Tag: Google

Fake Fears, Legit Fears . . . and Fears of the Undefinable

Happy? Thanksgiving?

Yes, it’s still a beautiful world in  many respects.  So as we head into the holidays with visions of impeachments dancing in our heads, let us rejoice that: we are not in a nuclear war; Donald Trump has not assumed dictatorial powers; William Barr is about to resign in disgrace;* Adam Schiff has not been assassinated (as of this writing); Russia has not annexed the whole of Ukraine; New York City is still above sea level; more than a dozen elephants remain in the wild;  Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives on; and Artificial Intelligence has still not determined that it’s worth taking over this messy, irrational, bigotry-infested world. 

You have much to be thankful for. You can be thankful that, despite much Fox News/National Enquirer-generated fake news, we do not have on our southern border hordes of raping, thieving, murderous people  itching to invade the U.S. and take away our jobs; Ukraine is not hacking our elections although Russia has and is; a non-negligible number of Americans actually understand the value of the rule of law; wind turbines do not cause cancer;  the mainstream media are not Enemies of the People; vaccines do not cause autism; Hillary Clinton is not running a child sex ring; a majority of Americans actually do believe that guns kill people; George Soros has no plan to undermine the American political system.

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Crowd Wisdom, Fake News, Information Disparity, and Antarctic Ice Shelves. What’s the connection?

Are Crowds Looking Better These Days?

Facebook is reported to be using crowdsourcing to keep Fake News in check. See https://headleaks.com/2016/12/facebook-tries-crowdsourcing-fact-checkers-to-fight-fake-news/

Trust in numbers. That’s what democracy is all about, right? In a representative democracy, crowds pick their representatives by majority rule. (I’m talking about the principle, not a debacle like the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.) Wisdom flows from the crowd. . . all of us persuaded of crowd wisdom are prepared to hand over most decisions to the crowd. Thus the popularity of ballot initiatives, such as the ones to legalize marijuana in several states in the 2016 election—let the voters decide, directly. Real democracy. Obtains the wisest results. If two heads are better than one, a million heads are better than. . . yours.

Or are they? There are a couple of things that call that into question crowd wisdom when applied to our real, complex, modern world.

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Fake News Ain’t the Half of It

“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.

As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now.  In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other.  A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it.  As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.

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