14/03/2018

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# There have been a number of "celebrity" deaths recently, usually people we recall from our childhoods and a pang of nostalgia makes us pause briefly, perhaps dig out an old book or album.

The passing of Stephen Hawking feels different, like something fundamental has just been removed from the universe.

He may have been confined to a wheelchair but it didn't define him, we didn't feel sorry for him, he took his place in our affections in spite of it not because of it. And, unlike those figures from our past whose stars largely faded, his shone ever brighter with the passage of time.

Rest in peace, Professor, you will be sorely missed.

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# Liked: Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now | Aeon Ideas...

"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 too much information available so we have to rely on others to filter it for us, yet we complain vociferously when social networks do just that, don't we?

There's a massive difference.

When I wrote "The 3 R's of Influence" almost six years ago reputation was one of those linchpins (along with reach and relevance) but it was also underlined by trust.

We have to be able to trust the reputation of those filtering our data. We can attempt to prove the reliability of individual sources, make a judgement of how much faith we place in them, but how could we possibly establish the reputation of an algorithm that pulls data from myriad sources all with their own degrees of trustworthiness or otherwise.

The problem, however, is that it's hard work to assess these sources, establish their pedigree, and trace their information flows. To do so properly would leave many with only a few sources at most; this narrow view - no matter how reliable - could be just as damaging.

So we resort to pseudo-reputation guided by sentiment and confirmation bias, believe those who shout loudest and amass the most disciples.

Truth by consensus.

These same sentiments and biases (or rather those of developers) fuel any attempts to automate the process leaving us at their whim, but we need to find a compromise whereby the task of establishing reputation is not too onerous, retains much of its veracity, and is available to all.

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