A perfectly random rump through the meadows of hyperspace lead me from this post on In Trade about volatility as a predictor of bias to this blog full of equations, to this note and then to this Chronicle article about mobbing in nature and society (academic society, that is). The point of the later is that mobbing is a biological reaction to danger (a la Lorenz). And none but the egghead academic is more liable to succumb to it. Now, my humble opinion is not that we act like hens and roosters trying to ward off a sneaky skunk raiding the coop, but that chicken society is just a bastardized image of human society. But this is a another issue, for another time. Until then, I retain the suggestion that given enough communication, people will flare up in each other the most deleterious instincts. If that is the right word for it. Here is the appropriate argument, pace Sunstein, who makes the same point in Infotopia. Which makes me think if ultimately, creating free channels of communication between people via online communication might not after all lead to what Rheingold and Seabrook described so well a decade ago, on the Well. Groupmind.
The Law of Group Polarization, formulated by Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that a bunch of people who agree with each other on some point will, given the chance to get together and talk, come away agreeing more strenuously on a more extreme point. If this tendency has a curdling effect on intellectual debates, it can have a downright menacing effect when the point of agreement is that a particular colleague is a repugnant nutjob.