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David McGavock

A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...-idea-of-algorithmic-authority

shirky trust authority community evaluate critical_thinking crap detection

shared by David McGavock on 10 Feb 11 - Cached
  • people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia
  • algorithmic authority
  • do I have certification from an institution that will vouch for my knowledge of Eastern Europe?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The social characteristic of deciding who to trust is a key feature of authority
  • information that can’t be evaluated independently
  • information that is correct by definition
  • authorities making untestable propositions
  • Why would you feel less silly getting the same wrong information from Britannica than from me? Because Britannica is an authoritative source.
  • 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.)
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 10 Feb 11
       
      "Not a problem with a solution" - there's something very freeing about that idea. So often we try and fix nature and our social "states" but they are too dynamic for a fix.
  • 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.
  • Algorithmic authority
  • just an information tool.
  • people come to trust it.
  • produces good results
  • people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others:
  • his is the transition to algorithmic authority.
  • spectrum of authority
  • Good enough to settle a bar bet
  • Evidence to include in a dissertation defense
  • 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,
  • David McGavock on 10 Feb 11
     
    "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. "
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