A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky - 1 views
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shirky trust authority community evaluate critical_thinking crap detection
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people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia
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Why would you feel less silly getting the same wrong information from Britannica than from me? Because Britannica is an authoritative source.
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Like everything social, this is not a problem with a solution, just a dilemma with various equilibrium states, each of which in turn has characteristic disadvantages.)
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it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.
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he criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement,
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"Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying "Trust this because you trust me." This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics. "