People will judge someone to be an expert when they perceive that person to have a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject. In the case of Jonathan Lebed [1], people attributed an expert status to him when his predictions seem to come true. The thing is, events came true because everyone believed in his predictions, not because he possessed any great skill in predicting the performance or actual worth of a company. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) claims that Lebed illegally profited by buying penny stocks, promoting them on message boards and selling them when the ensuing buying frenzy pushed up their price. The day-trading investors became victims because they lost money on the stock when its price eventually fell back down to earth. The SEC contends that had the public known that the anonymous poster was in fact a 15 year old boy who was manipulating the market for his own gain, investors wouldn't have jumped on to the speculative bandwagon in the first place.
Even if a person's identity could be verified in cyberspace, most people probably wouldn't bother to do so. Most don't even bother investigating an outrageous tale at a site like www.snopes.com instead of just forwarding it to everyone on their address list. The prevalence of apocryphal tales accepted and passed on as truth to others is clear evidence of a lack of critical thinking skills (or thinking effort) in the general public.
The main issue is one of reliability: can the source of the information be trusted? All sources of information are biased in some way toward the authors' own viewpoints or perhaps may be based on false or inaccurate facts. Some organizations may try to report information objectively but biases can be unintentionally and subtlety introduced by seemingly innocent things as the words used to describe it, the tone of voice used or in the case of printed and web-based media, the relative location of the item on a page.
The Internet is that it has made with the side effect being that anyone can potentially be considered an "expert" in anything. In one respect this change is better as anyone who is connected can access a wealth of information, granting him or her significantly more power than they had before. In another sense, this is worse as most people don't know what to make of this information. (The old cliché "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is most appropriate here.) Bias and other factors that contributed to unreliability are unavoidable but minimize-able. Given the vast and largely unenforceable nature of the Internet, it would be more practical for organizations responsible for looking out for the public welfare to educate the public than to remove all biased information. In fact, the SEC has launched a "gotcha" type campaign [2] just to remind investors: "Buyer Beware."
[1] Lewis, Micheal. Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis -- and 15. February 25, 2001
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/rbb/risd/Lebed.html
[2] SEC. Regulators Launch Fake Scam Websites to Warn Investors about Fraud. January 30, 2002
http://www.sec.gov/news/headlines/scamsites.htm
Advocating educating people about biases and reliability of sources is a good suggestion. These skills are needed for the internet and print media too! I think what you say is true - that many people are too apathetic to verify identities and accuracy of information. As you pointed out, biases are everywhere, even in books written by "experts". Well done! I enjoyed your commentary.
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