Benjamin Stewart's Profile

Networks avoid informational cascades - and hence, are reliable - only if they satisfy the following four criteria (known collectively as 'the semantic condition'):

- Diversity - Did the process involve the widest possible spectrum of points of view? Did people who interpret the matter one way, and from one set of background assumptions, interact with people who approach the matter from a different perspective?

- Autonomy - Were the individual knowers contributing to the interaction of their own accord, according to their own knowledge, values and decisions, or were they acting at the behest of some external agency seeking to magnify a certain point of view through quantity rather than reason and reflection?

- Openness - Is there a mechanism that allows a given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted with by others?

- Connectivity - Is the knowledge being produced the product of an interaction between the members, or is it a (mere) aggregation of the members' perspectives? A different type of knowledge is produced one way as opposed to the other. Just as the human mind does not determine what is seen in front of it by merely counting pixels, nor either does a process intended to create public knowledge.