Essays

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes.

constraints make a collective smart

A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value

anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia.

The aggregator is richer than the aggregated

An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.

In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle.

There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm.

The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.

authorship

perspective

The value is in the other people

Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual

What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization.

It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.

Delphi technique

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence.

In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar.

The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but it is bad when taste and judgment matter.

Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.

The balancing of

between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects

Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances.

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis.

What is crucial to notice about modernity is that

were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.

There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.