What about non-elite groups? (...) they are likely to be heavily influenced by the cognitive elite, especially in the longer run.
I think they are likely to be influenced by whom they consider high-status. If you succeed to make a conspiracy theory website seem like an authoritative source (it must seem as professional as the mainstream media, except that it brings "news you will not hear elsewhere"), that's all you need.
Why would anyone make a professionally looking conspiracy theory website? Aren't "professionality" and "crackpot thinking" kinda opposed in real life? Yeah, the genuine crackpots usually also have low regards for mainstream design or marketing. But a professionally looking conspiracy theory website is a great vehicle for political propaganda. So a foreign government may spend a lot of money and professional work to make a high-status conspiracy website, where the conspiracies are filtered, and only those that are neutral or convenient for the owner are published.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. Russians already have such website with online radio in my country. I see advertisements for it almost everywhere. The content is more or less: "Things your government wants to keep secret from you: Vaccination causes autism. West is the source of all evil. Russia is a paradise. Being a member of European Union is bad for you, because they will kidnap and abuse your children!" And of course, the website is "independent and alternative".
I agree with all of this. The upshot seems to be that its important that those who actually have good ideas achieve high status.
I think it does among the cognitive elite, and that this explains the rise of complex but good ideas such as applied rationality and Effective altruism. I'm less sure about other groups.
The Internet increases the speed and the convenience of communication vastly. It also makes it much easier for people with shared interests to get in contact.
This will of course lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of false or useless information. But it will also lead to an increase in true and relevant information.
Now members of the cognitive elite are, or so I claim, reasonably good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. They do this not the least by finding reliable sources. They will quickly pass this, mostly true information, on to other members of the cognitive elite. This means that the higher pace of information dissemination will translate into a higher pace of learning true ideas, for this group.
What about non-elite groups? I'm not sure. On the one hand, they are, by definition, not as good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. On the other hand, they are likely to be heavily influenced by the cognitive elite, especially in the longer run.
By and large, I think we have cause for optimism, though: good ideas will continue to spread quickly. How could we make them spread even quicker?The most obvious solution is to increase the reliability of information. Notice that while information technology has made it much more convenient to share information quickly, it hasn't increased the reliability of information.
There are a couple of ways of addressing this problem. One is better reputation/karma systems. That would both incentivize people to disseminate true and relevant information, and make it easier to find true and relevant information. (An alternative, and to my mind interesting, version is reputation systems where the scores aren't produced by users, but rather by verified experts.)
Another method is automatic quality-control of information (e.g. fact-checking). Google have done some work on this, but still, it is in its infancy. It'll be interesting to follow the development in this area in the years to come.