Sir, your spontaneous order is ready!

An article in Tech Central Station details why bloggers, working independently but cooperatively, were able to uncover the truth about the Killian memos in an astonishingly short time. The reasons stand as a vindication of the work of F.A. Hayek, who wrote extensively on the concept of spontaneous order.

The "blogosphere", defined, roughly, as the set of all bloggers who may interact with each other in discussing any particular topic, had developed very good reasons to suspect the memos were forged within one day of the first critical post on Free Republic. It might have been even quicker, but the first post on Power Line had to wait until someone was awake and had read his e-mail. Once that e-mail had been posted, information started to pour in, and within a handful of hours, the memos' falsity had been established beyond any reasonable doubt. (But not beyond unreasonable doubt, as Dan Rather was to demonstrate over the following week.)

So what happened, and why?

What happened was that questions about the CBS memos were turned over to the blogosphere, which acted like an information marketplace.

A marketplace is a region where goods are exchanged for other goods, according to the rules of a free trade as laid out by Adam Smith. In a free market:

• people will exchange goods only if each person values the good he is receiving in the trade more than the good he is giving up.
• trades are not coerced; coercion introduces another good into the trade -- the good of being allowed to continue living, or to keep your kneecaps, or to not experience whatever threat is being brought to bear. In a free trade, the only goods considered are the goods being traded.
• people have the option of not trading. They may choose to trade with another person, or to refrain from trading altogether.

Bloggers trade information. A blogger will read through the web, looking for items concerning topics that interest him, and will freely link to them. If someone else happens to be interested in some or all of the same things the blogger is, she'll read his blog, and very likely follow the same links. Thus, a blogger who has an interest in the art of Salvador Dali may run a blog (perhaps titled "Hello, Dali". Others who have some interest in the artist will find the blog on a search, and find it a useful pointer to articles that interest them, too.

So what do bloggers get in exchange for information? Well, sometimes they get more information in comments left on the blogs, or in e-mails sent to the authors. More often, any payment is in the form of strokes: their words are cited with varying degrees of approval. They may be passed along to othe people as something worthy of reading. Hit counters show that people are stopping by and reading their words. People give the blogger positive feedback.

In science fiction fandom, we invented a term for this kind of payment decades ago. It's called "egoboo", short for "ego boost". Egoboo is the sum total of everything that can be lumped under "hey, they're paying attention to me!"

Now since this is a marketplace, and since every person only has some 1,440 minutes of reading time, at most, in any given day, egoboo is a scarce resource. Some people will get a lot of it, and some will get very little. Those who want to get any amount of egoboo will have to pay for it, and they pay for it by posting information worth reading.

Now "worth reading" can mean any of a number of things, but in discussions of news and current events, it has to include being true. Any claim about any subject can be read by any number of people, some of whom will know more about that subject than you do.

I recall an incident some years ago when Nike had an ad featuring an African tribesman holding up a pair of shoes, and saying something in his native language. As he spoke, a caption gave the translation as "Just Do It". Nike got a letter from an African Languages professor who said, "What he's actually saying is, 'I can't wear these, give me bigger shoes.'" The folks at Nike declared themselves astonished that anyone in the region where the ads were shown would turn out to speak that language.

On any given subject, someone out there knows more than you do.

If a topic generates enough interest, any claims will be vetted by any number of people with varying degrees of expertise in that subject. Many of them will be able to confirm or refute those claims, and many of those will be more than happy to post their findings in the comments section, or e-mail the author of said claims. Failing that, the "six handshakes rule" means that someone who reads a claim will know someone who can comment knowledgably, and will probably be a lot closer than six handshakes away from that someone.

A hot enough claim can be examined by experts, and confirmed or refuted, in the time it takes to send a couple of e-mails.

Since blogs link very freely, the support and refutations of claims are almost always accompanied by a link to those very claims. The "track-back" feature becoming almost ubiquitous in blogs makes it easier to see what other people have said about any given claim. Internet searches make it much easier to examine the credentials, or at least the other writings, of anyone who offers purportedly knowledgeable comments on a claim. With tight feedback loops like that, false claims are quickly refuted, and are not passed along; claims that appear true, or at least consistent with the evidence, are passed along and echoed in other blogs. (And each such reference counts as "egoboo".)

By this mechanism, it is possible to bring the knowledge, experience, and intelligence of thousands of brains to bear on any given question, and arrive at an answer much faster than any individual, or any news bureau, could ever hope to. And this shouldn't be at all surprising. A team of 10 news reporters has, at best, 14,400 minutes of research time available in any given day, and absolutely won't be spending more than a fraction of that researching any given story.

Ten bloggers who happen to know a little something about a topic can each offer what they happen to know in a couple of minutes. If they're of a mind to, they can mail the story to a few friends, or link to it in their blogs. If each blog attracts ten more knowledgeable people, each with a bit of pertinent information, that's 110 people. If each of them decide to pass it along, we're up to 1,110 people.

If it takes ten minutes for each cycle, than at the end of the first hour, a story will have been handed around to 1,111,110 experts. If each expert adds only one word of new information to the story, that's the equivalent of 2,200 typewritten pages of researched material after the first hour.

Bill O'Reilly complained that the story that the Killian memos might be forgeries had spread through the blogosphere and to "right-wing talk radio" in an hour. Well, if the garbage is filtered out, and if only good information is passed along, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it can be surprising to those unfamiliar with self-ordered systems.

Indeed, if the memos were forgeries, and if they were planted with the intention of discrediting Bush until after the November elections, the speed with which an information marketplace was capable of finding the truth would appear to have caught a lot of people by surprise.

Gee, what a shame.