A mob fighting a good cause is still a mob. To fight back, you need to remember that although the internet age is hugely expanding the number of complaints, the old rules still apply. Whether you are the owner of a tiny blog or the editor of a national newspaper, if someone points out an incorrect fact, you correct it; if someone challenges an argument, you argue back; and if someone says that you must think what they think, you ignore them.

Source: here

Niki Kittur, an assistant professor at CMU who studies user collaboration on Wikipedia and was not involved with Kostakos's work, says that providing more information about voting patterns to users could also be helpful. Kittur suggests that sites could create ways to easily summarize and represent other users' contributions to reveal any obvious biases. "There are both intentional and unintentional sources of bias," says Kittur. "In the end, what we really need [are] tools and transparency.

Source: here

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internaland double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious, even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity” must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (”gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought”
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- Source: Philip Pullman in the Guardian

Two things the experience made sense of, and vividly so, were:

“Holiness in the desert is silence, in the crowd it is conversation”

(or something not too far off)

And probably my favourite line of verse, and top of my “Now That’s What I Call Poetry” compilation

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Of course, I’m glossing over the fact that the donkey had piles or something hee-hawed from about 2am till dawn, and the fact that the camels seemed to have shat everywhere, but testament to the whole thing is that when you’re there you really don’t mind. You’re a million miles away from everything.

Allegedly (and while I’ve every sympathy with her if it did happen, it looks like it may well have, but I still think it’s an “allegedly”), in response to the man below unzipping himself and pulling it out on a mid-afternoon uptown R train, she pulled out her phone and took a picture of him.

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Not long after it was evidence submitted to the police, and posted on Flickr.

Tama Leaver has written a corker of a post about the ramifications of this.

“while I commend Thao Nguyen for her quick thinking and wish her every luck in prosecuting the man who appears strongly to have abused her, I simply want to add a few words of warning to the digital ether and ask you to think about the ramifications of digital images becoming a form of citizen “justice”. We need to be wary in such cases, or our new digital resources may indeed open a seductive but ultimately unjust hi-tech pandora’s box.”

Spot on.

On a broader level, it does make you wonder about individual freedoms and just how pleasant bottom-up life is. Stowe Boyd coined the term swarmth for all that wonderful collective decision making ability that networked people are beginning to be able to show. But I would hate it if we forgot that these swarms have stings too.

The case was a short one, thankfully not rape or murder, but still had the possibility of a five year sentence. We sat and listened to the witnesses, barristers and judge for 4 days.

Now, the first thing that I found odd was that in many cases people came into the jury rooms with their minds already made up – there were various “oh he definitely did it”’s mentioned as asides. But ho hum, each to their own. We debated in our jury room long and hard for a day and a half – no unanimous verdict was reached – and so on the judge’s orders we went to majority verdicts of ten to two. (No Twelve Angry Men scenarios here).

It was at the end of the third day that I yelled at a fellow juror. Partly out of frustration, I had asked a facetious round table question “Does anyone here think that the defendant might be innocent?”. And to that, the soon to be yelled at juror said, “I think you’ll find that’s straight speculation – the judge made it very clear that we shouldn’t be doing that”.

What? WHAT?! There was a man outside waiting to find out what we had decided and we were saying we had to assume he was guilty? Isn’t it meant to be the other way around?

Now, this isn’t meant to be a getting it off my chest therapy session. But I though about it later reading “The Wisdom of Crowds“. I agree, fundamentally, with the notion of trial by your peers. And I think that the aggregated “wisdom” of crowds of jurors, on average, allows for better, more neutral decisions than the aggregated wisdom of barristers and judge. What I hadn’t taken on board until the case was this: being part of that crowd is not necessarily pleasant. In some cases, it is hard, very hard to see yourself as just another “outlier” helping towards a better aggregate decision.

And on that note, I’ll treat myself to some Lapsang.

“In 1906, English scientist Francis Galton visited a country livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest.

An ox was about to be slaughtered, and the villagers in attendance were invited to guess the animal’s weight after being slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go, and not surprisingly, no one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the average of those 800 guesses came close – very close indeed.

It was 1,197 pounds.”

It looks to be much more than a series of interesting anecdotes though …

the mathematics work so long as Surowiecki’s three key criteria – independence, diversity and decentralization – are satisfied. “If you ask a large enough group,” he says, “to make a prediction or estimate a probability,” the errors they make cancel each other out. “Subtract the error, and you’re left with the information.” In this fashion, the TV studio audience of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” guessed the right answer to questions 91 percent of the time, torching the “experts,” who guessed the right answer only 65 percent of the time

Have to admit, I was a little surprised that Pete was reading the Christian Science Monitor