Difference between revisions of "Talk:Understanding the role that trust plays in Knowledge transfer and our over reliance on technology"

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(Johannes Schunter, 2018/04/04: new section)
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== Daan Boom, 2018/04/03 ==
 
== Daan Boom, 2018/04/03 ==
  
Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher, and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. Her latest book is Reputation: [https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11127.html What It Is and Why It Matter+s (2017), translated by Stephen Holmes and Noga Arikha in English. Its an interesting read.
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Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher, and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. Her latest book is Reputation: [https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11127.html What It Is and Why It Matters] (2017), translated by Stephen Holmes and Noga Arikha in English. Its an interesting read.
  
 
There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.
 
There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.
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These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source, something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations.
 
These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source, something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations.
  
According to Frederick Hayek’s [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo26122880.html book] Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess’. A civilised cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social ‘rank’ of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field
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According to Frederick Hayek’s [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo26122880.html book] Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess’. A civilised cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social ‘rank’ of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field.
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Attachment: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1G15I4IAwb_YKoaimMtS2aPNvS_ZUNL4o 2017 Origgi Chapter 1 Reputation.pdf]
  
 
== Johannes Schunter, 2018/04/04 ==
 
== Johannes Schunter, 2018/04/04 ==

Revision as of 09:14, 19 April 2018

Daan Boom, 2018/04/03

Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher, and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. Her latest book is Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters (2017), translated by Stephen Holmes and Noga Arikha in English. Its an interesting read.

There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.

Let me give some examples of this paradox. If you are asked why you believe that big changes in the climate are occurring and can dramatically harm future life on Earth, the most reasonable answer you’re likely to provide is that you trust the reputation of the sources of information to which you usually turn for acquiring information about the state of the planet. In the best-case scenario, you trust the reputation of scientific research and believe that peer-review is a reasonable way of sifting out ‘truths’ from false hypotheses and complete ‘bullshit’ about nature. In the average-case scenario, you trust newspapers, magazines or TV channels that endorse a political view which supports scientific research to summarise its findings for you. In this latter case, you are twice-removed from the sources: you trust other people’s trust in reputable science.

The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.

Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? Such questions will help us to get a better grip on reality than trying to check directly the reliability of the information at issue. In a hyper-specialised system of the production of knowledge, it makes no sense to try to investigate on our own, for example, the possible correlation between vaccines and autism. It would be a waste of time, and probably our conclusions would not be accurate. In the reputation age, our critical appraisals should be directed not at the content of information but rather at the social network of relations that has shaped that content and given it a certain deserved or undeserved ‘rank’ in our system of knowledge.

These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source, something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations.

According to Frederick Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess’. A civilised cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social ‘rank’ of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field.

Attachment: 2017 Origgi Chapter 1 Reputation.pdf

Johannes Schunter, 2018/04/04

Thanks much Daan for sharing!

Without having read the book, and judging only from the paras above, I have to say, this is in my view an utterly short sighted view of the information overload conundrum. Reputation via statements from peers has always been at the heart of people's evaluation of given information, literally since forever. The only thing that changed is the massively larger amount of information we have to evaluate, and the massively larger number of peers we're using to do it. We can go back every single century in human history and we will find that reputatio was the only way people could make sense of external information received (since no one could practically confirm for themselves whether e.g. the earth was indeed round, whether Abraham Lincoln indeed got the most votes, and whether the Titanic really hit an iceberg). In fact, reputation mattered even more in history the smaller the community of peers was that was validating it, from nations to cities, down to villages, tribes and families. To speak of a "reputation age" as something new shows an astonishingly ahistoric view of the world.

Personally, I believe that instead it is Artificial Intelligence that will really change how we make sense of all the information we cannot compute personally anymore. Rather than relying on selected (and always biased) information sources based on reputation, which always gives us the illusion of comprehensiveness (when in reality what went into our evaluation was always only the tip of the iceberg) AI programmes will digest ALL information available and present summaries and conclusions to us. We will accept or reject those summaries and conclusiosn still based on reputation - though not anymore the reputation of the sources or peers who delivered the information to us, but the reputation of the alogorithm we trust to process all existing information sources for us in the best way (IBM Watson vs. Google vs. ???). This will create its own problems of course. But it has nothing to do with entering a new "reputation age". And in fact, in contrast to what the above author thinks, the skill of evaluating select information sources ourselves will become less and less important going forward, as we will rely more and more on software to do that for us.

Just my two cents. I'm sure there will be differing viewpoints, glad to hear and learn from those! ;)