Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds 178
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet takes a look at how crowd-moderation can capture and reflect the prejudice of individuals. 'As more web content is crowd-sourced and crowd-moderated, are we seeing only the wisdom of crowds? No, we're also seeing their prejudice. The Internet reflects both the good and ugly in human nature. ... Any system relying on people implicitly encodes prejudices as well. In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected, there is no hope for moral or intellectual consistency in crowd-sourced or moderated content.'"
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone who needed ZDNet to tell them this clearly hasn't been on Slashdot very long.
Yeah, just look at many of the moderations in the previous two articles on Linux and Apple.
Re:Calling Hari Seldon (Score:3, Funny)
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
It's been done. Years ago, it was determined that the intelligence of a group of humans is inversely proportional to log(N), where N is the number of people in the group.
Actually, there has been some dispute over exactly what sort of (inverse) function applies, since in some groups, the leaders find ways to divide the group up into functional sub-groups. This produces a set of smaller groups, each with a higher intelligence than the entire group would have if it worked together. But then the top-level intelligence is limited by the inter-group communication, so a similar function may be used to combine the subgoups' intelligence into a measure of the entire group's intelligence, and we all know how exponential functions combine, right? What? Some of us don't? Uh ....
There have been some wags that claim that the inverse function actually involves N squared or cubed, but there seems little evidence that (outside of politics) it's really all that bad.
There has also been some confusion caused by tests being done that included religious groups. But that data had to be discarded, since those groups tend to have a firm ban on the application of intelligence in any group activity, and researchers don't have tools capable of measuring the intelligence level of people who are blindly following (and misinterpreting) the commands of a leader. But there is hope that we may some day be able to measure quantities that small, similarly to how physicists can measure individual elementary particles. This may lead to some interesting results in the study of intelligence.
Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus Christ is the resurrected Lord and Life giving Spirit.
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Clearly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Calling Hari Seldon (Score:1, Funny)
i welcome the construction of the Large Hardline Collider.
fundamentalists are accelerated at near light-speed over 14 kilometres each and steered into each other, then the results analyzed.
Analysis Complete: Nothing of value was lost.
Re:Calling Hari Seldon (Score:1, Funny)
Ironically, you are a fundamentalist...
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Funny)