[P2P-F] Why all men are not created equal : Study on Social Hierarchy

Wed Jul 18 06:28:03 CEST 2012

Mark, have you read the article or is it just a suggestion that it is
correlation and nor causation.
I havent read it either but there seem to be some errors in the article.

Either the journalist or the authors of the paper have made some mistakes
about the interpretation of the results.

Both authors of the article are not Biologists. The abstarct of the paper
says that they describe 3 theoretical models about group coordination.
There is a huge logical error to assume that theoretical models that try to
describe the phenotype of organisms in a specific environment could prove
that this phenotype is due to an genetic characteristic of those organisms
obtained through the evolutionary process.

I doubt that the authors are putting into question the moto that "all
people are made equal"

The article is also probably intermixing social hierarchy with inequality,
suggesting that social hierarchy is bad.

In fact, there can be social hierarchy while retaining equality. Since our
context is information, noone values the opinion of a random person the
same as the opinion of a person which has specialized in the subject.

If we disregard all those mistakes, what we should learn about this paper
is that reputation matters.
Apart from lowering the cost of communication we should create reputation
networks that promote trustworthy and honorable people, otherwise things
will get worse.

2012/7/18 Mark Adam <dreamingforward at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120713-why-all-men-are-not-created-equal/2
>>
>> "David-Barrett and Dunbar discover a particularly intriguing implication
>> for our information age. One of the important factors in their model is the
>> *cost* of communication: how hard it is to exchange information. It’s
>> often suggested that by lowering the cost of communication, electronic
>> networking will make it easier for everyone to access information and so
>> will flatten the social hierarchy. The researchers find that,
>
>
> Correlation does not equal causation.  I think those researchers will find
> that after the legal system judged (almost completely) in favor of wealthy
> plaintiffs (RIAA vs. 17year-old, etc), the egalitarian nature at the heart
> of the Internet dramatically got stifled after Napster, for example.
>
>
>> if there is an initial inequality in how information is distributed,
>> lowering communication costs counter-intuitively sustains this steep
>> hierarchy and promotes inequality. There’s less incentive to spread
>> information around: you can just keep on looking until you find it.
>
>
> Big media doesn't want to "spread information around" -- it wants you to
> go to their sites.  Unfortunately, the lawsuits mentioned above was a big
> blow to p2p, so now we have this rather stagnant internet where most of
> people's time is on less than 1% of the net.
>
>> If we want to avoid this effect of cheaper communication, they say, then
>> we’ll need ways of compensating for it – for example, by greater social
>> investment in education to disseminate knowledge. The web won’t do it for
>> us."
>>
> This is an example of a reporter who doesn't know how to do the research
> well enough.  As I said, it's not an effect of cheaper communication, it's
> purely an inadvertant correlation.
>
> markj
>
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-- 

Sincerely yours,

     Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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