Childhood's end

A fascinating essay by Alan Finlayson (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n10/alan-finlayson/brexitism) on the London Review of Books discusses Brexit as a large-scale experiment of “self-regulating society” in the Big Data era. I would like to share a few thoughts on this.

Maybe people can be gently “nudged” in a direction or the other by spreading doctored info customized by carefully crafted apps. Still, predicting an emergent collective orientation is awfully difficult, at least before the facts ??.

Personally, I find the emergence process of collective ideas at least as fascinating as the ideas themselves. In a post-Big-Data-era self-regulating society (I just re-watched the lucid, prophetic 2014 talk by #Dirk Helbing https://youtu.be/eaD6xPM3AJI) "ideology-based" ideas and conceptions were supposed to be quickly supplanted by "evidence-based" ones. Well, maybe this is happening, but evidence still needs to be interpreted. Professional roles (politicians, scientists, professors, even managers) have seen their interpretation monopoly taken away from them, possibly never to return. For good or bad, the public opinion's childhood seems to be over. Collective ideas increasingly seem to “emerge” (be crowd-sourced ?) from a co-provisioning process: we draw inferences based on evidence while simultaneously revising our inference rules based on the same or on different evidence. Perhaps the worst attacker to Big Data pipelines (https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/bigdata-threat-landscape) is not the one who injects fake data, but the one who silently poisons the syllogisms ?? we use to interpret it. What do you think?