ST Alpha - ""Wisdom of Crowds" author weighs in on what went wrong with Reddit's attempts to ID bombers. -- (link)" (Reading a Post)

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"Wisdom of Crowds" author weighs in on what went wrong with Reddit's attempts to ID bombers. -- (link)

Posted by mara Apr 26 '13, 15:13

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"For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other." (www.newyorker.com)

Responses:

"the Redditors faced a simple, but insuperable, obstacle when it came to identifying the Tsarnaevs, namely - charlie Apr 26, 15:15 18
- I can't recall - did reddit try to identify before those photos came out, aside from the brown student linking from his hs gf? - b. Apr 26, 15:47 4
  - oh yeah, "Findthebostonbombers" was active that whole day and a half before -- nm - charlie Apr 26, 15:50 3
    - I mean actually naming names. -- nm - b. Apr 26, 15:52 2
      - i don't think they named the Brown student until they heard his name over the scanner when shit was going down - charlie Apr 26, 15:53 1
        
        for sure, his did come earlier as a possibility. - b. Apr 26, 15:55
- But that's a large part of the stupidity of their effort. They didn't have access to significant information (which any idiot would know is the case) - pmb Apr 26, 15:19 11
  - the public was asked to post their photos, but they didn't have access to the store videos, and .. - zeitgeist Apr 26, 15:29
  - i don't think that's necessarily a reason not to try. but it is a reason to take any potential theories or IDs as potentially unreliable - charlie Apr 26, 15:25 9
    - I think there is value (ex.: a lot of the photographic identification was crowdsourced), but no one should look to anyone but authorities for real - b. Apr 26, 15:37 1
      - agreeance -- nm - charlie Apr 26, 15:38
    - From an interview I saw, it did seem like someone who set up a subreddit put some caveats in its opening post, urging people to avoid profiling - Max Apr 26, 15:29 6
      - Right. I'm sure there could be value in it, but the ability to control so that it's productive is virtually non-existent. -- nm - pmb Apr 26, 15:32 4
        
        Well, if all they did was look for people who had a backpack in one shot and didn't in another, that might have been helpful. But singling out - mara Apr 26, 15:40 3
        
        except when you know that the bomb was in a backpack - charlie Apr 26, 15:43 2
        
        Sure, but the vast majority of people with backpacks were innocent. Looking for a guy with a dark backpack wasn't enough; they needed to also find - mara Apr 26, 15:48 1
        
        to my recollection, they did find photos with and without, including the one from the guy from FL whose friend saw his photos on fb. -- nm - b. Apr 26, 15:51
      - the pictures with all the arrows and circles are the ones that crossed the line into Carrie from Homeland crazytown -- nm - charlie Apr 26, 15:32
- not as dark as some of the people in the pictures? -- nm - zork Apr 26, 15:17

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