Curiously I’m still a big believer in the wisdom of crowds. Crowds behaving badly is almost never organic, and almost always the work of elites trying to undermine rival elites. Crowds are naturally wise and have to be forged into massed stupidity by removing structure.
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Show me a mad crowd and I’ll show you an elite power play.
It’s a defection move in a tragedy of elite commons. “Burn the shit to the ground” always has a subtext: “start over there”
The hope is, the burning can be stopped before it turns to “excess”, defined as “our shit”
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Only if it is a well informed crowd. The question has to be something about which the crowd is knowledgeable - check the origins of the theory
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What if Wis. of Crowds exists but only for problems that involve large-scale statistical sorting, e.g. markets.
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I might have been true in a world before instantaneous mass connections: the natural human tendency to align with community members tended to average out the worst craziness.
Today, it’s easy to find an online filter bubble that serves most flavors of crazy at scale to a crowd
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