MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
Is anyone else ever concerned about the implications that Wikipedia (and any other present or future internet-based 'warehouse of human knowledge') has for diversity of opinion?
It used be the case that no matter how demonstrably useful or correct any piece of information was, no one could reach and convince everyone. Since people always used to get their information more locally than they do now, there would inevitably be pockets where different basic assumptions about the same subject held sway. But now that everyone is starting to rely on the same big free online sources for much of their information on everything, it seems to me that it's hard for these pockets of dissent to survive, except among peoples politically and/or economically cut off from the Internet completely.
I see this happening on both the giving and receiving ends. On the giving end, experts who are able to muster the most influence and a critical mass of assenting support, are able to basically grab 100% market share of 'the facts as we know them', with one little edit of Wikipedia. On the receiving end, most people looking for up to date information will take this one triumphant expert opinion at face value, never bothering to question it or even inquire into who first put it on Wikipedia and why. They just assume whoever wrote it knows what they're talking about.
In science, I understand the value of moving toward greater consensus. In medicine, for example, an equivalent institution to Wikipedia is the Cochrane Library, which contains metaänalyses of peer-reviewed medical studies. Conclusions reached by the Cochrane Report are considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine by many, and with good reason. I see this as mostly a good thing -- most patients with disease X who fall into Y and Z demographic groups will follow the same disease course and respond to the same therapies as the majority groups that the metaänalyses predict. It's definitely a good thing when a doctor is pressed against the wall (e.g. in court!) to defend his medical decisions. But the flip side is, once a 'consensus' is established, it seems to me a doctor has less grounds for justifying a less supported treatment for a patient whom he believes is a statistical outlier. He could come to this belief after a long and well-established doctor-patient relationship, which rests somewhat on that nebulous thing called intuition. In the digital era, the stakes are now far higher should the doctor go out on such a limb and fail, it seems to me. There is an increased incentive to treat every patient as if they were 'typical', rather than a unique individual.
Such a phenomenon is potentially tragic in areas of knowledge that are not indifferent to human passion and opinions the way science is. For example, I don't want my child reading on Wikipedia and learning by rote that the Beatles are the greatest musical artist of all times, period the end. I want them to listen to lots of music, see what perennially moves them, and make up their own minds on who's the greatest. The greatness of an entertainer is measured by the degree to which they entrance the appreciator, not what some experts somewhere (anywhere!) have to say. It will be a sad and stagnant day for human culture when the whole world declares a priori that no one will ever make music as great as the Beatles made.
Perhaps the worst outcome of digitally-manufactured consensus might be in politics and economics. It seems to me that nowadays (or someday soon), savvy and unscrupulous politicians and business owners could convince the whole world that their platforms / products are simply the best, and/or that their competitors were inferior, and they could grab a monopolizing amount of power before anyone realized they'd only heard one side of the story.
I don't think anyone reading this needs it explained to them why the steamrolling of culture and the party-lining of information is a bad thing. (Watch a documentary about North Korea if you have any doubts.) As good as a font of all human knowledge is for the advancement of human living standards, I have to question how abusable this technology could be, in the hands of people with a strong vested interest in steamrolling or party-line-toeing.
I think that there is inherent merit in the existence of well-developed dissenting voices, on really every matter. Even when these dissenters start from founding premises that are strange or even suspect, their different perspective can often shed light on things that those schooled in the mainstream might not have even stopped to consider. For example, the intellectual merit of G.I. Gurdjieff's work is, to many people, highly questionable. Certainly his starting premises were not the same as those of mainstream academic philosophy or psychology. But regardless, some scholars who agree with nothing else he said, find some merit in his Enneagram. If someone like Gurdjieff were never allowed to thrive in the first place, simply because his starting premises were not in line with established sources of intellectual consensus, such an idea would have never been published.
Any thoughts?
It used be the case that no matter how demonstrably useful or correct any piece of information was, no one could reach and convince everyone. Since people always used to get their information more locally than they do now, there would inevitably be pockets where different basic assumptions about the same subject held sway. But now that everyone is starting to rely on the same big free online sources for much of their information on everything, it seems to me that it's hard for these pockets of dissent to survive, except among peoples politically and/or economically cut off from the Internet completely.
I see this happening on both the giving and receiving ends. On the giving end, experts who are able to muster the most influence and a critical mass of assenting support, are able to basically grab 100% market share of 'the facts as we know them', with one little edit of Wikipedia. On the receiving end, most people looking for up to date information will take this one triumphant expert opinion at face value, never bothering to question it or even inquire into who first put it on Wikipedia and why. They just assume whoever wrote it knows what they're talking about.
In science, I understand the value of moving toward greater consensus. In medicine, for example, an equivalent institution to Wikipedia is the Cochrane Library, which contains metaänalyses of peer-reviewed medical studies. Conclusions reached by the Cochrane Report are considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine by many, and with good reason. I see this as mostly a good thing -- most patients with disease X who fall into Y and Z demographic groups will follow the same disease course and respond to the same therapies as the majority groups that the metaänalyses predict. It's definitely a good thing when a doctor is pressed against the wall (e.g. in court!) to defend his medical decisions. But the flip side is, once a 'consensus' is established, it seems to me a doctor has less grounds for justifying a less supported treatment for a patient whom he believes is a statistical outlier. He could come to this belief after a long and well-established doctor-patient relationship, which rests somewhat on that nebulous thing called intuition. In the digital era, the stakes are now far higher should the doctor go out on such a limb and fail, it seems to me. There is an increased incentive to treat every patient as if they were 'typical', rather than a unique individual.
Such a phenomenon is potentially tragic in areas of knowledge that are not indifferent to human passion and opinions the way science is. For example, I don't want my child reading on Wikipedia and learning by rote that the Beatles are the greatest musical artist of all times, period the end. I want them to listen to lots of music, see what perennially moves them, and make up their own minds on who's the greatest. The greatness of an entertainer is measured by the degree to which they entrance the appreciator, not what some experts somewhere (anywhere!) have to say. It will be a sad and stagnant day for human culture when the whole world declares a priori that no one will ever make music as great as the Beatles made.
Perhaps the worst outcome of digitally-manufactured consensus might be in politics and economics. It seems to me that nowadays (or someday soon), savvy and unscrupulous politicians and business owners could convince the whole world that their platforms / products are simply the best, and/or that their competitors were inferior, and they could grab a monopolizing amount of power before anyone realized they'd only heard one side of the story.
I don't think anyone reading this needs it explained to them why the steamrolling of culture and the party-lining of information is a bad thing. (Watch a documentary about North Korea if you have any doubts.) As good as a font of all human knowledge is for the advancement of human living standards, I have to question how abusable this technology could be, in the hands of people with a strong vested interest in steamrolling or party-line-toeing.
I think that there is inherent merit in the existence of well-developed dissenting voices, on really every matter. Even when these dissenters start from founding premises that are strange or even suspect, their different perspective can often shed light on things that those schooled in the mainstream might not have even stopped to consider. For example, the intellectual merit of G.I. Gurdjieff's work is, to many people, highly questionable. Certainly his starting premises were not the same as those of mainstream academic philosophy or psychology. But regardless, some scholars who agree with nothing else he said, find some merit in his Enneagram. If someone like Gurdjieff were never allowed to thrive in the first place, simply because his starting premises were not in line with established sources of intellectual consensus, such an idea would have never been published.
Any thoughts?
