Had it with the hive mind? Dedicated to debunking the creepy notion that crowds are smart? Ready to get your “digital Maoism” groove on and positively humiliate “the idea that the collective is all-wise?” Sick and tired of Internet gurus grabbing unearned mind share with fashionable constructs like algorithmic authority, which appear to suggest that the many can be more reliable than the few?
I want to help you make your debunker post the best it can possibly be because you are brave. It takes bravery to go against the new collectivites, a “triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions.” Just by landng here, you have, I feel, made a statement. You have declared yourself ready to doubt–by rights to reject–the rancid claim called wisdom of crowds and strike a blow for tradition and the individual talent. This is a great statement! But you need to know what to reject when you’re rejecting “technologists who believe that wisdom emerges from vast crowds, rather than from distinct, individual human beings.” You need to be informed.
For if you are not the Maoists will stomp the straw out of you. They are very disciplined.
The claim that crowds are wise comes from a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The author is not in fact a technologist, or much of a Maoist, but a business journalist for the New Yorker. Yet he does say that crowds can be wise, so if anyone ever needed to be stomped debunked it’s him, the phrase launcher.
Now when you draft your “I am skeptical…” post, be sure to look carefully at the part in his book (it’s p. 22) where he specifies “the conditions that a group needs to be smart.” Actually, you don’t even have to read the book. The number one hit on a Google search for “wisdom of the crowd” is the Wikipedia entry on the concept; it has a helpful section, “four elements required to form a wise crowd.” They are:
Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
Independence: People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
In other words, all crowds aren’t wise, according the source code for the phrase, “the wisdom of crowds.” Just those that are characterized by a diversity of views, independent thinkers, a distributed and decentralized population, and effective means for aggregating the votes or decisions of individuals. Only when these four conditions are met is there any sort of claim about crowd wisdom available for us to debunk, but please… don’t let this stop you. Remember: you are brave. You are informed… right?
Elsewhere, Surowiecki further qualifies his statement that crowds can be wise. For example, he says, “Crowds are best when there’s a right answer to a problem or a question,” like who is going to win the election. Other kinds of questions, not so good. He is very interested in situations where crowd judgment goes disastrously wrong, like financial bubbles, indicating that he hasn’t lost all his faculties.
Bottom line: you definitely can, and for the love of Einstein should, accuse Surowiecki of being an uncritical crowd worshipper, the spreader of a dangerously deluded and utopian meme. Just keep these subtle complications in mind! As a wise man once said, “Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t.” Indeed: Surowiecki himself says the crowd isn’t strong on cultural questions. To wit:
Collective wisdom is a good way of coming up with an answer when there is a right or wrong answer (in a kind of Platonic sense) to the question. Which horse is most likely to win this race? What percentage of the vote will George W. Bush get? What will the box-office grosses of “Shrek the Third” be? What are the chances of an outbreak of avian flue in Indonesia in 2008? These are all questions that there is, in some sense, a true answer to (even if we won’t know that answer until much later or perhaps not ever). I’m not sure, though, that the same can be said about a question like: Which movie is better?
Let’s wrap this up. You need to know what to reject when you’re rejecting the idea that the collective is all-wise. Consulting the source code for the idea, we find that crowds are not inherently wise at all. Rather, they are wise when…. there’s a right answer to the question, when the question isn’t a matter of taste or cultural quality, when there is diversity of opinion and independence of mind among group members, when there are specialists who can draw on local knowledge, and when there’s “a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict.” Also, crowds can be blind and stupid, and there’s no point in denying that.
A rickety structure indeed. Now sail forth and knock it down.
Jay Rosen: Public Notebook 
Feb 15, 2010 @ 16:41:26
I’m finding that the crowd is primarily concerned with group emotional management. There are only a few people who matter (who actually accomplish things) in any particular sphere, so it can be beneficial to tune out the crowd and focus merely on the leaders.The web is still a tiny community relative to the rest of the world. It appears all-encompassing when you’re staring at your Twitter feed.Often, the "wisdom" of the crowd is just an aggregation of infectious memes originated by a few talented individuals at most.The classic blog is an example of this process. A single story from the New York Times can get replicated and commented on by thousands of people. These people may add some opinions and emotional content, but the base material remains the same.If one of the journalist’s sources on that story lied, and no one figured it out, all of that "wisdom" can be pyramided on top of a falsehood.
Feb 15, 2010 @ 18:02:50
I feel it is the fourth element, the method of aggregation, and the second element, independence, that causes the problem in the wisdom of the crowd. Without the influence of the other members of a crowd if most members of the crowd chose an unwise solution than the crowd’s answer will be unwise if there is not interaction among the crowd. The reverse is also true, wise choices by the members leads to a wise overall decision.Interaction and non-independence of influence may overcome this and lead to a wise solution. It might also lead to an unwise solution.If members of a crowd are able to influence in either direction than the wisdom of the crowd will lean in that direction. If they are not able to influence than it is a crap shoot determined by the individual wisdoms of the members of the crowd. Which ultimately is non-determinant.It is more about the balance of the wisdom, the willingness to lead, and the ability to influence of the members of the crowd that determines the direction of the solution towards or against wisdom. Again it can go in either direction depending on the overall make up of the crowd.No crowds are not wise, but can make both wise and unwise decisions. Its just a roll of the dice.
Feb 15, 2010 @ 20:08:20
Well done Jay – I read Surowiecki’s book back in ’04 and always assumed that those who used the phrase "Wisdom of Crowds" never read it because it isn’t often quoted to back up claims. I was referred to this post by a friend. Keep an eye out for my post @ Permission To Suck (dot com) blogazine where I will be referencing your thoughts with links back to this post.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 00:03:45
Last week, I had a conversation with Steven Lisberger, who directed the classic film TRON, about storytelling in the networked environment. He had some similar points of view when it came to "the wisdom of networks." I blogged about it here http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1510thanks for the post, Jay!
Feb 16, 2010 @ 00:14:46
Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to discuss Surowiecki’s book with others, I sum it up as "under the right conditions, the right group of people, with the right information, can come to a better conclusion than any one individual." Doesn’t mean all crowds are smart, not by any means.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 00:18:51
Don’t forget to debunk prediction markets, where outcomes are bought and sold by markets of knowledge consumers trading futures. Businesses and intelligence agencies alike are finding them useful. Given the tight purse strings of most organizations these days, however, that utility has to be rationally realized against bottom lines.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 00:26:21
Jay, thank you for taking on a sacred emblem of the new digital media ecosystem. Somehow the idea that aggregating ignorance leads to wisdom was given a free pass by the cognescenti of the Valley. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand that aggregating the opinions of people who are actually informed on a topic, but from a diversity of *perspectives* on how to analyze it is probably the correct way to implement it.Just asking the public about complex topics however leads to inanity.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 00:59:08
My buddy refers to it as clownsourcing (he spends way too much time with expensive and pretencious word-of-mouth-agencies that prattle on about wisdom of crowds.)Yes there is a massive deception in listening excessively to collective voices, typically those that replicate the same knowledge (cultural retweeting) or are rapidly trying to gain social capital. What i find discordant is that truths and innovation can supposedly be found within crowds, but the same crowds are responsible for good-enough culture, where second-best, second-mover advantage dominates. (http://www.futuritymedia.com/2009/11/good-enough-culture-is-not-good-enough/)So wisdom of crowds? Yes, but only within those tightly defined parameters.Btw, when I learned the Delphi process on a Future Studies Masters degree back in the 1990s, croudsourcing was already widely debunked.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 03:00:52
Thanks, everyone. What I’m still trying to figure out–and I am sure one of you can help me–is who ever said the crowd was "all wise" (Jaron Lanier’s term) or ingenious over most things? Who?Do you understand the question I am asking you? For some reason I can’t get anyone to answer it, so maybe no one understands it but me. And to me it is a perfectly obvious question: <i>who said that thing you are so intent on debunking?</i> And if you don’t know, why are you debunking it?Who was it in the Valley that credited the "idea that aggregating ignorance leads to wisdom?" I wrote my post because I encounter repeatedly the urgency of writers who wish to debunk these generalized notions of crowd wisdom. But almost invariably the generalized notions of crowd wisdom are attached, linklessly, to categories of people, not real people we can look up, or touch or ask further questions of.When it comes to real people who have written with some enthusiasm about these ideas, what I find is authors who qualify them. They are making not generalized claims about wise crowds but more limited observations such as those I quote in this post.In the Jaron Lanier essay I linked to, he mentions some real people, but he doesn’t show or quote or link to any of them calling crowds "all wise." The closest he comes is "Kevin Kelly says of the ‘popurls’ site, ‘There’s no better way to watch the hive mind.’" That’s not even close. Lanier references "the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise." Fine. I am prepared to believe that some people might have fallen for this delusion. But who said it, and in what context, and what did think they meant? And are these people of sufficient stature, with a big enough following so that they might profitably be compared to a Mao, a Lenin, who commanded disciplined cardres?The reason I wrote about Surowiecki’s book is that it doesn’t make any claims like the ones that get debunked– endlessly, linklessly, and I would say mindlessly. The reason I used satire is that normal language does not seem to work. Everyone pretends like they can’t grasp my question. But if you read Lanier’s essay almost every point he makes about the wisdom of crowds is made by Surowiecki. "In some special cases the collective can be brilliant." That’s what Surowiecki says. "The collective can be stupid, too." That’s what Surowiecki says.Read <i>Crowdsourcing</i> by Jeff Howe. You’ll find the same sort of qualified "in some cases" reasoning there. None of the sweeping claims about crowd wisdom that are ritually debunked– linklessly, mindessly, namelessly, endlessly. What Howe says is that in some cases some kinds of tasks can be delegated to the crowd. But the debunkers don’t care what Howe says. They don’t care what Surowiecki says.This situation is fucking <I>absurd</i>.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 03:56:01
Thanks, Jay, for performing this public service.It is a conservative form of counter-culturalism that is moved to caricature ideas that challenge the special status of the ancien regime’s elite, that is, their sense of their own unique authority. Crowdsourcing is a double-whammy, undermining their claim to carry the collective wisdom of the culture while also attacking their assumption that their exceptionalism confers on them special powers of perception–of which the hoi polloi are not capable. Hence this backlash.Isn’t it ironic that the elite’s disconnectedness from the newly emerging mainstream is precisely what allows them to persist in their fantasies?
Feb 16, 2010 @ 04:27:57
Perhaps it’s the crowd that made the leap and attributed the wrongful thought to "they"? Maybe the politics of the day that finds powerful crowds claiming wisdom through media pundits? Or is it the heartbreak of diminishing uniqueness felt by our creative class when spec work is harvested from crowds? Not sure – and pretty sure that wasn’t your point.It was my impression that much of what is said and written about the "Wisdom of Crowds" is not directed at anyone in particular but rather the action of organized groups using new mechanisms to reach deep into crowds to find "wisdom" – i.e. smartness, ideas, thought, experience, etc. with the ultimate purpose of shifting financial margins.The form of my debunking is rooted mainly in distinguishing between open source and crowdsource; innovation and derivative creativity taken to extreme; collaboration where everyone shares and benefits equally in the result and the solicitation of work on spec to benefit a central profiteer. Go here for an excellent blog post: http://bit.ly/9gxRv1I agree, I don’t think either Jeff Howe or Surowiecki in any way deserve anything but admiration – I’m just sayin’ ….
Feb 16, 2010 @ 04:56:35
Thanks, Bruce. And thanks for your post, too http://bit.ly/dmyPPS I thought it was well written. I think you may be right. "Much of what is said and written about the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ is not directed at anyone in particular but rather the action of organized groups using new mechanisms to reach deep into crowds to find ‘wisdom.’" Makes sense.The trouble is it’s not framed that way. The debunkers seem to be calling out individuals, but then they never name, quote or link to them. That’s how you get sentences like this, in the Washington Post review I linked to… "A self-confessed ‘humanistic softie,’ Lanier is fighting to wrest control of technology from the ‘ascendant tribe’ of technologists who believe that wisdom emerges from vast crowds, rather than from distinct, individual human beings."
Feb 16, 2010 @ 05:06:13
Ahhhh, the "ascendant tribe" – now THAT is a tribe that has never accepted me as a member; Descendant crowd maybe.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 05:10:13
I’m importing this from Twitter, http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/statuses/9171512338 because I think it captures what I meant. The debunkers should simply say, "I read the title of Surowiecki’s book, and I think he’s wrong." I’d have no problem with that. That would be honest. That would be real. Problem is… they’re too embarrassed to admit it. But that is what they mean, most of ’em.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 05:55:09
There’s a big difference between a justification and an excuse. I’m here to off the latter on behalf of many debunkers.When someone like Surowieki writes a well publicized popular book called "Wisdom of the Crowds" as opposed to "Occasional Wisdom of the Crowds," it’s easy to misunderstand. It isn’t justifable, but it’s excusable. When Surowieki enumerates criteria that amount to a definition of crowd wisdom but doesn’t fully investigate each, it’s easy to lose track of how grand or limited the scope of his overarching claim is. For prominent writers in prominent publications, that’s no justification for error, but, again, it’s a reasonable excuse. To the extent that Surowieki can talk about "Independence" as a state of the world in which "People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them" and get bright people to conclude that all he means is "independent thinkers," his seeming trick appears to have worked. In fact, he’s defining a condition far more stringent than people who think independently in the colloquial sense. The condition he’s really defining is so stringent–perfectly disconnected, unaware decision-makers utterly uninfluenced by one another–that it may not have a proper role in a popular book.But of course his is a popular book, so of course his condition mustn’t be so strict. Or that what naive reviewers figure anyhow. And this kind of reviewer is naive. That’s why I’m *not* trying to justify their reviews, their ecstatic debunking. And yet, under the circumstances, I do think this kind of naive reasoning really is excusable. If your job is reviewing books and you have one before you that’s *either* correct and so narrow in scope as to be boring *or* wrong and interesting, I can get over it if your gut reaction is to see the latter.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 06:37:10
You will have to excuse me. I come from an academic environment. Where if you say, "I disagree with X" and you cannot say who proposed X, and the only text you can site for X reveals a profound misreading of that text… you are laughed out of the room. And when it comes to what is a "good" and what is a "pernicious" idea, our attitude (show me the text!) is, I feel, the more realistic one. The one that is empirical. The one that asks for evidence. I know: crazy, isn’t it? We require a grounding in what is actually said.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 12:38:36
I bristle over Surowieki’s title and the word crowdsourcing but when I spend time with the underlying principles, my argument doesn’t focus on the title of his book – that was designed to get folks excited – but rather the creative destruction and "unnovation" as coined by Umair Haque, that is trending and bundled with the title "Wisdom of Crowds" is without full understanding. Beyond that and without references the argument seems semantically frantic. I don’t really care where wisdom comes from if it really is wisdom and not unsubstantiated claims that points to "crowds" as a reputable source of truth..
Feb 16, 2010 @ 15:50:27
If only Surowieki had titled his book "The Wisdom of Well-Crafted Knowledge Extraction Systems," none of this confusion would exist.Great read.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 17:25:29
I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective, that echoes some of what has been stated above about extracting wisdom from crowds and not succumbing to the lowest common denominator effect. I do not think debunking is the issue, Jay. Debunking is a form of denying, and denying throws the argument into an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic that can never be resolved. It doesn’t matter whether the context is academic, experiential or intuitive, pr whether the term in question is hive, swarm or network. My background is storytelling in the entertainment industry. I personally dismissed ‘crowdsourcing’ after witnessing many failed experiments with collaborative storytelling in the mid to late ’90s. On the other hand, I have also seen the ‘auteur’ process lead to battles for control of the narrative that only the most extreme personalities (Tim Burton, James Cameron, and fictional archetypes like John Galt, e.g.) can leverage. ‘The fight for control of the script’ has a pernicious effect on process and product that isn’t much different from ‘crowdsourcing misapplied.’ The auteur process, by definition, isn’t for everyone, and yet the invitation for everyone to play along is implicit in the networked environment. This is the paradox to be resolved. Any contemporary theory of narrative production that holds water has to account for this potential for everyone to participate. This, it seems to me, is the real issue: What are the collaborative theories and practices that take the networked environment into account, and at the same time, elevate the narrative instead of leveling it? This is why I believe that improvisation is so vital to any contemporary creative process. Improvisation offers the invitation to ‘the crowd’ to participate and, at the same time, establishes objective standards for that participation, and for the resulting narrative.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 17:36:02
<i>You will have to excuse me. I come from an academic environment. Where if you say, "I disagree with X" and you cannot say who proposed X, and the only text you can site for X reveals a profound misreading of that text… you are laughed out of the room.</i>I wouldn’t think of laughing you out of the room, professor. But would you permit me a snigger?Where, exactly, are these legions of "debunkers" who are out there tilting at the idea that the "collective is all-wise." You’ve given us the X, but you haven’t said who proposed X. OK, you’ve linked to a couple of would-be Xs. There’s Jaron Lanier, whom you suggest is painting a one-dimensional picture of the crowd and distorting the subtleties of Surowiecki’s argument. Yet here is what Lanier actually says about Surowiecki’s argument in his book "You Are Not a Gadget":"The term ‘wisdom of crowds’ is the title of a book by James Surowiecki and is often introduced with the story of an ox in a marketplace. In the story, a bunch of people all guess the animal’s weight, and the average of the guesses turns out to be generally more reliable than any one person’s estimate. A common idea about why this works is that the mistakes various people make cancel one another out; an additional, more important idea is that there’s at least a little bit of correctness in the logic and assumptions underlying many of the guesses, so they center around the right answer. … At any rate, the effect is repeatable and is widely held to be one of the foundations of both market economies and democracies. … The ‘wisdom of the crowds’ effect should be thought of as a tool. … Since the internet makes crowds more accessible, it would be beneficial to have a wide-ranging, clear set of rules explaining when the wisdom of crowds is likely to produce meaningful results. Surowiecki proposes four principles in his book, framed from the interior dynamics of the crowd. [Lanier then summarizes those rules as well as other theories, including his won, about when crowds can be "wise."] Maybe if you combined all of our approaches you’d get a practical set of rules for avoiding cloud failures."Clearly, Lanier has a multifaceted view of the usefulness of the clouds and is certainly not characterizing Surowiecki’s argument as "the collective is all-wise." You also link to George Packer’s post criticizing extreme forms of "techno-worship," which can take on the characteristics of "a triumphalist and intolerant cult." You’re certainly free to disagree with Packer, but can you point out where he discusses the wisdom of the crowds or where he paints a simplistic picture of the "all-wise collective" or where he glosses over Surowiecki’s subtleties? Packer doesn’t discuss that subject at all, so I’m not sure why, by implication, you’ve included him among your nefarious "debunkers."Let’s see. Who else are you specifying as promulgating this "all-wise collective" strawman?Well, no one, so far as I can see. "Show me the text," indeed.Are you not perhaps guilty of the crime you are so quick to see in (unnamed) others?
Feb 16, 2010 @ 17:52:58
Here’s an example of the text of a debunker: the opening graf from Steve Lohr’s piece in the NY Times Week in Review about Apple as a counterexample to the wisdom of crowds "Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/weekinreview/31lohr.html"The more, the better. That???s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and ‘open innovation.’ Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we???re told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence."
Feb 16, 2010 @ 17:57:33
Nick: Lanier says he is concerned about the "appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force." The fact that he doesn’t connect it to Surowiecki is my point. He can’t.
Feb 16, 2010 @ 18:28:27
Jay: I think a case could be made that Lanier overstates his case, particularly in the essay, from early 2006, that you point to and quote from. But even in that essay, he is careful not to create the kind of strawman that you accuse him (indirectly) of creating. Here is what he says about the wisdom of crowds in that essay:"This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the ‘Wisdom of Crowds,’ though I think the word ‘wisdom’ is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google’s page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania. The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential."Do you find this passage to be a distortion of Surowiecki’s argument? To me it seems like a level-headed gloss on that argument. To be fair to Lanier, don’t you think you should note that, both in this essay and in his book, he gives a careful and balanced review of the wisdom-of-the-crowd thesis?What Lanier criticizes in his essay is the sense, espoused by some, that a collective intelligence, or hive mind, is emerging on the web that is somehow superior to the individual mind. You can certainly debate Lanier on that point (though I think his observation is an important one and shouldn’t be dismissed) but to imply that he (or unnamed others) don’t appreciate the subtleties of the so-called wisdom of the crowd is to traffic in strawmen yourself.Anyway, I await the further specification of texts that illustrate the debunkers’ views as you characterize them.John McCrory: Lohr is just providing an accurate summation of a popular view about "open innovation." This is a view you hear all the time in discussions about how businesses can tap into the wisdom of the online crowd – see, for instance, the popular book "Wikinomics."
Feb 16, 2010 @ 18:45:24
Excellent post Jay.What I often say to people – and I believe it’s in the book somewhere is that there are certain types of actions where you don’t want a hive mind/wisdom of the crowd. But that doesn’t discredit that in other actions/conditions the collective is indeed much smarter.If I have a jar of jelly beans – I’ll take the wisdom of the crowd any day.But if I’m going to have brain surgery. Or if I’m going to be on an airplane. Please give me a brain surgeon and a pilot. But the book never claims that brain surgery could be done by the collective. Perhaps because, as you noted, it would be hard to funnel up decisions, and perhaps also because some actions require expertise still. And while counting jelly beans might be trivial – that is simply a lack of imagination on my part right now – time to get back to work!!!Best
Feb 17, 2010 @ 04:16:07
Oh, I see what you’re doing there…the whole, let me put up the comment bait and then come back over the top by debunking the debunker agree"ers". Cute.So, let’s get to it. You ask: "Who was it in the Valley that credited the "idea that aggregating ignorance leads to wisdom?"" No one person is credited with that idea — but I never said there was one person. Rather I believe it’s the collective actions of businesses built with this theory and the constant echo chamber of the Internet has simplified the meme into its current (mis)understood form. Marketocracy and StockTwits are a couple of examples of the theory in practice. Yahoo! Answers and other knowledge aggregation sites can be shown as prime examples of the "Wisdom of the Crowds" as well. A great Communications professor unveiled the theory of Social Construction of Reality and related it to communications and semantics. And I think this is a great example. If most of the communicative nodes believe that "Wisdom of the Crowds" is simplified into a different form than what is memorialized in the iconci works, then guess what, it is.And I also agree with the secondary argument raised so wonderfully in your comments. Just because Suroweicki qualified the argument doesn’t mean it shields him from the backlash on its weaknesses. He certainly made enough money standing in front of the meme with his book. Morisy’s comment about what Suroweicki’s title really should’ve been is a classic illustration of the difference between the meme and his qualified presentation of it. As credit card companies are discovering, fine print does not absolve sins.But let me also offer a constructive critique of his presentation: If you examine his four requirements to form a wise crowd (Diversity of Opinion, Independence, Decentralization & Aggregation), he completely misses the most important requirement in my opinion: the members of the crowd must have a rational connection to the question at hand in order to be able to offer an ‘additive’ opinion. In fact, the first example presented in the book, finding the location of the Scorpion submarine is a great example of the fact that polling a well-informed crowd is actually better than polling random people. The lesson of the Scorpion is that by aggregating the views of informed experts with different analytical lenses that may not be in traditional expert structures is a good idea. (And by the way: Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew is an EXCELLENT BOOK – an absorbing and fascinating read!)And maybe that’s what Suroweicki was really trying to say: that the existing decision-making structures are significantly flawed. Which is fine, but that’s not what he promoted. Much of my visceral reaction to the meme comes from other people magnifying some of his small errors (in my opinion) into a disputable meme.Do I have a citation for you to bookmark and reference? No. I’m arguing that the ‘they’ is an amalgamation of Surowiecki’s initial presentation, the following SiliValley frenzy that occurred and the echo-chamber amplification that surrounds the idea. Am I comfortable with my criticism of as a result of that perspective? You bet.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 04:27:45
The Social Construction of Reality is not by a Communications professor. It’s by two sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and is considered a contribution to the field of sociology of knowledge. So no one said "aggregating ignorance leads to wisdom." Rather, lots of people must have thought it because several enterprises can be said to have been based on it, even though the people who created those enterprises would never say that’s what they were doing.Well, I guess you debunked them.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 04:38:47
Didn’t mean to imply that the idea was created by a Communications Professor, rather meant that the idea was initially presented *to me* by a Communications Professor. But thanks for the attempted credibility reduction through a nitty fisk. Nice.Some of those organizations have said they were doing it. Some would probably not admit to it now that the thinking has advanced. Still stand by it.And by the way, the whole guess the weight of a pig story? I’d love to see that study reproduced. I’m betting experts on hog farming would be much more accurate than random county fair crowd-goers any day.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 04:47:57
Some of the organizations that created sites like Yahoo Answers have said they thought aggregating ignorance leads to wisdom? Really? That would surprise me, but if you say you heard them… okay.By the way, I disagree with the widespread idea that a blogger can never be as informed as a college professor. I think it’s all wrong.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 05:06:09
Nick Carr: Lohr wrote, "we’re told in books and academic research" — not "popular views" or "discussions" — but he doesn’t cite any specific book or article. He very well may be referring to Don Tapscott as you suggest, but there is no way for us to know that. It seems Jay’s point is that he and other debunkers never — never — say exactly who put forward the theory they are debunking, or where we can find that theory elaborated.If one is going to make an argument with "books and academic research" one really ought to argue at that level. Give citations the reader can follow back the sources. I don’t expect footnotes in a newspaper or magazine article, but a name or title would be nice.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 05:35:21
Nick, you claim that Jay has unfairly summarized Lanier (and others), and, after citing a passage from Lanier’s argument, state:"Do you find this passage to be a distortion of Surowiecki’s argument? To me it seems like a level-headed gloss on that argument. To be fair to Lanier, don’t you think you should note that, both in this essay and in his book, he gives a careful and balanced review of the wisdom-of-the-crowd thesis?"But you completely miss the rhetorical point of that passage. It’s not a ‘gloss’ of Surowiecki’s arguments; it’s a quick-summation-and-then-rebuttal of those arguments. By failing to see that, you miss the point of Jay’s argument, which is that ‘debunkers’ iron out the subtleties in their opponents’ arguments and then triumphantly offer up those very same subtleties as proof that that their opponents have been ‘debunked’.Let’s look at Lanier’s passage, the one that you cite, a little more closely. He begins that section by stating that "The collective isn’t always stupid," offering an "example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective." (Jellybean counting) This, Lanier states, "has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds,"" and he admits that the "phenomenon is real, and immensely useful."Right. So far, so good–this is indeed Lanier’s "gloss" on Surowiecki and the idea of ‘collective wisdom’. But here Lanier’s summary of the "wisdom of the crowds" ends, and he begins his own arguments, a rhetorical turn that you missed."But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania." Get it? Lanier is saying that the "peculiar trait" celebrated by Surowiecki is in fact "not infinitely useful." These qualifications are presented as Lanier’s own argument, the starting point for an argumentative thread that clearly opposes itself to the ‘jellybean logic’ of the "wisdom of the crowds":"In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar."And in other words, by misreading Lanier, you turn an example of what Jay is talking about, the strawman logic of the debunker, into a purported counter-example.
Feb 17, 2010 @ 14:46:37
<i>Lohr wrote, "we’re told in books and academic research" — not "popular views" or "discussions" — but he doesn’t cite any specific book or article.</i>Give me a break. Lohr was writing a newspaper piece, not an academic paper. You’re being silly.Matt: I don’t think I missed Lanier’s "rhetorical turn," but I am missing your point. When Lanier writes that the crowd’s "special kind of intelligence" is "not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too," he’s not only stating his own point of view but also Surowiecki’s and that of any other sentient human being.
Feb 18, 2010 @ 06:41:19
<b>Linklessly, mindessly, namelessly, endlessly, cont. </b>..And yet the utopian promoters of the Internet tell us that the hive mind, the vast virtual collective, will propel us toward a brave new world. Lanier dismisses such visions as childish fantasy, one that allows many well-intentioned people to be seduced by an evolving nightmare.???The crowd phenomenon exists, but the hive does not exist,??? Lanier told me. ???All there is, is a crowd phenomenon, which can often be dangerous. To a true believer, which I certainly am not, the hive is like the baby at the end of ???2001 Space Odyssey.??? It is a super creature that surpasses humanity. To me it is the misinterpretation of the old crowd phenomenon with a digital vibe. It has all the same dangers. A crowd can turn into a mean mob all too easily, as it has throughout human history.??? — <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_information_super-sewer_20100214/">The information super sewer</a> by Chris Hedges. The debunkers have names; the debunked…."utopian promoters," "true believers."
Feb 20, 2010 @ 22:54:19
<b>Quotelessly, linklessly, cont.</b><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983004575073911147404540.html">Evgeny Morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.</a> A little sanity check here: when you write a couple thousand words about the "myth of widgetry," don’t you normally have to supply a one or two quotes that give the flavor of widgetry and its wild claims before exposing what a lie and delusion it is? I mean, wouldn’t that be normal practice? Click the link. See if you can find a single quote from the techno-utopians who are said to be pervasive.</p>
Jul 23, 2010 @ 13:09:37
If only Surowieki had titled his book "The Wisdom of Well-Crafted Knowledge Extraction Systems," none of this confusion would exist.Great read.
Aug 08, 2010 @ 17:10:22
<i>Which horse is most likely to win this race? What percentage of the vote will George W. Bush get? What will the box-office grosses of ???Shrek the Third??? be?</i>Aren’t those not so much wisdom of the crowd as examples where the crowd sets the victory conditions? I mean, how many votes GW Bush gets is a function of the number of people who vote for him, not strictly speaking some sort of sense of wisdom.Ditto the odds on favourite to win a race, or the box office grosses of Shrek the Third. These are all based on what the crowd expects itself to do – which would mean that the crowd isn’t so much wise, as consistent.Further, aggregation would by its nature eliminate the other three conditions for wise crowds. It would be a centralising force that could only arise through a lack of independence (Given that the individual within the crowd would have to have a concern for the opinions of others in order to come to an aggregate) and is ultimately how we solve the problem of diversity of opinion.
Jan 31, 2012 @ 12:04:47
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Feb 09, 2012 @ 00:58:59
Nick Carr: Lohr wrote, "we’re told in books and academic research" — not "popular views" or "discussions" — but he doesn’t cite any specific book or article. He very well may be referring to Don Tapscott as you suggest, but there is no way for us to know that. It seems Jay’s point is that he and other debunkers never — never — say exactly who put forward the theory they are debunking, or where we can find that theory elaborated.If one is going to make an argument with "books and academic research" one really ought to argue at that level. Give citations the reader can follow back the sources. I don’t expect footnotes in a newspaper or magazine article, but a name or title would be nice.
Feb 09, 2012 @ 08:19:56
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Feb 11, 2012 @ 07:46:13
Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.