Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we consider chance-curation (the task of eas-ing chance-discovery activities for agents) as far as it concernsinformation sharing in online communities, understood as Vir-tual Cognitive Niches. We claim that Virtual Cognitive Nichesare digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of informa-tion and pieces of knowledge into the environment. The par-ticularity of Virtual Cognitive Niches, as socially biased net-works, is that they provide more ways for agents to interactthan to control the quality of the information they share and re-ceive. We contend that this social bias enables chance-curationstrategies that agents cannot foster in real-life communities. Inparticular, the chance curation strategies that we discuss are:redirecting the attention of agents to the virtual domain, foster-ing an only-docility-based relation with truth, and increasingthe social virtues of fallacies.