Information Socially Corrupted

Another story indicating that socially shared information is not necessarily good information. Tweeted by Dave Gurteen on LinkedIn, this Wired Science story based on this National Academy of Sciences paper.

Good also that it acknowledges the misnomer in the “wisdom”of crowds having nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom, more a matter of objective statistical accuracy in aggregated subjective judgements. BUT, crucially the statistics are broken if the crowd shares what it knows before judging – then all you have is a meme, information of dubious quality that just happens to be easy to spread. Easy crowds out good.

Social sharing of information is not necessarily a good thing.

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