last updated 10/29/2011

Who Creates Information?

·         Overview of Cass Sunstein's  Infotopia (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006)  -- Introduction and Ch.1

o   Sunstein’s key idea – Information and decision-making are interdependent: We can use new media to overcome problems of deliberation.

o   Defining deliberation – face to face discussion, evaluation and determination of solutions and answers to problems.

§  What are the various goals of civic deliberation?  Questions of fact, value, policy. 

·         Usual Positives for deliberation:  Build community?  Represent diverse interests/ stakeholders?  Create support for action? 

·         Possible Negatives in the use of deliberation: Gain power and control by groups?  Defeat opponents?  Advantage Self and Reward supporters?  Promote an ideology?

§  Note: C.S. focuses mostly on objectively correct answers not really planning to take actions, gaining team support, representing interests, etc.

o   C.S. focuses on gaining and using dispersed information (in the decision-making group):  Methods -

•  By averages

• By deliberation (and vote?) 

• By price systems 

• Through “new media” (internet aggregation)

o   Cocoons vs Wikis – the possibilities of multiple inputs v selected isolation

o   Deliberation can and does fail badly, due to

§  Informational inadequacy, and

§  Social pressure

·         The Condorcet Jury Theorem – Groups will make better judgments than individuals and big groups better than smaller ones, IF

• Majority rule is used, and

• Each person (or the average group member) is more likely to be right than wrong. 
   

• Condorcet assumes that individual judgments will be

  • unaffected by whether the vote is decisive and that

  • votes will not affect each other, and that

  • the correctness of one vote is unrelated to the correctness of others’ votes.

o   The DARK SIDE of the theorem is that the reverse is true.  If the average member is more likely to be wrong than right (for some reason) the decisions will be worse than individual judgements.

o   Example:  Polling the audience versus calling a friend on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

o   The Problem of anchors is that they systematically bias "votes in ways that may mke the average voter more likely to be wrong!

Discussion Question:  Under what circumstances are “voters” more likely to be wrong than right?