, then having an accurate assessment of their authority and character is extremely important.

And as much as I love to be logical about things, for much of the information we get, we're relying on some authority. Even when someone publishes the result of a scientific experiment that could be repeated, they generally aren't repeated. In many cases, you or I wouldn't have the resources to repeat them. If someone at CERN reports the results from an experiment with a particle accelerator, I pretty much need to trust them (at least to some extent), or I need to give up on the possibility of knowing anything about that realm of science. I'm not going to be able to build my own particle accelerator and repeat their experiment. And maybe someone else has those resources and repeats the experiment, then I'd just be trusting their authority as well.

From CERN experiments to whether your friend went to the store yesterday, most of your knowledge comes from the reports of others, and not from your own empirical observation. And even when you have your own observations, you yourself are not above deceiving yourself or making mistakes.

Put less politely:

[hey!]

We're entering the Age of Bullshit.

Re: Put less politely:

[hey!]

That's the optimistic view.

Now?

[OneHundredAndTen]

It's always been about reputation. The Information Age did not change that.

Re:Now?

[MattCC]

I agree ... "It's always been about reputation" The majority of our beliefs are based on what we have learned from an authority figure of one form or another. We could not develop otherwise -- it is not feasible to spend the time that would be needed to validate what we are told based on either rationality or personal experience.

Wuffie - Doctorow was right

[i.r.id10t]

Dibs on the shooting range in Frontierland

Knowledge was always reputation based

[modmans2ndcoming]

The issue isn't that we rely on reputation to decide if something is truth. The issue is it is easier for charlatans to build reputation now a days.

One slight flaw in the plan

[petes_PoV]

in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.

So how good is the author's reputation, that we should believe this?

Critical thinking has always been an asset.

[swell]

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.

Re:Slashdot's political agenda

[Betty Crocker]

Ad verecundiam

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to-authority/

Stellar Reputation and Golden Toilets

[PopeRatzo]

I am the most beloved Slashdot commenter and have tremendous reputation, which is why I won the presidency of Slashdot by the biggest margin in history.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There are no Reputable Sources and never have been

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three problems here:

1) The real question is why did the flat earth society decide there was a giant conspiracy. The answer is because they needed to believe that or give up their belief in a flat earth. There may well have been some believers in a flat earth who gave up that belief, but by definition they were no longer members of the flat earth society.

2) Conspiracy theories are dangerous because once you accept the conspiracy, it is impossible to have it disproved. All contrary evidence simply becomes part of the conspiracy.

3) There really are conspiracies in the world. But they don't involve thousands of people because its impossible for that many people to all keep the secret. For a group that large to act together requires a collective self interest and a large amount of transparent activity. Which makes the idea of the moon landing being a conspiracy absurd on its face.

Which brings us to the larger problem. "Reputation" is not an objective reality. Some people think the New York Times has a good reputation, others think Fox News has a good reputation. Those reputations are both based on confirmation bias. Both depend on attracting and holding the attention of an audience for advertisers. That filters out anything that forces their audience to question their world view.

Winston Churchill once said ""In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." The notion that some sources are always reputable and others aren't is a foolish conceit. Objectively, the US military and intelligence services should have zero credibility whether speaking openly or through their chosen media. The notion apparently is that while we may ask them to torture and kill people in the service of their country, they would never lie to us if they thought it was in the country's interest.

My rep preceedeth

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I'm under a 3, so Bryce Dallas Howard should want sex with me!

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[epyT-R]

Anyone, really. At least that should be the sane default. I don't buy into the idea that information is worthless unless there's an already-built consensus with the 'correct' list of who's-whos backing it up. That's too easily manufactured. It's argument from authority. Facts are facts, rational is rational, lies are lies, and irrational is irrational. It doesn't matter who expresses them. While it is true that at some point we have to take claims at face value, especially if it's not an area of focus, it doesn't mean we shouldn't hold the purveyors to demonstrating their claims before critical choices are made.

This gets pretty close to the current ideological conflict between identity politics and meritocracy. The implication of the summary suggests we're supposed to accept the former as axiomatic. 'Listen and Believe' is not healthy for society.

Re:Paradigms're nice

[DontBeAMoran]

What is this? A gestapo for ANTS?!

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[pots]

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.

Re:Slashdot's political agenda

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Age of Shittalking

[Giant Electronic Bra]

That's what this is. Reputation? Please don't make me laugh! Its all about shit talk and riling people up. This is the Age of Disinformation folks, get used to it.

Eyeroll

[ceoyoyo]

Sure, it's *totally* different than when almost everybody just trusted the evening news or their favourite newspaper columnist to tell them what to think.

The information age made the raw information available. Many people use it directly. It's not terribly surprising that most people don't have the time, skill, or inclination to do that, so they do as they always have and rely on someone else to interpret it for them. The availability of information has made a change in that area though: now just about anybody can become a reputable source of opinion, no capital broadcasting or publishing infrastructure required. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on who you are and how much faith you have in people.

Re:Eyeroll

[fluffernutter]

A common theme I see with technology is wanting to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The world already WENT THROUGH THIS. We came up with that news anchor and evening paper BECAUSE of the unreliability of information otherwise. Then millennials come along and say that the news anchor is now corrupt and start to read and believe EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET. There is something *very wrong* with this picture.

Re:Eyeroll

[JustNiz]

Its blindingly obvious that many mainstream news anchors are spinning and changing the truth to fit their paymasters agendas. They are therefore not only totally unprofessional and unstrustable, but corrupt.
Just look at the giant difference between the way supposedly professional anchors like Rachel Maddow present the same news items compared to the way the rest of the world does, such as the BBC or Al Jazeera. That alone should be enough to tell you to never believe anything she or people like her say, much less base any actual opinions or actions on it.

Re:Eyeroll

[tbannist]

A common theme I see with technology is wanting to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The world already WENT THROUGH THIS. We came up with that news anchor and evening paper BECAUSE of the unreliability of information otherwise. Then millennials come along and say that the news anchor is now corrupt and start to read and believe EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET. There is something *very wrong* with this picture.

I have my doubts that the millennials have much to do with this "fake news" bullshit. Trump, for example, is considerably more than 20 years old, and the largest portion of his support seems to come from Baby Boomers, not millennials.

tribal reputation outsourcing on crack

[epine]

We've always had tribal reputation outsourcing. The main difference is that we now have tribal reputation outsourcing on crack.

In addition, we've always had a rich vocabulary concerning those who outsource their opinions while exercising insufficient personal vigilance: toady, bootlicker, sycophant, fool, ass, halfwit, dunce, dolt, ignoramus, cretin, moron, imbecile, and mean-girl wannabee (to commence dining with a preliminary cheese plate).

For the soup course, we have on offer a rich gumbo:

* fear
* authoritarian submission
* self-righteousness
* compartmentalized thinking
* hostility
* prejudice
* ethnocentrism
* dogmatism
* our "biggest problem"
* feeling empowered in groups
* insecurity
* lack of critical thinking
* egregious double standards

The other difference is that you no longer have to attend the meetings, the social media mess tent comes to you.

(My background Scrabble brain spied an opportunity to randomly rearrange the jackboot soup recipe to spell out a vile epithet; verily I remain an adult child.)

We have blockchains

[Giant Electronic Bra]

This is a solved problem.

Stop making sense and appeal to authority...

[neurosine]

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.

Re:Stop making sense and appeal to authority...

[thinkwaitfast]

Critical thinking maybe why it isn't taught.

Re:Results?

[thinkwaitfast]

Just copying who I believe it was Scott McNealy (of Sun Microsystems) who said at Comdex about ten years ago that the future of computers was about trust. They were pretty spot on with the whole The internet is the computer thing too.

Re:It is true

[thinkwaitfast]

It the transition to a Postmodernism philosophical belief and has been ongoing for decades, the dominant culture in media and now taught in schools.

Re:Slashdot's political agenda

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say it works quite well on this site. Idiots are modded down.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[admin7087]

There are plenty of politicians with high personal integrity on all political sides. Trump is not one of them - as most of the current US government. But who cares about the current US government anyway...

Re:Paradigms're nice

[admin7087]

The best way to get a gestapo is by voting for a president who actively fights law enforcement and also seeks control over all intelligence agencies in his country.

It always WAS about reputation

[fluffernutter]

It always WAS about reputation. People used to read and trust news from ACCREDITED SOURCES ONLY. Only since Facebook and the death of print has this changed.

Re:Bullshit

[fluffernutter]

I mentioned this on Slashdot as I saw millennials throw out the concept of journalistic integrity and accreditation. It was always a thing. It was Facebook that destroyed it. Now all the reliable sources (which were mostly print media) are going bankrupt.

Re:We lost the Information Age

[fluffernutter]

One could have easily said the same thing in the myspace day. Ultimately Facebook is just a really big message board, and they are already getting old. There is lots of room for other players and you won't be one of them if you keep thinking that way.

London calling

[epine]

Let it not be forgotten that the primacy of information remains, but the gatekeepers of primary information are becoming increasingly specialized and dispersed throughout the social graph. One of the problems here is not that information is waning, but that the social internet deluge refuses to wane.

The Purpose of Mathematics in a Classical Education — 1 March 2017 by Thomas Treloar

In approximately 300 B.C., Euclid brought together much of what was known in mathematics up to that point in 13 volumes. He systematically organized this material, beginning with a short list of first principles and piecing together a body of knowledge as an extended chain.

The Elements became the standard textbook in geometry for the next twenty-two hundred years. It is only in the last one hundred years that it has been discarded as required reading for all educated people.

The expectation used to be that an educated person could somehow manage to cram the essential information working-set into their brain's as a young adult, and that would provide a solid (and shared) operational basis throughout adulthood. In modern mathematics, one often sees Poincare mooted as the last universalist.

No longer do we even cram the essence of one field into our brains all at once.

One approach to this conundrum is just to accept that you're working at second (or third, or fourth) hand most of the time. The other is to dump the knowledge itself, and turn your brain into a glorified index-card compendium: rarely to have the knowledge, but to have the Knowledge about where it lives (which is rarely more than three inspired search keywords and a click or two away).

The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS — November 2014

Actually, "challenge" isn't quite the word for the trial a London cabbie endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine.

It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study ... a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that.

PBS's edumentary The Brain with David Eagleman (2015) has a segment on neurological change induced by this learning process (not a small effect, either). The specific subject of this giant, journalistic wall-of-text from turns out to be a crazy man:

He sold his engineering outfit and devoted himself full-time to the Knowledge, living off the savings he'd gained from the sale of his business.

Nevertheless, I relate to his endeavour. Half of the time on the Internet, I feel like a "butter boy" endlessly committing to mind the knowledge graph. Not the knowledge itself, just the graph, with just a little help from my own personal wiki.

Strangely, the key organizational principle in my wiki is a social graph: the names of people who discovered or wrote things. People make for the best landmarks. This was reinforced for me by a remark in a Bryan Cantrill video, where he said "corporations don't innovate, people do". I've borne this maxim in mind ever since. When a corporation talks about corporate innovation, ask yourself who the people are. If you don't know, you're being sold a bill of goods. Why is clang so great? Because it was Chris Lattner, as supported by Apple, and not some generic Apple product team. And usually when the key people leave, the innovation does, too. So my social graph consists of the people

Re:London calling

[dwpro]

That's a great point. The necessity of diffuse authority with so much data seems obvious, at least until we get personalized AI to augment our decision making.

This is all utter BULLSHIT.

[Anonymous Coward]

The premise that "news" should be trusted if it comes from a trusted source overlooks that a trusted source can be corrupted and used for ulterior motives.

If you can't understand this you're just plain stupid and naive.

That's all the time I am going to waste on this, except to say that Slashdot has become nearly pure shit in recent years.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[BlueStrat]

By definition, a leader whose doctrine is "my country first" isn't out to improve the world.

No ir's not any such thing if that country has a long history prior to the last few decades of overall being a force for good in the world and has suffered for not putting enough into taking care of their own nation so that they may resume being on balance a force for good in the world.

No nation is perfect. Some nations are on balance a force for good, but most are on balance a force for evil in the world, or at best, spectators & opportunists. Some nations go through phases alternating between being forces for both good and evil at different points.

Only Sith and their ideological equivalents IRL deal in absolutes.

Strat

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fundamnetal difference

[Archfeld]

It is the fundamental difference between getting information and understanding information. Many would imply that they are one and the same but there is a huge difference. Just reading about something gives your a very basic view of something but hardly makes you an expert or even qualifies to understand the underlying facts. Too many people think that a little reading makes you qualified to extend the facts you are given to other circumstances, or to make extended predictions. When often the facts you read while true may only be so in a very narrow focus or set of circumstances. One needs to be assured that the facts we are given apply to a very narrow set of circumstances before claiming to be an expert in anything.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[burtosis]

I lump them into they take large donations and corporate money or they only take small donations. Predictably this weeds out the vast majority that never were going to take constituents needs seriously.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[rtb61]

More realistically, if it comes out of properly run court of law, it is as close to the truth as we can get, anything is likely bullshit, especially reputation. We are coming into the bullshit age, where social media is treated as a joke and people create what ever identity they want and portray their social media identity as such, much like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?... or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... People are really starting to appreciate the sheer level of bullshit in the establishment from psuedo celebrities, to the sports elite to celebrity politicians and of course worship of the rich and greedy. Who the fucks cares about social media, don't treat it is real, don't treat it is fact, don't take it seriously, make up what ever the fuck story you like and share in on social media. Just like the fake arse fuckers did with corporate main stream media, they ain't no special people, just egoistic show offs.

Social media is just a game, play it like one, create that fantasy digital sim of yourself and have fun. So religion: Jedi, nationality: Kekistan and gender: attack helicopter and mock the fuckers who take it seriously, take back the fun of social media and tell the whiners to fuck off.

Want truth go to a court of law, want to have you mind twisted by Kekistanis, log onto social media and of course want endless seas of bullshit, watch corporate main stream media, where lies for profit is called News.

Re:Say Hello to a First Post M'ladies

[darth.hunterix]

Being a first-comer is not something to brag about around the ladies.

Now too much information.

[Sqreater]

"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."

There is just too much information out there to do anything but rely on others to synthesize it and give us a result. That is why reputation is so important. We cannot possibly even do what this author so easily calls on us to do from the comfort and speed of his/her/its computer communications. It is easy to write the impossible as a "should do."

Old is new again

[jbmartin6]

This is an old idea, and we've already seen an iteration of it. Likely there is a pendulum swing between individual effort and curation. I remember the early days of the Internet, when search engines basically sucked. Then along came Google, which was more relevant to an order of magnitude. Relevance, very similar to reputation. Back then I used to observe that given a flood of information of varying reliability, relevance (Or reputation if you will) becomes a valuable commodity. This was Google's early competitive advantage.

Re: Trumpian Algebra

[phantomfive]

If Trump had run as a Democrat, people would have accepted him, just like they accepted Hillary. Most of the rage you see is blind partisan stupidity.

You can never understimate the general populace.

[JustNiz]

It seems clear that a large percentage of average Americans are simply not interested in facts, and and instead decide what news to trust only on whether something has "truthiness", how it makes them feel, and mostly whether it happens to support or at least not question their own already formulated world view.
You can see exactly the same effect here on slashdot.
Any post that demonstrates actual evidence for validity of thinking outside of the PeeCee mainstream agenda will nearly garner multiple -1 troll mods, even if it is politely written and factually correct, apparetly because its reporting a fact that someone simply doesn't like.

it has always been this way

[mapkinase]

This has always been this way:

the 'reputation age', in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others

The only thing that changed is that in the past there were natural barriers and thresholds for idiots "online". Now there are none, so the problem is solved by artificial "reputation" measurements.

Re:it has always been this way

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, there are two things which changed. First, the gatekeepers to knowledge selected successors with a bias. Second, the barriers to mass communication were massively reduced, which resulted in people becoming aware that the gatekeepers to knowledge were not trustworthy.

There has always been some of this, but people did not realize how extensive it was. My first experience of this occurred when I was 12. I witnessed an event that was being recorded for the evening news. Then I watched the evening news broadcast of the event and what they said about the event bore little resemblance to what I had witnessed while standing next to the camera and the reporter who reported on the event.

Re:it has always been this way

[mapkinase]

Then I watched the evening news broadcast of the event and what they said about the event bore little resemblance to what I had witnessed while standing next to the camera and the reporter who reported on the event

This has been known for ages.

"There must have been three thousand of [the dead]."

"It must have been all of the people who were at the station."

The woman measured him with a pitying look. "There haven't been any dead here." She said. "Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo." In the three kitchens where José Arcadio Segundo stopped before reaching home they told him the same thing: "There weren't any dead."

BETTER now than it has been.

[bkgoodman]

Back when I went to school we were taught to do research. We walked into the library, opened the encyclopedia, and if it said that the Indians and Pilgrims shared a meal of thanks, helped each other, made friends and lived happily ever after - and we could provide a Bibliography to prove we got that info from a "proper" source - then that's how it happened. People have a LOT more source-material at their hands - some good - some bad - and they have to LEARN how to sift through it themselves. Reputation is ONE way to do this - but as we're discussing - reputation is only a single weight that has to be managed when scrutinizing material.

Cory Doctrow figured this out years ago

[BubbaJonBoy]

Read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
It's all about the Whuffie...

Re:We lost the Information Age

[ElitistWhiner]

Right!

Important point hat frustrations we have are the frictions of a war machine.

A Reputation economy values 'following' which eerily feeds an AI driven behavior model of society. This retrogressive hardening by nation state actors solidifies a 3C world with more Control through algorithm and processing.

The machine has won this round only to stand-up in the next.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[pots]

Bigotry does not require the subject of your prejudice to be born with anything. Here.

Doctorow

[Dripdry]

Has no one mentioned Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?
Well someone should do that!

Re: Trumpian Algebra

[q4Fry]

I recognize this is a trap, but I think it could be done. It'd be harder, certainly, if you only accepted elected officials, but perhaps possible even then.

We Are On The Road To "Strakh" (See Vance, Jack)

[mixerfix]

Read "Moon Moth" by Jack Vance - are we indeed going there? Time to pull out the double-kamanthil.

...As predicted in the Ancient Texts...

[wowen]

The author E. M. Forster predicted this sort of attitude in his 1909 novella "The Machine Stops". Part of the story revolves around the exchange of ideas. However, new ideas are looked down upon, as they have not been thought about by lots of people. The attitude was almost that it was not necessary for people to actually think about the ideas, but the chain of passing from one brain to another was enough to give an idea value. We appear to be approaching something similar today.

Re:Trumpian Algebra

[Aighearach]

Sounds like a bunch of "blah blah" to me. Guaranteed to be irrelevant to what I said. How can it be "more realistic," when you're just blathering about a totally different idea that doesn't counter or expand on what I said? I don't mind you hanging your comment there, but lets not pretend you were offering some sort of counter-point.

When somebody says something, if it is true or not has nothing to do with your sense of their authority, or what you measure their intent to be. Ideas are abstract, and human understanding is abstract. It does not matter who says a thing, when doing information analysis.

People who blather about reputation are simply wallowing in logical fallacy. That's fine, but they shouldn't presume that logical thinkers assign weight to it; it isn't even well-formed enough to fit onto the scale!

It may be that there was no change, and these people were never interested in, or making practical use of, knowledge in the first place. But their merely having a platform now to broadcast to each other might not add up to anything substantive; certainly the bare assertion that it has quantitative value doesn't have any weight.

On Truth.

[HeckRuler]

What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is spotting and confirming the veracity of the news AND 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 lent it credibility. BECAUSE doing so helps verify the truth of the matter, which is the ultimate goal.

There. Fixed it for her.

On the surface, I have to agree that a web of trust would be really handy when it comes to weeding out bullshit. And I think everyone does this passively to some extent. We all know a few news sources which are full of bullshit. And hey, I trust foxnews.... to put a spin on stories of a certain flavor. Take that into account and you can learn a lot about what's going on in the world as well as how groups of people view it. And just because I used to hold CNN in high regard doesn't mean that they can't change their ways.

But the end-goal remains the discovery of what is true. Don't lose sight of that. If an absolute pile of scum and deluded bigotry and willful ignorance says something that's true, it doesn't stop being true. If you distrust someone, but verify what they said, that can be a very powerful learning experience. And we want that right? All those bigotted, hill-billy rural hicks prepping for the purge and societal collapse due to satanically influenced socialists... They don't trust us, but we want them to research and verify the facts. Right?