What Would Plato Think of Crowdsourcing? | Big Think

What Would Plato Think of Crowdsourcing?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, on what Plato would think of technology today.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and philosopher. Her novels include "The Mind-Body Problem," "The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind," "Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics," and her latest, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction" (Pantheon Books).

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address.

Goldstein has taught at Barnard College, in the Columbia MFA writing program, and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers; has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University; and has taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:

Rebecca Goldstein: If Plato were to come back today I think he would have a lot to say about so many things but crowdsourcing would be of great interest to him. I take Plato to the Googleplex and he’s very, very interested in our technology. And that would appeal to him very much. But he gets into a conversation at the Googleplex with a software engineer on crowdsourcing and could crowdsourcing answer the kind of ethical questions that he first raised. And he is, he’s quite interested in this idea but he’s very down on it. He’s very much against it because, you know, he doesn’t – he didn’t have much faith in the ethical opinions of the masses. He thought that ethics was a kind of knowledge that is extremely hard to attain. He’s right. I mean that’s one of the reasons we’ve left him so far behind. Slowly, slowly we make progress – ethical progress.

But he thought, you know, it was a kind of knowledge and it takes a trained mind and, you know, it’s harder than mathematics. Mathematics is a preparation for this kind of knowledge that you need that kind of dispassion and distance from your own life to be able to access ethical knowledge. So he would not have been very interested in crowdsourcing and what is the opinion of the masses of people. And he also would say, I think, well then how do we ever make any ethical progress. How do we ever learn anything new to challenge our intuitions if, in fact, it’s just being crowdsourced.

I do have Plato getting quite addicted to the Internet and looking up things on the Internet and Wikipedia constantly. I mean that was partly – I needed a quick way to bring him up to speed and he is – so he carries – while he’s at the Googleplex he gets a Chromebook, they give him a Chromebook and he carries it with him everywhere. I mean, he’s constantly consulting it. But again he is – he believed in the expert. He believed, you know, in expertise. He – Aristotle, his student, actually says some things that are much more favorable toward crowdsourcing. You know, he says that if you go to a meal if it’s just cooked by one person you may not like it but if it’s a feast with many people bringing their dishes you’ll find something to like, Aristotle says.

And he really has an idea there of crowdsourcing. Let’s try to get as many points of view as possible. Plato is very dubious of this. He believes that it’s extremely difficult to know anything. It takes a tremendous amount of training – years and years of training. He has the rulers of his state studying advanced mathematics for ten years before they can even think about political philosophy. That’s how hard he thinks these things are.

[nickstne]

I'm not an expert on Plato, but I've read "The Republic" and hold it in very high regard.

Plato believed in "the Expert" only when it comes to executing a task that requires skill, like all the discussion in The Republic about guards who must be experts and cannot be shoemakers exercising guard duty on the side.

But would he have been against crowdsourcing? about small people uniting their economic power for being able to obtain something that could otherwise not see the light of day? Of course he would support crowdsourcing. In book #1 of The Republic (the best and most important part) he talks extensively about democracy and about the necessity to have power in the hands of the many rather than a concentration of power in few hands of already powerful people who want to hang on to power forever and who would become corrupt by power over time.

Plato would love crowdsourcing and he would be horrified or just disillusioned by Google's concentration of power.

[KeymoEmbryo]

I read "What would Plato think of Crowdsurfing?" 
lmfao 

SLAYER !

** more Michio Kaku plz 

[yanava]

Or maybe he would take a look at crowdsourcing and say: "that's awesome! now let's browse for some cat pictures!"

[aducksecho]

What would plato think of playdoh. very interesting

[Volound]

guys, easy on the dislikes. this is the wife of steven pinker. dudes..

[tabularasa]

Plato wouldn't care. He would be watching pron, just like everybody else.

[sarahblub]

Being well versed in Plato, these sound like good guesses for what his thoughts would be, but there's something presumptious about saying that these would certainly have been his thoughts.

[BrutalToad]

Aww I came here thinking I would here about Plato's opinion of crowdsurfing

[fayomifashanu]

She doesnt talk about just how much porn plato would download

[VOSTK]

What? This lady is crazy. She doesn't really make a real point about Plato and croudsourcing. It's like she's just some nutcase talking about her imaginary friend named Plato.

[ballstreet]

Actually a really interesting topic of discussion and she's completely right. Plato, and Socrates for that matter, would despise crowdsourcing. They weren't too pleased with democracy involving the public too much. They were strong believers in the philosophers being head of state. The allegory of the cave is a metaphor of this. The men trapped in the cave are only seeing glimpses of reality that are being cast on walls as shadows, whereas the man that makes the journey out of the cave has reached clarity of reality by seeing the sun. When he comes back to his fellow friends to tell them about the real world outside of the cave they are perplexed and don't know what he's talking about. The story is the metaphor of the philosopher who has reached clarity, where the men trapped in the cave are the mentality and ignorance the masses. 

[RATPTI]

I could've sworn it said crowdsurfing.

[anima]

I thought she meant googolplex and was super confused lol

[MuncleUscles]

You might be missing her point, she's talking about the crowdsourcing of ethics, not the ethics of crowdsourcing - whether ethics should be determined by popular opinion, not whether crowdsourcing is a good way to solve problems in general

[Pectabyte]

If ethics was in the mind of the masses then we'd never make progress. Its the failure of ethics in large numbers that cause individuals to rise to the occasion to start asking the questions that cause progress.

[Ramsez]

Not that the youtube comments sections is the right place for it, but as a graduate student in philosophy and someone who has read much of Plato, I disagree with her. I believe he would mostly be worried about how to bar trolls and the like from participating in important projects. Also I think he would be quite pleased with croudfunding, since he believes that being able to help others in need is the most positive aspect of having money. 

[bytefu]

Hitler would love the Internet. He would constantly watch skinhead videos on his tablet, play StarCraft and drink schnapps.

P.S. Oh, yeah. He would also love the idea of *_-Crowdsourcing.-_*

[Dabro]

She's speaking as if she's got direct communication to him like some sort of ghost medium

[moejones]

This woman is really sugar-coating Plato's feelings, in regards to the "common" man. Plato wasn't hip to the optimistic view held by liberals about the potential of people. In The "Republica" he rallies about the lack of mental faculties most people posses. He feared and loathed democracies, warning that due to the before mentioned intellectual shortcomings, elections would always degenerate into popularity contests, money, and family affiliation. Sound familiar?

[mauritsbeudeker]

I misread the title so I thought: "She's wondering if Plato would visit a rock concert and if he has a strong opinion on crowdsurfing?"