File deletion stream-of-consciousness

Deleting a bunch of stale user data, watching the filenames flicker by:

falklands...
...blair...
...rhino...
...pinhole...

The mind boggles.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Here's an interesting article on the "wisdom of crowds" from biological evolution to Wikipedia.  It addresses the conceptual problems some people have with both - "that can't work, random changes mean we'd be piles of goo" and "that can't work, random edits mean every article would have penises in it" respectively.  Both clearly do work, on a macro scale; both clearly have problems when you zoom in (the panda's thumb and Ronnie Hazlehurst's obituary).

The reason they work, of course, is the existence of selection pressure.  Even if the edits are random, what is preserved is not; wikipedia users will revert or correct a garbage entry and bad biological mutations make you less likely to breed.  Because selection pressure is invisible and out of our control, people have trouble seeing it.  The author supports his argument with personal experience of constructing software for a reccomendation system where, "The system doesn't "know" that a movie is a science fiction movie, any more than natural selection "knows" why a particular mutation in the DNA increases the chance of an animal surviving to adulthood."  It doesn't need to know: selection pressure doesn't have to be teleological.