The Dark Prince

It’s one of those semi-serious rants that I sometimes make when I feel a bit important! Don’t worry, I’ll try and avoid writing anything for months after this to keep the balance of nature steady.  Right then, off we go.

One of the biggest problems to academia, progress, whatever you wish to call it at the moment is not a lack of information about things, but rather too much of it and no decent way of finding what you need. This is a relatively recently recognised problem and is fast being tackled, or at least valiantly attempting to be tackled. Google make their entire living doing just this, but like everything in life sadly, computers are not going to magically fix everything.  It is becoming very clear to even mainstream media that Google is not winning this fight.
The problem is simply that too many people want to have their say and not enough of them actually know what they’re on about.  This is the main failing behind Wikipedia, (and the fact that people are willing to trust information from this source is frankly frightening), but it extends to the web in general.  When you have no way of controlling what gets submitted and who by, there are just too many loudmouthed people who are too sure of their often insane opinions that the crud rises to the top whilst valuable and useful information sinks into the murky depths of the ever growing pile of crap that the internet has become.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, we can’t.  It is impossible for everyone to have their five minutes and for all views to be covered equally and sensibly.  People are selfish creatures and always push their agendas, the loudest mouths always win and the world steps backwards.  People purely want their words to be seen and heard, regardless of their correctness or even their possible interest to others. Blogs (which, lets face it, exist solely to boost egos and are of little benefit to anyone who isn’t the author), wikipedia, comments on news articles and forums seem only to consist of people all re-iterating their points with little or no regard to others in the hope that if their blab is repeated enough, it will drown out all other blab.  Forums in particular, even those that have a good community, slowly fill with more and more people who just have to have their say, or who can’t be bothered looking for a simple answer and ask repeated questions or start the same discussions over and over again.
To be honest, the only way forward is to filter and weight opinions based on the people that say them, but this in turn is also unsolvable.  Who has the more important opinion, someone with academic credentials, or someone with deep experience in the field.  It is possible the academic is merely a learned fool and equally possible that the experience gained by a field worker is repetitve and limits innovation.   In other words, there is no way of creating a metric of any accuracy whatsoever to rate the value of someones opinion.  And until this problem is translated or reduced to a problem that is solvable or even a hacky solution that almost works, the world will consist of far too much useless information.