When they aren’t getting the date of the first moon landing wrong in an op-ed praising the late Walter Cronkite’s reputation for “accuracy” (p.s. har har!), the NYT occasionally prints something worth reading, apparently…
“There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” says Thomas W. Malone in a New York Times piece by Steve Lohr (7/19/09). “That’s not true. It’s not magic,” he adds. It’s an interesting perspective, given that Thomas is director of M.I.T.’s Center for Collective Intelligence.
After all, even “harbingers” of so-called “crowdsourcing,” like Linux and Wikipedia, ultimately depend on an elite corps of experts deciding what the end-product looks like.
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There is altogether too much of this populist nonsense abroad in the “conservative” interwebs. (Jeepers — remember the “Anglosphere”…?)
49% of the general population, statistically speaking, isn’t very smart. This is why libertarianism can never “work”: besides the fact that so many libertarians are chronic potheads, they also tend to be higher-IQ folks, and the general populace is not.
Hence I have little faith in “democracy” as commonly understood.
