There’s always something to howl about.

Conjurers confounded: Reality is what it is . . .

Joel Burslem:

If enough people believe their Zestimate to be true (consumers, journalists, realtors, whomever) – then reality really can be altered. It just shows how malleable the wisdom of the crowds really is.

Oh, good grief… Consciousness does not cause reality.

The meta-topic is interesting, however, first because it highlights one of the more pernicious aspects of Web 2.0, the idea of collective wisdom, and second because it brings out one of the better features of Web 2.0, the ferocious pursuit of canonical truth.

In the first case, the social web is largely harmless, even if its epistemology is absurd. The nonsense Joel Burslem is citing would be dangerous — and assuming that he is not actually joking — if it actually came to pass, but this seems hugely unlikely. One of the subterranean tenets of Post-Modernism is the subtly communicated dictum that nothing matters until it does. David Letterman does not chuckle when you back into his car. The owners of Zillow.com will not buy or sell real property on the basis of their own dubious Zestimates. In any real-life real estate transaction, if one party loves the Zestimate, then the other necessarily hates it. If people labor in error, in Wikipedia or elsewhere, it is because they believe the marginal cost of improving their knowledge of reality exceeds the marginal benefit of having done so — which calculation may itself be in error.

So what falls out? It is possible that people directly involved in real estate transactions may decide that the cost of pursuing a better alternative to Zillow exceeds the benefit. This seems doubtful to me, but we can stipulate the point for the sake of the argument. Even so, their doing so will not have “altered” reality. Zillow will still and always be unable to report the most important fact about the structure — is it still there? — at the time of the Zestimation. To agree to decide something by a means that is known to be fundamentally defective but which is nevertheless mutually-acceptable to the parties is not metaphysically dispositive, despite the fabulist hyperbole we hear everywhere. The ranch that became the town of Show Low, AZ, was “sold” on the turn of a card. This didn’t alter reality, either.

But: The true killer application of Web 2.0, weblogging, is overwhelmingly predisposed to rooting out error and falsehood wherever it is found. Whether this is an attribute inherited from the early webloggers or an artifact of the interaction among weblogs (which we are seeing writ small in this debate), in the long run, in the blogosphere, truth will out.

The fact is, no thoughtful person would rely on a Zestimate where their own house or money were at stake. The polling at Sellsius&176; Blog is bearing this out very clearly. What is being “altered” is not reality but the state of public posturing about reality. This, alas, is not new…

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