Science of course promotes short chains by encouraging replication and black boxing. Nobody has to “trust” the PCR works — they get PCR materials and equipment and depend on it every day in their lab. All of molecular biology is a distributed daily replication of PCR. And this pattern holds for essentially all major scientific results, although less dramatically.

At the risk of getting boring, this is another piece of (what should be) a general theory of judgment aggregation. The community around this blog seems to be stepping smartly in that direction.

I was trying to say above that it’s possible to reduce the effective length of the chain, by cutting out middlemen for claims that are repeatable. I’d like to reformulate my thoughts on the matter.

The vast majority of information is not passed in a chain, but in a network. Each node gets signals from many other nodes, and can make further connections on demand (and at some expense). This network carries claims (X is true) and metaclaims (some node claims X to be true).

I can believe network partitioning could cause this to behave similarly to the chain model. This could happen due to secrecy or institutional trust barriers, or for uninteresting claims just friction (it being more expensive to establish new connections than refreshing of the claim or metaclaim is worth to a given node).

If a claim is about a repeatable experiment or observation, it gets even easier – there can be many nodes independently asserting the claim, and you only need a sufficiently good path to one of them to benefit from the knowledge.

I think this network WILL be susceptible to some types of noise over some types of claims. Selection biases, for instance, are hard to avoid if you have a cost to evaluating each claim, and so want to keep your number of connections down.

I think that a variety of other factors are going to come into play that are not articulated in your setup definitively. Saying people are “close to rational” does not cover all the ground.

Thus, it depends on what kind of bureaucratic (or hierarchical or chain) setup they are in. Do they get punished for reporting things that seem to outlandish? Do they get rewarded for saving everybody from something unlikely but very dangerous? These alternatives are just a few of the extra elements that can come in to muddy the picture and either muffle or magnify the signal coming from an initially extraordinary report.

Fraction of the articles I read? Close to 0. Fraction of the articles that make extraordinary claims and interest me enough to pass on? maybe 60%, scaling inversely to ordinariness. We’re only talking about extraordinary claims in which I participate in the reporting chain, right?

At the least, I tend to note the references of the story, determine what parallel sources may be available, and make it possible for links upstream of me to eliminate my added noise by seeking out the sources I used.

Hard to know why or how which effect will dominate, the noisy swallowing, or
the magnification.