Are blogs echo chambers?

Posted in Social Epistemology, Tidbits on Aug 3rd, 2009

Eric Gilbert, a 2009 Google Fellow, and his colleagues at Illinois Urbana-Champaign devised an empirical study to test whether blogs isolate readers from dissenting opinions by comparing the ratio of agreeing to disagreeing comments in several top blogs. They write that As early as 1996, Nicholas Negroponte theorized about The Daily Me, a newspaper perfectly [...]

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The Condorcet Jury Theorem when Individual Competence is Low

Posted in Social Epistemology on Apr 23rd, 2009

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is often cited in support of the thesis that a group is a better truth-tracker than an individual. In other words, suppose there is a group of people, presented with two options and (one of which is true, while the other is false) and the probability of a single member () [...]

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