The Eli Pariser TED talk appeared several times in my Twitter feed recently, and in spite of the fact that the title captures about 95 percent of the value of the talk, I watched it. (Duh... we surround ourselves with the ideas and people we like?). It is nonetheless a good reminder of the danger of listening to ourselves and our echoes (and the power of the Internet to amplify those echoes).
A far more important (if less glitzy) link that rolled through my Twitter feed (courtesy of Dan Brickly) was a pointer to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). The National Academy of Sciences is perhaps the most exclusive scientific meritocracy in the US, and I'm therefore inclined to give it more credence than any other filter on things scientific.
The link in question identifies a research report (How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect) that describes the somewhat paradoxical result that while the so-called wisdom of crowds can distill greater expertise or extract more precision than we can expect from actual experts, when members of the crowd are influenced by other members of the crowd, the result is often a shift of consensus towards the fringes. A social manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
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Two diners checking their smart phones, captured by another diner with his smart phone, at a restaurant in Fukuoka's Canal City. Irony, entropy, and recursion rule all.
