Evidence can be selective, yes, but by definition it is objective. Your last statement seems to be in opposition to your premise, because you’ve stated plainly how effective influence can be in creating an echo chamber, and “truth” then becomes merely a subjective construct, built within that chamber and becoming a constituent part of its world view.

> The more people that participate, the closer you get to representing how true or false that marqt is

You’re describing the “wisdom of the crowd.” The scenario you’ve posited isn’t a version of the “wisdom of the crowd,” however. Rather, it seems to be a simple battle of resources. A popularity contest, if you will. Whoever has more “charisma capital” wins, because if the influence of a leader is wielded successfully, the executive function of the followers is short-circuited. History is lousy with examples of the “hive mind” refusing to acknowledge new/better evidence because they are irrationally driven to avoid the shame of being wrong in their commitment to their chosen thought leader. It becomes “us vs. them”, and objectivity goes out the window I’m favor of polarity.

The “wisdom of the crowd” absolutely depends on a probabilistic, noisy distribution of individual cognition. When rhetoric and influence are at play in a battle of “true or not true”, the cognitive expression of each individual is no longer a probabilistic distribution of statistical noise; it’s a coin toss, with the more influential participants supplying their own, weighted coin to their followers.

I feel like, as with most systems that rely on a group of individual cognitive perspectives and abilities, incentive or reward of any kind disqualifies that system from adhering to the vision you seem to have.

I may still be missing something, and I’m willing to be shown that, but I’m afraid that what you’ve described isn’t the wisdom of the crowd.