The hope is that one day blockchain-based social media and community tools can create a portable resume or data set that will allow one to take one’s curiosity and obsession data from platform to platform; for now though, creating holistic cross-platform portraits of experts is key. Allowing active discourse participants / future experts to share... See more

Instead of using aggregated engagement data on consumers’ revealed preferences, it's actually more valuable to disaggregate “the crowd” into specific communities and clusters, and to pick cultural objects that spike in particular communities or are at the intersection of two to three communities, rather than the objects that are broadly liked.

Even if most people don’t have a practiced intuition or diverse networks to produce strange objects, listening to one’s own network or intuition is much more likely to voice heterodoxical opinions on the value of a cultural object compared to the wisdom of the crowd or experts as there is less noise.

However, this greater time spent thinking also causes experts to be more rigid and dogmatic in their thinking. This combined with the ivory tower that experts can sometimes live in can result in them completely overlooking important, left-field new ideas.

We can define an expert as someone who has spent a significant amount of time studying a related field, and as such it’s reasonable to assume that experts are slightly better at avoiding the problems of information cascades, binary voting, and free market default values... This is because the time afforded to experts to think allows them the space... See more

The intent of this piece is not to deride public opinion; the goal of this piece is instead to figure out the pros and cons of each of the typical four sources of information (public opinion, experts, personal networks, intuition) one uses to make decisions, in order to create repeatable processes of organizing information that combine the best of... See more

This concept of the staking of limited resources as a measure of how strongly beliefs are held and likely to come true is why prediction markets like sports books or Metaculus are often seen as the best sources of truth for the future.

When analyzing the wisdom of the crowd, it’s easy to forget that opinions are not independent, and that social media is very driven by first mover opinions and “influencers”.

“The curator is someone who insists on value, and who makes it, whether or not it actually exists,” says David Balzer, author of Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else.