One bold, misinformed spider slows a colony’s ability to learn by Susan Milius.
From the post:
The wrong-headed notions of an influential individual can make a group sluggish in learning from its mistakes, even among spiders.
Velvet spiders (Stegodyphus dumicola) with bold behavior but incorrect information were bad influences on their colonies, researchers reported June 11 at the annual conference of the Animal Behavior Society. Spider growth faltered in these colonies because the naïve group mates were slow to catch on to bold ones’ errors. In contrast, misinformed shier spiders didn’t undermine their colonies’ prospects.
…
The rest of the article is fire-walled but you get the gist of the finding.
What if you had ten+ (10+) bold, misinformed spiders with seemingly unlimited TV time? Would that have the potential to make an entire nation dumber?
Is this why federal agencies function so poorly? Bold, misinformed spiders are appointed to positions of leadership?
There is certainly an argument for editing topic map input to eliminate views of bold, misinformed individuals.