Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Cass R. Sunstein

Language: English

Pages: 308

ISBN: B00F8CWCOW

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The rise of the "information society" offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? In this book, Cass R. Sunstein develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.

In an age of information overload, it is easy to fall back on our own prejudices and insulate ourselves with comforting opinions that reaffirm our core beliefs. Crowds quickly become mobs. The justification for the Iraq war, the collapse of Enron, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia--all of these resulted from decisions made by leaders and groups trapped in "information cocoons," shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. How can leaders and ordinary people challenge insular decision making and gain access to the sum of human knowledge?

Stunning new ways to share and aggregate information, many Internet-based, are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, wikis, covering everything from politics and business plans to sports and science fiction subcultures, amass--and refine--information. Open-source software enables large numbers of people to participate in technological development. Prediction markets aggregate information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer manufacturers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about product launches and office openings. Sunstein shows how people can assimilate aggregated information without succumbing to the dangers of the herd mentality--and when and why the new aggregation techniques are so astoundingly accurate.

In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together might well provide the best path to infotopia.

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Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economy, and annual peak rainfall runoff.37 For private and public institutions, the implication is straightforward: “Organizations often call on the best expert they can find to make important forecasts. They should avoid this practice, and instead combine forecasts from a number of experts.”38 (Leaders of companies and nations should take note.) The (Occasional) Power of Numbers / 39 For political polling, it has become standard practice to combine a set of poll results and to rely on the.

Future: about the nature of apparent threats, about the stability of certain governments, about technology and even natural disasters. Department analysts frequently consult “prediction markets”—markets in which ordinary people are permitted to invest in, or bet on, what is likely to happen. In the past several years, the outcomes of prediction markets have proved exceedingly valuable to the department, helping it to predict accurately that an apparently unfriendly nation did not, in fact, have.

Individual jurors were.60 This is polarization in action, and it produces large blunders. 96 / Infotopia Polarization, the Internet, and the Daily Me / What is the effect of new technologies on polarization? There is no simple answer here. Many people are using the Internet to encounter new perspectives. They may live in an information cocoon—their workplace, their school, their neighborhood—and the Internet can greatly broaden their horizons. Cocoons and echo chambers, emerging from simple.

As central planners relate to markets, so, in a way, do standard encyclopedias relate to Wikipedia. Indeed, we can go much further. Perhaps any particular article, at any particular time, should be seen as a kind of “price” that is a product of many minds and that might be altered, at least to some extent, by any interested person. As we have seen, a price is a result of the judgments and tastes of a large number of consumers. An article on Wikipedia or any other wiki has the same characteristic.

Incentives are not directly involved, Hayek’s central arguments about that “marvel,” the price system, do not apply, at least not directly. In this light, we can easily imagine a society in which Wikipedia would not work. Imagine what science fiction writers call a parallel world, one very much like our own but in which many or most contributors to Wikipedia are confused, error-prone, partisan, or eager to engage in vandalism. Here the wrongdoers would triumph, creating error and confusion or.

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