[kortex]

Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery.

The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles, not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting hyperbolically has real social consequences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...