Musings of a Computer Scientist

Here is an interesting Op-Ed in today’s NYT, which touches on the point I made in my earlier post entitled “Ignorance is Bliss”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23pariser.html

I have been harping on this for a while, but Eli Pariser (of MoveOn.org) puts it very eloquently: “There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they’re not people, they’re code.”

In Jon Crowcroft’s talk at BU earlier this month, I hinted to this issue — getting information through a social network reduces entropy — and alluded to the need for better “personalization” technology and algorithmics. Pariser’s point is that we should not trust editorial responsibility (the control of information flow) to code. If we do, then the Internet would have turned things around 360 degrees — by allowing us to bypass “an elite class of editors”, only to let code decide what people would see and hear about the world.

Related to (and influencing my thinking about) the above is the long-held position that “Code is Law” by Lawrence Lessig.

Computer Science is quickly becoming a social science!

This is a very intriguing study about how social media/interactions may be warping “crowd wisdom” — defined as “the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers”. In this study, researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight (a.k.a., group regression to the mean) “went awry”. You can think about this as introducing dependencies, and hence biases in the sample statistics.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline/

I should try this in a test in CS-350!

Perhaps related to the above is the mounting criticism of “personalization” as introducing biases in what (say) search engines return to different people for the same exact query — Google now is personalizing Google search and Google News…

There is something to be said for having crowds have consistent views of the world…