"In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin"
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What Shermer is praising here isn’t just Google’s engineering; it’s a worldview in miniature: trust the crowd, but only after you’ve corrected for the crowd’s worst habits. The brilliance he points to is recursive. A link counts as a vote, yet the vote itself is weighted by the voter’s standing. That one move turns raw popularity into a rough proxy for authority, the same way a reputation system makes gossip legible and markets try to price information.
The subtext is classic Shermer: skepticism with a soft spot for systems that approximate truth without requiring saints. He’s interested in how beliefs spread, why people mistake noise for signal, and how you can build mechanisms that exploit social behavior while guarding against it. PageRank works because it smuggles in a theory of knowledge: credibility is not merely asserted, it’s conferred by a network. You don’t ask each page if it’s trustworthy; you observe how other pages behave toward it.
The context matters. Shermer came of age intellectually as the web turned into an epistemic battleground: expert institutions weakening, misinformation cheap, attention the real currency. In that landscape, “algorithmic authority” feels like a technological answer to an old philosophical problem: who gets to be believed, and why? There’s an implicit warning, too. If ranking depends on link structure, then power belongs to whoever can shape that structure - which is why SEO, link farms, and platform manipulation aren’t glitches but predictable consequences of the same social logic Shermer admires.
The subtext is classic Shermer: skepticism with a soft spot for systems that approximate truth without requiring saints. He’s interested in how beliefs spread, why people mistake noise for signal, and how you can build mechanisms that exploit social behavior while guarding against it. PageRank works because it smuggles in a theory of knowledge: credibility is not merely asserted, it’s conferred by a network. You don’t ask each page if it’s trustworthy; you observe how other pages behave toward it.
The context matters. Shermer came of age intellectually as the web turned into an epistemic battleground: expert institutions weakening, misinformation cheap, attention the real currency. In that landscape, “algorithmic authority” feels like a technological answer to an old philosophical problem: who gets to be believed, and why? There’s an implicit warning, too. If ranking depends on link structure, then power belongs to whoever can shape that structure - which is why SEO, link farms, and platform manipulation aren’t glitches but predictable consequences of the same social logic Shermer admires.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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