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Say Goodbye To the Information Age: It's All About Reputation Now (aeon.co)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

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.

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Malicious crock of shit by ohnonononono · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Malicious crock of shit by clovis · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. That assumes... by toejam13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. A lot of words for a simple concept by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Critical thinking has always been an asset. by swell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...
  5. Re:Slashdot's political agenda by Betty+Crocker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ad verecundiam

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

  6. Re:Trumpian Algebra by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Trumpian Algebra by pots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Stop making sense and appeal to authority... by neurosine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.