Unwisdom of Crowds

Author: Marc Fawzi

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/marcfawzi

License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

~~

A Crowd Has No Wisdom

Before we make this argument, let’s define the types of crowds.

{The designations of ‘condensed’ and ‘dispersed’ given below for crowds are relative to the ability of the members of the crowd to communicate with each other and affect each other’s judgment.

The word “crowd” is used here to mean a large group of people, not 5 or 10 people but thousands or millions of people.}

A dispersed crowd (without a formal hierarchy) will produce averaged judgment. For example, asking each of 200 people (not at the same time or place) how many jelly beans are in a jar would result in an averaged judgment, which would eliminate values that are too high or two low, resulting in an estimate of the number of jelly beans in the jar (which is a measurable value) that is close to the actual value. In this case the crowd is nothing more than a decent statistical calculator. It has not exhibited any more wisdom than the tool it is being used as.

A condensed crowd (without a formal hierarchy) may produce averaged or lowest-common-denominator judgment, depending on whether or not its judgment is rationally or psychologically driven. In case the judgment is about a measurable value it would most likely be rationally driven, and, thus, be an averaged judgment. In case the judgment is about a quality it would most likely be psychologically driven, and thus, be a lowest-common-denominator judgment. In the rational case, the assumption is that, even though the crowd’s members can communicate with and affect each others judgment, if each member is rational enough and the judgment to be made concerns a measurable value then the crowd will likely produce an averaged judgment (i.e. the average of independent judgments.) If, however, the crowd members can communicate and affect each others judgment and the judgment to be made is qualitative not quantitative then the crowd’s judgment should tend toward the lowest common denominator.

A typical crowd is a mix of both the dispersed and condensed crowds. Thus, its range of judgment with respect to both measurable value and quality include both averaged as well as lowest-common-denominator judgments.

The problem with averaged judgment when it’s applied to quality (rather than measurable value), which can happen in a typical crowd, is that you end up with a judgment of average quality, not the best judgment.

The problem with lowest-common-denominator judgment when it’s applied to quality is that it uses the primitive part of our psychology. In other words, expect exactly the opposite of wisdom.

So when it comes to quality, a typical crowd is going to be either a judge of average quality or an unwise judge. And nothing else.

Where does that leave the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ movement? (in the garbage bin of history in my candid opinion.)

Toward a Democratic Society

A hierarchy that doesn’t listen to the crowd (or that forces and manipulates the crowd to listen to it) is a dictatorship (e.g. North Korea, Iran, the 3rd Reich, etc.)

However, mixed ‘hierarchical + crowd’ system, which ideally allows the crowd to adjusts the judgment (of the system), is a democracy.

Therefore, Web 2.0’s [un]wisdom-of-crowds model needs to be fixed by adding the concept of a non-arbirary hierarchy that is by the crowd (or people) and for the crowd (or people.)

Below is one example, using ‘digg’ as the Web 2.0 application, that shows a prototypical transformation from Web 2.0 to Web 2.5 (or from “hunter gatherer” to “democratic society.”)

Electing Leaders in a Democracy: Building the System

In an application like digg (or the “digg killer” to be exact) writers, content producers, social figures, business figures, and others, who are higher in the food chain than the consumer, and who are collectively referred to herein as ‘taste makers’, should be allowed to start their own channel (or page) where they list links they think are cool. If enough people ‘bookmark’ a given page then that means that the taste-maker in question is worthy of being positioned into the system’s hierarchy at a higher level than that of the consumer. The taste-makers can then rally their followers (those who use them as taste-makers) to digg the links the taste maker has chosen to put on his/her page.

This is similar to parliamentary democracy where members of the parliament have to get enough votes on a given issue from their district in order to pass it into law.

The key here is that the ‘trusted’ taste-makers get to decide which links to promote for votes from their followers.

At the same time, people in the crowd should be able to vote the taste-makers in or out of the system’s hierarchical structure by bookmarking or un-bookmarking their page.

Anyone who has followers can become a taste-maker, but they would have to replace an existing taste-maker as the system has a finite hierarchy with finite number of taste-maker positions (e.g. in the thousands.) And once someone is elected as a taste-maker they would stay in the role for a certain period before they can be voted in or out of the position by their followers (assuming another contender has nominated himself/herself for the position.)

This is a very simple ‘hierarchical + crowd’ system that implements a very simple form of leader-follower democratic process.

The perils of letting the crowd decide without giving them a democratic structure and process is to let lowest-common-denominator and averaged judgments become the norm.

Leaders and Crowds need to work together within a democratic structure and process to assure the best judgment possible.

BTW, this is not much different than the process whereby the crowd selects its taste-makers (e.g. Radio DJs, Wise men, etc.) except this provides a structure to formalize the process, which would be too costly and time-consuming in the real world. So may be this would also apply to how society elects its taste makers (outside of social bookmarking sites.)

The reason this system would kill digg is because it will have an aggregate quality of judgment so much better than digg.

Related

 

1. Web 2.0: Back to The Hunter Gatherer Society
2. The Future of Governance (outdated by next link)
3. Toward a Natural World Order

 

Tags:

Trends, wisdom of crowds, tagging, Startup, mass psychology, Google, cult psychology, Web 2.0, Web 2.0, digg, censorship, democracy, P2P, P2P 2.0, social bookmarking, social networking, Web 2.5