Perhaps, but the problem there is that including certain well respected AUTHORS in your bibliography can influence the respect given to the CONTENT. But even great authors sometimes produce ill-recieved works, and those may be the ones built on.

The electronic network nodes in your model differ from people in that people can actually add analysis as they pass data around. In your model, prominence is related to connectedness only. In the human model, connectedness matters (some people like Lessig or Sunstein have prebuilt audiences), but content also matters.

I think that information cascades occur when the nodes/people do not have independent ability to judge the content and decide if it is worth passing on. This is almost certainly related to the degree of openness concerning the process being evaluated. Open processes have wider dispersion of expert knowledge.

— Siva

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/20/the-magic-of-markets/

“In other words, there�s strong reason to suspect that this case doesn�t support Lindgren�s more general claims about the superiority of prediction markets vis-a-vis experts; in this case the markets are arguably being manipulated by people with insider knowledge that isn�t available to the experts. The reason that markets are doing better than experts �without first-hand knowledge� is most likely that they�re being used by experts with first hand knowledge to make money from those who don�t have such knowledge. This is a very bad case to test the efficacy (or lack of same) of prediction markets in aggregating dispersed public knowledge into a usable metric; it seems to me rather unlikely that this sort of aggregation is what is in fact happening here.”

How did Judge Roberts graduate from Harvard a conservative? That is quite an achievement!

“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage

But I see an underlying idea in some evangelism that now, we can put into the “machine” wrong figures, and through WISECROWDS, the right answers *will* come out.

I would suggest this is a “teachable moment” that, as the saying goes, “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, and usually aggregating a bunch of wrong answers leads to a wrong answer.

There are indeed some extraction procedures which can find a signal amidst noise. But accurate information can’t be created if it was never there in the first place. Even using a Wiki.