It's a Wiki world - Pt. 2

Yesterday we looked at the changes in journalism and the reliability of the press, and used Wikipedia as the new model of distributed intelligence. My point, in part, was that we should not place absolute trust in any source of information: nobody gets it exactly right, and some get it disastrously wrong (or are disastrously wrong-headed).

This understanding also relates to the idea that asymmetrical information -- when one person has more info than the person she is negotiating with -- is in itself a moral hazard. If we want to deal with moral hazards, we don't need to get tough with punishment so much as make sure that everyone has access to the same information.

I find this casts an interesting light on the idea of privacy. If we are all human, what is there to fear from someone else knowing our human-ness? That's meant to be a rhetorical question, but the fact is that some parts of this society know a whole lot more about us than we think they do, or that we know of them. That type of asymmetry can easily be turned into impositions of power that is markedly asymmetric.

It's not so much about privacy as it is about guilt and shame -- we fear that our personal foibles and failings will makes us vulnerable to someone with intimate knowledge of us, especially if that person also has political power. But what if we all know so much about each other that we recalibrate guilt, and separate private human weakness from psychopathic, destructive behavior? What would that do to our astonishing homicide rate?

Small, cohesive social groups, like tribes or villages, are often marked by low levels of violence or crime. It could be argued that one reason for that is that in those cultures everybody knows everybody, information about people is pretty equally shared. The village works by both setting standards of conduct, and by helping identify and deal with personal problems before they are catastrophes.

Very few of us live in that type of village. But some of us are experiencing a heightened sense of personal community as we observe and engage in the conversations that flourish on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media networks. As a corollary, Wikipedia is an instructive model of how distributed learning creates a process that engages people across a broad spectrum while it also delivers a product of high (if not perfect) reliability.

I have great hope for Wikipedia, and for all the other tools that help us build meaningful social networks. We are just beginning, still learning how to handle these new sources of information, but perhaps this can be a way to share what we learn with a larger and larger part of our planet. I think that may be an unprecedented way to understand the unexpected ways we are, indeed, connected. To my mind, there is no more important lesson to be learned in our lives. Wiki on.

Climate and Guilt

As noted, in earlier posts, one of my general themes vis-a-vis politics is taking a close look at the language used and understanding the frame (or meme), in order to get at the "real" message represented by a particular statement -- no matter who the source.

Tracking the discussion on "global warming" is one of those activities that can make you crazy if you only react to the frame. The fact that the LA Times persists in giving Jonah Goldberg a prominent spot on its Op-Ed page has made me a little crazy in the past, but I'm trying to take the time to apply the de-framing exercise to his screeds, and I'm finding there is a lot to learn about Jonah and his fans, whoever they are.

Take today's column, "Maybe it's the sunspots" (it has a different title online). Along with a shallow dip into the science of sunspots and their correlation to warmer or cooler climatic periods, Jonah gets to the meat of his argument in the last third of his column, as he talks about being "lectured and harangued" about his choice of toilet paper or cereal or shopping bags. That's what really cheeses him off -- being made to feel guilty by some snotty environmentista.

Look at what most of the right says about climate change (or global warming, or whatever) and it comes down to an argument about who's at fault, buttressed by how expensive it will be to fix it, even if it is our fault, which it's not. After all, we exhale CO2, how could it be bad for us? Fox News even had their own viewpoint last Friday.

In other words, for those folks who see such issues in terms of a divinely defined moral order, how could we be doing something immoral? Don't tell me I'm guilty! George Lakoff (earlier bog) has an interesting anlaysis of the political identities that see the world in this way.

For those of us whose experience of the world demonstrates that we are responsible for our actions -- and that responsibility is NOT the same as guilt -- we are confronted with this basic disconnect. We accept that we don't know all the answers, but that doesn't mean that we ignore what we do know while we keep asking the questions that will get us closer to the truth, inconvenient or not.

In some future blog we will also look at the role of "common sense" in terms of this disconnect.