Tenacity, Authority, Plausibility, Inquiry, Discussion Thread Options

[Milton Roe]

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[Jon Awbrey]

Discussion Thread for “Tenacity, Authority, Plausibility, Inquiry”

I'm going to try separating the discussion from the main topic — just an experiment to see if it helps me keep my brains from getting too scrambled. Feel free to post on whichever thread you find most convenient — I can always sort things out afterward.

Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

Excerpts from the Facebook discussion —

One participant commented on the initial problem statement:

Problem. We need to find a way of understanding the regressive trend of crowd-sourcing that reverses the normal advance of inquiry and ultimately leads to the lowest common denominator of the most popular misconceptions in every area where it holds sway.

This prompted me to add the following explanation:

That question arose from my participant-observation in-&-of various “social media” sites, most flagrantly in-my-face with Wikipedia, but once I noticed the phenomenon I began to see it happening more and more in other niches of the web, and even to retrospect on the fact that I had probably been looking at larval instances of the same species for many years. Flying in the face of all the hype we hear about “collective intelligence”, there appears to be an even more pervasive and powerful retrograde tendency. The “normal advance of inquiry” that I mean here is the natural tendency to progress through the series of less than satisfactory forms of inquiry — tenacity, authority, plausibility — and on to the properly scientific form of inquiry. But I think we are seeing less and less of that all the time in “crowd-sourcing”. So why is that? And is there anything that we can do about it?