Social organisation of knowledge

Descriptive and normative

August 24, 2021 — February 10, 2024

adaptive
agents
bounded compute
collective knowledge
distributed
economics
game theory
how do science
incentive mechanisms
institutions
learning
mind
networks
sociology
squad
standards
swarm

Nothing to say here about general epistemic communities right now. I have thoughts about the specialized epistemic community that is the science community. I would like to think about journalism also.

Figure 1

1 Incoming

News media and public shared reality. Fake news, incomplete news, alternative facts, strategic inference, kompromat, agnotology, facebooking to a molecular level. Basic media literacy and whether it helps. As seen in elections, and provocateur twitter bots.

Samuel Butler:

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Figure 2

2 References

Bazzoli. 2022. Open Science and Epistemic Pluralism: A Tale of Many Perils and Some Opportunities.” Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Berger, and Luckmann. 2016. “The Social Construction of Reality.” In Social Theory Re-Wired.
Eady, Paskhalis, Zilinsky, et al. 2023. Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and Its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior.” Nature Communications.
Farrell, Mercier, and Schwartzberg. 2022. Analytical Democratic Theory: A Microfoundational Approach.” American Political Science Review.
Smith. 2022. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning.