Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!sun!tma1!peb
From: peb%tma1@Sun.COM (Paul Baclaski)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Another Effect of Computers
Summary: information overload, hypertext and trust
Message-ID: <93894@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 14 Mar 89 21:30:12 GMT
References: <8903140313.AA01117@violet.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 27

A summary of my previous posting:

Human attention is a limited resource and in context of information 
overload, experts opinions are used to make decisions.  I.e., people
trust other people to make a recommendation.  A public, hypertext
forum will allow better decisions since it is decentralized and will 
promote discussion because the barriers to discussion will be lowered.
It is like the newspaper editorial page side by side with the news 
(no N day delay for the discussion).  In such a system, there would
be so many letters, that the reading would have to be filtered.  Thus, 
the problem becomes the same old "who do you trust?"  The filter
could have a list of authors that it always reads, authors that it
always ignores and some authors that it reads sometimes (probabilistic
browsing?).

In article <8903140313.AA01117@violet.berkeley.edu>, mwm@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike  Meyer, I'll think of something yet) writes:
> To date, the net result of people relying on a human filter instead of
> thinking themselves is that there has been no change in insurance
>...
> This is also a perfect example of the aldous dystopia. People
> believing what they are told by media figures, and not looking at the
> readily available facts themselves, even in matters that hit them
> where it hurts.

I was making an example of how decisions are being made, not how 
they "should" be made in some "perfect" world.  There is no need to
get into the details of the insurance initiatives.