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Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now - Gloria Origgi | Aeon Ideas
Paradox of knowledge
The increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous.
Instead, it makes us more dependent on other people's judgments and evaluations of the information that we are faced with.
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From Information to Reputation
There is a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge from 'information age', moving towards the 'reputation age'.
This shift involves valuing information only if it has already been filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. From this perspective, reputation has become a central pillar or gatekeeper of collective intelligence. We become reliant on biased judgments of other people.
Reliant on reputation
If you are asked why you believe in, for instance, the big changes in climate, you might answer that:
- You trust the reputation of scientific research and believe that peer-review is a reasonable way of sifting out 'truths'.
- You trust newspapers, magazines or TV channels that endorse a political view that supports scientific research to summarise its findings for you. (Here you are twice-removed from the source - you trust other people's trust in science.)
Assessing 'fake news'
- 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?
Empowering your knowledge
In a civilized cyber-world, people must know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources.
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Our lives are full of real and imaginary risks, and distinguishing between them isn’t easy. We have to be able to decide what to believe and how to act on that.
Marcia McNutt - Geophysicist
“Science is not a body of facts. Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”
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Conspiracy Theories
In the earlier times, conspiracy theories were a convenient way to cover up the inadequacies of the government, and putting a set of helpless people as a scapegoat, cloaking the misdeeds or mismana...
We Love A Good Story
The organic and unpredictable nature of conspiracy theories had led many researchers to investigate the cause of the phenomenon.
- Successful conspiracy theories always tend to invent a great villain, have a backdrop or a backstory, and a morality lesson that can be easily understood by most.
- Great stories are by nature more magnetic and appealing than the truth.
- Human beings think and understand in stories. For thousands of years, fairy tales, legends, anecdotes and mysteries have helped our brains make sense of the world.
Collective Hysteria
Every society has its own, unique anxieties and obsessions, and the conspiracy theories that gain good mileage are the ones that tap into these primal fears.
Example: Many people fear vaccination of the children due to fears that the mass drive to vaccinate such a large population has some ulterior motive, like a mass medical experiment. The dodgy past record of the health care system, and the fact that the vaccination is free of charge, of course, adds fuel to the fire.
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Real and self-appointed experts
The rise of social media means that experts willing to share their knowledge are more accessible to the public. One might think that communication between experts and decision-make...
How experts compete
Real experts are often confident in their claims, but in the private market, the opposite can be more common.
- Self-appointed experts want airtime and overstate their conclusions.
- Actual experts want to draw attention to their work. They may not have all the answers and may admit it.
- Consultants want future business. They have to try to pretend they have complete certainty about uncertain things.
Mixing the information of the pundit, scholar, and consultant creates information noise that makes it difficult for decision-makers to know what to do.
Three kinds of questions for scientific knowledge
When communicating scientific knowledge to policymakers and the public, there are three levels of questions:
- Level-one questions: Anyone with even modest expertise or access to a search engine can answer these questions. For example, 'Will price controls cause shortages?'
- Level-two questions: Only the most qualified experts, within existing paradigms of scholarly knowledge, have something to say. For example, 'Can we design algorithms to assign medical residents to programmes in an effective way?'
- Level-three questions: Even the experts don't know the answers, such as what interest rates will be in two years.
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