Folie à deux means madness of two -- a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a delusional belief, or psychosis, is passed from one person to another. There is a story of a woman named Margaret and her husband Michael who adamantly believed invisible people were living in their house spreading dust. The craziness usually starts with a dominant person, called folie imposée, who begins imposing the delusions on others ... until it becomes folie à plusieurs, the madness of many.
Plug in the 2006 real estate market, or the 1998 internet bubble, or any major religion, and some could argue the irrational beliefs held by so many are a mental fiction spread virally from one to another. If you think there is really truth, read the brilliant post by Eliezer Yudkowsky who argues that humans make decisions not only by observing facts, but by slyly calculating the credibility of other prior witnesses. If enough others tell you something is so, why, you tend to begin believing ... weighing their opinion more than your own cognitive observations. It's probably an evolutionary shortcut; your cave-dwelling great-great-grandpa couldn't wait to collect all the data himself on incoming rabid saber-toothed tigers, so when his buddy Org shouted "Arg! Tooger!" he took that as a good sign to run for his life. Yudkowsky writes, "if you know that a cognitive machine is a rational processor of evidence, its beliefs become evidence themselves."
Recently some contacts on Twitter engaged in a rancorous debate over whether it is ethical to receive payment to write opinions. We're working on a column for a national publication on this, and while we come down against the "pay per post" idea -- bending minds with cash is far different than paying for the location of an ad -- the ethical argument is nuanced. The most difficult judgments in the modern world are weighing the data for yourself when there are so many inputs and opinions trying to bend your will. It's counter-intuitive, going against everything that made human clans survive. If 100 people judge your idea to be wrong, is the bell-curve of opinion right? Or do you let your mind stand alone?
4 comments:
You should definitely let your mind stand alone -- a lot of people thought the world was flat, right?
I should mention that I didn't agree w/ your position on the Chris Brogan issue specifically, which I think is not exactly the same as pay per post. But I appreciated having your point of view to consider and to reconfirm my standing on the debate.
Research, of course, shows that we are influenced by the expressed opinions of others. An obvious strategy then is to cut yourself off from that influence.
That doesn't mean you have to cut yourself off from data about others' opinions, just from collecting such opinions in a social milieu. For instance, do run surveys; don't collect feedback as your persona either in real life or on twitter (a social medai web site).
Generally, I hold to the opinion that data is your friend in decision making, and social influence not always. This piece seems to somewhat conflate the two. At the limit at least, you can disentangle, and you are almost always better off doing so for your own decisions.
The flip, of course, is that you want to use social media to the extent possible to influence others. That's where I think the ethical dilemmas you describe come in. It's not so much an impersonal ad delivered by someone else but your personal, and therefore social, endorsement.
Ben ‘kinda’ knows where I stand on PPP. ;-p
Lot of issues got thrown into the Kmart mix and the ‘Bloggers aren't journalists and can do what they want’ crowd yelled the loudest.
But to the point of PPP vs. ads and Bud's point, there’s another consideration: What if you have ads show up in the rotation from sponsors you disagree with?
Now, nobody would really believe every Google ad is a sponsor you believe in, but the net effect is the same if people see questionable stuff.
Or the Intellitext service that has keywords popping up supposedly relevant text ads, but often, the ads that display are either totally unrelated to the topic or definitely for questionable things. I've seen otherwise G-rated site display adult links off harmless words.
Again, I could care less if someone wants to make money off their blog, but in many cases, there’s not even an attempt to run ads/sponsor that might be relevant to something I want. In the end, it all gives off a certain impression of the blog and shapes the perceptions of readers.
Excellent post, and as someone who was accused of spreading a mob mentality by having the temerity of going against the "bloggers aren't journalists" crowd (pot, kettle and black), I couldn't agree more.
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