Slashdot Mirror
Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds'
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
I'm already posting -1
Wow. I hear a best selling demotivator poster in the works.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Everyone knows that an argument from appeal to popular opinion is invalid. http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~benham/funstuff/logical.html
I have never frequented fark.com, only clicking through on occasion the last X? number of years it's been running, but TFS makes me appreciate the founder's own wisdom....
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.'
Funny, that also seems to be the case with most articles. Garbage in, garbage out.
Fark Creator Anoints Self Emperor, Declares Martial Law
Dog is my co-pilot.
Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay (first published in 1841). His book discusses Tulip-mania in the Netherlands and witch persecutions (and many more incidents) to illustrate the distinct LACK of wisdom of crowds.
[Insert pithy quote here]
This, from a guy that used to post boobies and weenies links? Dude, you haven't got enough IQ points to fill a mayonnaise jar. Seriously -- there are people with letters after their names that back this stuff. What do you have? "A popular website marketed to Joe Average." Woooow... some cred there, man.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Keep in mind that Drew is running Fark as a business, and certain comments that might rail against his corporate superiors will get modded or banned. Drew and his modmins are know to ban people based on petty rivalries and personality conflicts. Fark is no bastion of "free speech", and what would he know about "wisdom" from a site that is dedicated to goofball headlines and accelerated political trolling.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Is like resistance in a parallel circuit.
Come on. "America Speaking Out" is not about getting wisdom from people, any more than the White House's solicitation of ideas for the oil spill was. It's about allowing people to feel like they have a voice. Don't spoil the illusion!
As to the "wisdom of crowds" in general, it depends entirely on the context. We know for a fact that when crowds have significant enough motivation (like money), they do an excellent job of predicting things, for example. But if your motivation is to have people point at your comment and emote somehow (laugh, get angry, friend you, whatever), then obviously, truth and wisdom are not your goals, so you don't often find truth and wisdom there.
Crowd are dumbs: right! It's exactly what Gustave LeBon said about crowd and it's still true. Just watch the suckers all around the web (e.g. Twitter...). :))))
Claude LaFreniere aka climenole
..is he, like, new to the Internet?
Slashdot is not so different, there are some pretty useless comment here. Hell, I make a lot of them on occasion myself.
But if you read between the lines and "cherry pick", there are usually hidden gems about a software package, a piece of advice or something truly fascinating.
The noise to signal ratio is what matters, and on Slashdot it is better some days than others but in general it's a lot better than a lot of other sites. Some sites like YouTube or even to some extent Digg have almost no added value in their comments and the "noise" is pretty high.
It's not just about the freshest content (which is why I think a lot of people frequent Digg or Hacker News), the comments are what makes a user-generated-content site work... at least for me.
That's why I keep coming back here.
If you can't mod them join them.
I run a site that targets the same demographic as Curtis and while I concur that the vast majority of posts provide little value, there are a subset that are well reasoned and very helpful.
Any crowd is going to eventually devolve into a set of leaders and a set of followers and I think the problem that we see online is that the leaders are often not the most informed, but the most controversial.
However, i'm not sure that's much different from anywhere in the real world
I believe his name is "Drew Curtis" - note the terminal "S".
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Perhaps less that "wisdom of the crowds" are dumb, but more that the vocal minority tend to drown out the quieter majority ... and the percentage of nutcases is much higher in the former group.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plus2sd/200809/the-stupidity-crowds
"What can you do? I gained some insight into this problem several years ago when my research group performed an fMRI study of social conformity. We recreated a version of the famous Asch experiment of the 1950s and used fMRI to determine how a group changes an individual's perception of the world. Two things emerged from the study. First, when individuals conform to a group's opinion, even when the group is wrong, we observe changes in perceptual circuits in the brain, suggesting that groups change the way we see the world. Second, when an individual stands up against the group, we observed strong activation in the amygdala, a structure closely associated with fear. All this tells me that not only are our brains not wired for truly independent thought, but it takes a huge amount of effort to overcome the fear of standing up for one's own beliefs and speaking out".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
America Speaking Out is not, arguably, the best example.
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage. Worse; because of the, er... exceptional quality of political discourse in America, you ran into the "Poe's Law" problem.
If your mods are remotely on the ball, or your wiki editors are up to snuff, or whatever, it is pretty trivial to resist obvious and unsubtle attacks. Worthless posts get modded down, somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough. If, though, a fair part of your "crowd" is utterly batshit crazy, you run into a real problem: your most committed users will produce output almost exactly like your most vicious, cynical parodists(the same thing happened to Conservapedia. Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).
Similarly, with America Speaking Out, the problem isn't going to be with trivial vandalism, which is annoying but quick to clean up, the problem will be that it is impossible to distinguish between people ranting about how Barrack Hussein is a communist fascist muslim sleeper agent because they believe that, and the ones doing exactly the same thing because it amuses them to associate such views with the RNC. Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=5457221&cpp=1
???????
Just fix your sarcasm detector?
Yeah because democrats are better?
Lets just say that both major parties have an underlying sameness that prevents any progress other than over tiny issues.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't
"If it is impossible to tell whether something is being parodied or taken seriously, then that something is genuinely stupid."
--Krohn's Corollary to Poe's Law.
If you have a dumb idea and are relying upon people to tell you that it's a dumb idea rather than make fun of you, then you've already lost, because you can't tell who is helping you and who is making fun of you.
The solution? Educate yourself before you tell everyone your dumb idea!
America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Really now? You expect that a site where people can make policy decisions via the internet wouldn't be trolled to hell by 4chan or the like?
Really, you can't take anything on the internet to be 100% seriously this is true from news articles (look at how many people use The Onion as a "reliable" source) to voting.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I've always felt the rest of the world was stupider than me, too. Of course, in my case, I'm obviously smarter than this Fark creator.
Qxe4
The guy completly misunderstands the point of "the wisdom of the crowds". As he says, only 1% of comments on a story are useful, and that's true. But no one ever said that the entire crowd would be smart. Just that if you get a crowd of people together, a few good ideas (and a ton of bad ones) will come up far faster than a single individual thinking alone.
Of course you still need moderators to filter out the good stuff from the bad. No one ever said otherwise. That doesn't invalidate the concept of "wisdom of the crowds", though.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Just look at the people who they have representing them. And the market! Jeeze! How much more crap can we cram onto the shelves? The "crowd" may consist of humans, but it acts on pure animal instinct.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It was noted in the original paper that the wisdom of crowds applies when comprised of aggregate decisions of individuals making decisions as individuals. On most websites this is not what you get.
Drew goes so far as to imply (by my reading) that crowds act more stupidly than individuals. These crowd failures are identified and discussed even on the Wiki page, most notably relevant to Fark.com and Americans Speaking Out:
Due to the nature of the websites various factors come into play which ruin contra to requirements for "the wisdom of crowds". Not forgetting that if it's on the internet, it's probably not being taken seriously and therefore is hardly a gauge of anything.
(I'm not wanting to be seen as endorsing the "wisdom of crowds", I'll take the wisdom of a few experts instead thank you very much, but the argument presented here is extremely flawed).
I suspect that the anonymity granted by a mere handle online gives many people license to compete for "points" on any ground that can get a laugh or comparable reaction from their online peers. The few who may have actually something to contribute to society will either find their attempts drowned out by that crowd, or won't bother to frequent Fark towards that end.
By comparison, I find that Slashdot's peer-based moderation system fares quite well in filtering the noise. It's not perfect, but the Slashdot crowd seems also a good bit less driven to cash in on quick, cheap thrills.
On the whole, though, I trust far more in the thoughtfully conducted discourse of the considerate few, than the multidirectional pull of large crowds. I wonder if that says something, too, about the effectiveness of our democracy.
--Udo.
One of the main things that one might say about the crowd is that it leads to groupthink, in which false statements are allowed to be pushed as true because no one has the ethical or moral ability to deny them as true. No matter one's political persuasion, one cannot say this of America Speaking Out. On the healthcare page, the listing show that people are overwhelming against limiting abortions, though not so much for the absolute legalization of abortion. This shows that people are thinking for themselves. The idea to make english the official language is also way down. When I first say the site I thought it would be a joke, but it has been kind of interesting to review. One of the first ideas to make it to the top was the taxing of churches.
I think if we did do what the people wanted, the crowd, we might be ok. The problem is that what the people wants tend to be a weighted average in which the amount of money one has plays a significant role. This is not necessarily bad, but if we want to do what the people want, then it should be all people, not just the rich. Look at the oil spill. It was said that we all want cheap oil at any cost, but it turns out people want fresh seafood as well. People make more money off oil, so that is priority of the rich. The common person though likes affordable food as well.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Both sides of are equally stupid. When you go Far RIght you are hindering all progress. If you go to the far Left you are trying to fix things that doesn't need to be fixed, or with solutions that just makes them worse.
When you open the gates for public opinion you are going to get the Crazies from both sides. And because they feel so insanely strong about their opinion they will be the most vocal... Drowning out the ideas of the more sane people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I hadn't heard that site mentioned in years.
If Politico or the New Republic or the Huffington Post said that, they might have a point. Any anonymous site is going to have low-quality comments.
http://xkcd.com/756/ Mildly related to the summary (the secret hovering remark from this particular comic): "News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones."
they can be the same depending on what criteria you use
So what are the major difference between the two parties?
The democrats want a -bit- more government, and are totally willing to enforce the parts of the constitution they like, namely the right to free speech (so long as you aren't promoting "hate" crimes, can't have true freedom now can we?). The republicans want a -bit- less government, and are totally willing to enforce the second amendment but forget any right to privacy (look at the PATRIOT Act), etc.
Ok, so you might get different views on abortion, welfare, etc. but forget any real debate over hard money, real tax reform, elimination of various government programs, etc.
They are two sides to the same coin and any differences serve to cloud the main issue of sameness.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Regardless of how true it is that a lot of strong opinions are attached to people who are highly ignorant, people don't want to hear that. Tell it to them, and they not only won't vote for you, they'll consider burning down your house.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
but... but... neither of them agree with my personal savior Ron Paul! Therefore, they are exactly the same.
I used to pay for totalfark, the premium version of fark, then this idiot decided to show totalfarkers what their money meant to him and loaded even that area with ads, fuck him.
He got greedy so folks went elsewhere.
They are the same. They're both fucking us up the ass while they profit. That's all that fucking counts.
They need to DIE so new people with better ideals and (hopefully) less greed come into power.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
People crowd onto slash and say the most stupid things. Most of the comments are a crap full of troll bait. The articles are crap. Fark.com is crap. I'm full of crap and wasting a crap load of time just spewing out this crappy comment. Strangely I feel better afterwards.
Crowds are wise, mobs are not.
Fark.com is a mob.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How About "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nation" It is a nice counter to Charles Mackay. It's funny how people like to say crowds are morons and then try to prove it Scientifically like Francis Galton did with his Ox Experiment. If a crowd is so stupid why is the Mean of Francis' experiment within 1 pound of the weight of the Ox? From what Fark is ranting about he seems more irked about his crowd not self organizing when he wants it to. Wikipedia and Youtube self organize not just because of leadership but because the crowd wants to organize. If you have a meaningless concept that doesn't have the interest of the crowd then it wont self organize. And just because a group of people can be tricked like in the many witch burnings doesn't mean they have more or less wisdom then the individual since I've seen individuals go far more mad than that.
the problem is, his feelings lead one to think this dangerous thought: "99% of the crowd is dumb... therefore, we need some more trustworthy entity for wisdom"
when you say that, you've committed a worse stupidity than the aggregate stupidity of the crowd
what he says is essentially true, the crowd is stupid in aggregate. getting wisdom from the crowd is a process of gleaning the nuggets from the bullshit. the problem comes when the process of separating the wheat from the chaff gets so tedious that you wish there were a shortcut, that you wish there were some special class of people who are better than the average man, and trust them for wisdom instead. which is a FAR more dangerous thought than simply recognizing the plainly obvious stupidity of crowds. there's no shortcuts: placing your trust in some sort of clique or aristocratic division is when the REAL trouble starts
so yes, people are dumb. but yet it is even dumber to trust some small segment of people according to some ill-defined parameters of what wisdom is instead
i think drew has just been modding too much. if i were a proctologist, i would be sick of looking at assholes too. if i were modding comments all day, and i was constantly exposing myself to the kind of mental diarrhea you see when browsing slashdot at -1, then i would hate people and crowds as well
i think reading the shallow end of the comment pool constantly will turn you into a misanthrope, a hater of mankind
limit your exposure to the idiot area of comment boards, or it will give you brain damage
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Crowds are wise under specific circumstances just as capitalism works under specific circumstances.
Mod this whole story down.
The differences are straw men... and they're not. Each has certain fringe groups associated with them which are used by the inclusive party as a power base and by the exclusive party as a target. Then, in the middle, you have the jockeying back and forth for voters who have been convinced that there are always two (and only two) choices. At any given time, there are also fringe groups that have splintered, but will return in time (to be replaced by other splinter groups) once they see that they don't have any power without one of the two big names behind them.
One thing I've noticed is that certain websites tend to attract certain types of people. Digg, for example, has an extremely high concentration of liberals and atheists. You may agree with liberals and atheists, but one thing I've noticed with digg is that a lot of users have become ignorantly liberal. They surround themselves with other liberals, and now the userbase is much more socialist than it used to be (and much much more than the average population). You may not disagree with socialism, but the way that it has come about on digg still demonstrates the point I'm making, which is that crowds promote ignorance. Many users who were moderate liberals a couple of years ago are not complete socialists, and in my understanding it is because it has become cool to go against conservatives.
The difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties is like the difference between crime and organized crime.
"The Wisdom of Crowds" requires a good filter, one that only lets through the 1% of ideas that aren't complete crap. E.g. a filter that would have quickly blocked this particular post.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
....crowds suffer from selection bias.
Think it over.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It is too bad Drew finds it difficult to detect {sarcasm, parody, irony, ...} without some lame ASCII-art version of a laugh track tacked on. Being dull and slow must be quite terrible, but recognizing your limitations must help somewhat. At many points in time you can look at democratic choice as being awful; pretty much every country can point to repeated elections of imbeciles and thugs. Overall, though, democracy has done a pretty good job of filtering out the wannabe Caesars, Napoleons and their ilk. Ron Paul, I'm talking about you.
While democracy ( or crowds ) don't seem to offer much in star appeal, there is a long term stability in mass decisions which are likely more right than wrong.
In contrast, dictatorships, monarchies and brilliant individuals don't really pan out in the long term, other than how their gross failures help foster new democracies.
The Democrats are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the left half of the US political spectrum.
The Republicans are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the right half of the US political spectrum.
This is the natural, stable state of a political system when you have the kind of electoral system the US has, which tends strongly to an essentially two-party system in the long term, though over the short term you can occasionally have more than two competitive parties, and its possible to have regional situations that are more durable where the two competitive parties in a region aren't the same as on the national scene. (The Farmer-Labor Party, before it merged with the Democratic Party, is a historical example of the regional effect; the current situation in the UK is something of an illustration of the potential short-term deviation, as the US has a system which tends to two-party dominance for much the same reason as the US system, though not quite as strongly.)
Its also perhaps worth noting that the governments in developed democracies with systems like this tend to be among the worst of those in developed democracies, when measured by opinion of the government held by the citizenry.
This is not a new concept. David W. Moore discusses something very similar in his book, The Opinion Makers
Basically, Moore argues that the purpose of polling is to measure the opinions of those who have considered an issue, not to measure 'top of mind' opinions.
One of the most interesting examples discussed in the book was a poll done leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The poll asked respondents if they felt the U.S. Government should invade Iraq, then depending on how the respondent answered, the pollster followed up with a second question that basically asked if the respondent would be disappointed if the Government performed the opposite action. I don't recall the exact breakdown, but basically if you evaluated only the first question, it appeared that around 60% of those polled wanted us to invade Iraq, but after evaluating the second question, only 28% desired us to go to war and 30% desired us not to go to war. A plurality were indifferent to the actions of the Government.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
And a hypocrite of the highest order. He writes a book about misleading headlines, ad placement, and other malarky, and then turns around and does the same malarky on his own freaking website. Fark used to be good. It's turning into a dump.
Even if 99% of all comments are garbage, that is simply an argument for better filtering, not that the crowd has no wisdom. The whole point of the wisdom of the crowd in the first place was to apply filtering mechanisms to ensure the best gets to the top. It seems to work well for Wikipedia and it even will work for this comment if you mod me +1.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
How is this article's claim any different than the criticism that Obama's "oil spill" speech was too intellectual for most US citizens, because it was written at a 10th grade level? There's a reason that Homer Simpson is the US Everyman.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Who better to point out that crowds are dumb, irrational, and poorly-researched?
I find the tragedy of the commons much more likely than the wisdom of crowds in most cases.
The flip side is that anonymity allows people to express opinions that might otherwise never be voiced, especially when interacting with another person. Yes, the accuracy becomes more questionable, but the discoveries can be much broader. There is a place for both.
I have found several very strong biases in Slashdot. Anyone who criticizes NASA, for example, is modded into obscurity. Or criticizing the liberal bias of the editors, or their love affair with certain large corporations, and constant bashing of certain others.
The argument that an educated few should decide for the uneducated masses was obliterated during the Renaissance.
A 13-year-old girl was stoned to death for reporting that she had been raped. I'm sure the crowd that threw the stones was a fuckin' collective genius.
I piss off bigots.
The PATRIOT Act == GOP meme needs to die. Kerry wrote a large portion of that abomination, and plenty of Dems voted for it. It's a perfect example of the troubling sameness of the parties - they both want more government power at our expense - not some GOP thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The best system is adversarial but friendly: liberals arguing for each change that sounded good, conservatives challenging each proposal demanding evidence that it actually is good, but both agreed that the goal is to make the country better. We pretty mich have none of that; it's all meme-parroting and visciousness and stealing from our grandchildren.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think a lot of "group think" is a matter of energy and choosing battles. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to correct an entrenched misconception. And what do you gain? It's generally easier to "go with the flow". The brain is the single biggest consume of energy in the body, right? Wouldn't evolution necessarily produce a brain that's heavily optimized? It's why we collapse everything to patterns and it's why www feel unease or unhappiness when we encounter something that doesn't fit a pattern. Sure ther are the oddities such as those that like learning. But I posit that the reason they like it is that they have a brain that can create new patterns for less energy than average.
Group think is similar. It takes less energy to go along with the crowd. Especially if that issue has no major direct impact oyour survival. It's even easier if the group is telling you something that more easily fits a pattern you already have (it's why we end up with a huge number of people believing in a creator, without any hard evidence at all.)
Groups are composed of humans. Humans have a lot in common. And our most similar features are our basic animal nature. I think that our higher features, those later evolved, and those that are a product of the mind are similar but less exact than the basic characteristics. Think of it as adding two waveforms. The peaks for our basic nature line up nicely and so add up to produce higher peaks. The higher nature has peaks that are slightly different. So when the add up they don't produce peaks that are a sharp. Do this with enough curves, and you end up with something that looks like the basic animal at a different scale.
I think we're stuck with that.
As I understood it, the point of "the wisdom of crowds" was not that *everyone* contributes value, but that by opening the forum you improve the likelihood that *someone* will contribute value.
Am I missing something or did Drew's knock over his beer again?
the larger the domain, the greater the experience coefficient for the domain. not all domains are created equal, and granted, the person with the answer that will [save the day, prevent loss, get a good laugh, be the wisest, ...] may not be in the domain, but if the domain is the Internet...and if all humans learn(good or bad) from experience, "He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.'" who can make such an assertion accurately? one comment may provide value to one person and not another..., besides who is scrubbing/indexing and reading everything that can validate that x% has been evaluated and thus only y% of x% is good?...hmm
The Emperor Has No Clothes is another classic about thoughts of crowds. There is a moral to the story, which is lost here, sometimes it takes innocence (or bravery) to point out that what everyone else is thinking is wrong i.e. that the commonly held belief is based on a lie.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Both sides of are equally stupid. When you go Far RIght you are hindering all progress. If you go to the far Left you are trying to fix things that doesn't need to be fixed, or with solutions that just makes them worse.
When you open the gates for public opinion you are going to get the Crazies from both sides. And because they feel so insanely strong about their opinion they will be the most vocal... Drowning out the ideas of the more sane people.
How about a dynamic site moderation system based on polarity? Each extreme sees mostly their side being the most vocal, reducing the inverse-polarity feedback that drives them to a frenzy, and the people ranked close to neutral see few messages from the extremes.
The weak point is how each post gets classified. I guess tracking who likes or dislikes what would create natural grouping.
You can't take the sky from me...
No single person could ever believe the idea that god had a head of an elephant or jackal, or that god created woman from man's rib. But somehow, when a billion people believe it, it's easier to fall in line.
Democracy = The wisdom of the crowd (TM)
I worked within the Democratic party during the last presidential election.
During one part we had some where close to 500 issue reports which needed to be reviewed to determine whether it should be voted on or dropped. Issues were health care, internet, data security, energy, open source software....
Most of these reports contained nothing more than opinion. I reviewed a report that was interesting on energy distribution close to 100 pages, which had been presented in a 25 page slideshow. Some of the ideas were very interesting and compelling, but nothing was documented. Where did you find this number? How did you arrive at this figure?..... There was nothing to verify that any of these numbers were anything but random numbers. But most there took it as gospel. I asked for supporting documentation and was given copies of more papers by the same author or other papers which had nothing showing that they weren't pure gibberish.
I think I went through about 50 of these. Pretty much all were the same.
The best document out of all that I saw was something on 'George Bush should be charged for criminal activities' it was well documented with instances of supposed malfeasance and had references to supporting legal documents and laws. The presentation wasn't really bad either, but it just wasn't going to go anywhere with regards to the Democratic platform. If it wasn't so controversial, I would have asked that further documents put forward had at least 10% of the documentation and references before they were to be considered.
But basically after that I have not put any serious effort into the Democratic party, because I saw they had a number of major issues within the organization. By and large after putting out a lot of effort, I felt the whole process wasn't geared around influencing change within the goverment , but more so to make people feel they had a voice.
Do people often associate the word 'wisdom' along with the word 'Fark'? From HIS point of view, I'm sure he's absolutely correct. Depends on the crowd, though. If you go to a TED conference, the crowd is going to be substantially more wise than the crowd on Fark.
It also depends on the subject. Religion and politics can overwhelm even the most wise person. (see also: the 'Conservative Right' in the U.S.)
...I'm not.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
I believe he said something along the lines of:
Until we create the artificial intelligence apparatus that will be capable of guiding us while having our best intention as a species in mind, we are stuck with this democracy thing despite it being the worst form of government EVAR!
Well... except for all those others that have been tried.
Why else do you think he had Alan Turing working on that computational contraption?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I understood that the difference between wise crowds and stupid mobs is the processes of selection of good results that have become feasible with modern technologies.
For example, asking random people is not the best way to know about encyclopedic subjects. Wikipedia works because it has crowds and a process (easy edition, easy correction, talk pages, contributions history,...) that preserves good contributions and rejects bad ones.
Same about the Linux kernel, Torvalds' role filters good and bad contributions.
In Slashdot, we have moderation that allows me to read the cream of the comments avoiding hundreds of trolls, redundant comments and not very enlightened sentences.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
If you want a solution that requires expertise - you need an expert on that particular subject.
Not "a thousand monkeys".
But if your expert is not solving the problem at hand, you need a different expert.
Either one who is more "experty" (in case the one you have is lacking experience) OR one who is a completely different kind of expert (in case your problem actually requires a different kind of expertise).
Adding more of the same kind is just treating your expert(s) like monkeys and hoping for that "Collective Works of Shakespeare" to appear.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
-Glory Road
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
Use Advanced Search and restrict to Full view only. Here is a scan from the New York Public Library. Speaking of popular fads, there's also a version for people with 3D glasses
Don't blame the internet for the tea party. :P
If you think equating Ron Paul to Caesar or Napoleon is even in the same solar system as sane they your head is so far up your ass that there simple isn't a metaphor to finish this sentence with that makes any sense in this dimension.
And I didn't even like Ron Paul, but at least he opposed both current wars. You knew that, right? RIGHT? Yeah, real Napoleon there.
"mevets" is now and forever equated with "total and complete fuckhead beyond what was previously thought possible for a human being."
Seriously, you must walk into walls on a regular basis.
Democracy done a good job? We're teetering on the brink because our wonderful system sends the same idiot shithead losers back into office over and over, in some cases for fucking DECADES. Come look at California for a bit. Sacramento is a fucking frat party where the politicians spend more time fucking lobbyists and raping effigies of the taxpayers than doing anything useful.
Come to California with our long time Democrat majority that actually seems to be hell bent on destroying the whole place. If it doesn't end in armed insurrection here I will be very surprised.
The head of Fark is VERY negative about other people. His opinions may be true or not true, but they are coming from someone who is not reliable concerning that subject.
I just used a German IP address and anonymous email to register on America Speaks Out and vote on issues.... Who exactly is speaking out on this site??!
He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.'
But remember, those other 99% provide a lot of "value" in page views and revenue, both from posters and from readers. So the truth of that statement depends on exactly which value you're measuring.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues...'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
This is more a commentary on the present positions of the Republican party than on the wisdom of crowds, I'm afraid.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Currently, the question at the top of the "American Values" section of the America Speaking Out site is this:
"Do you like erections? If so, list the 7 best things about them." - posted by Cockgobbler
I see this site being highly successful... as a source of comedic inspiration :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Well, that is if the site works at all.
Voting is broken. Often. It breaks randomly. It is broken more often than not.
Commenting is broken. Often, and it's random. Sometimes you can comment one second, and then be utterly unable to comment the next, and you don't know until you hit "submit" and the comment just doesn't take.
These two things make the site more unreliable than a Commodore 64 BBS running off of a pair of 1541 drives. It is literally painful to use.
Now add to this censorship.
The censorship is ridiculous. People are reduced to leet-speak or "creative spacing" for words like "homosexuality" which occurs more than once in the Texas Republican Party Platform. Perfectly ordinary words are verboten. It's not just profanity that's filtered, it's ordinary English words, so much so that sometimes one can't tell *which* secret word is preventing a posting. One can spend 15 minutes rewording and still be unable to post.
Chris is not sure who is kidding and who isn't
Curtis hasn't read the Texas Republican Party Platform, a mishmash of xenophobia, self-contradiction, homophobia, and some real tinfoil-hat craziness (read the bit about RFID and GPS). If you had never known that the document itself was real, you'd assume it was parody. Poe's law.
http://static.texastribune.org/media/documents/FINAL_2010_STATE_REPUBLICAN_PARTY_PLATFORM.pdf
Go ahead, read it. I dare you. I will bet you cannot make it to page 3 without saying "Wait, what? What the FUCK is this?"
If the national GOP is influenced by the Texas GOP, which is likely - as Texas goes, so does the national GOP, the GOP is looking at a good 40 years in the wilderness.
But I've digressed. Back to Americaspeakingout.com:
The actual good trolls that can be mistaken for loons are few and far between. The real whackos can be identified because they are so darned *earnest* in their opinions - humorless regurgitations of misunderstood and broken philosophy. Reposted ad-infinitum.
The current "most active member" aka "newmoon" is a barely literate bible thumpin' copy-pasta machine. Anything more than 3 lines is copy-pasted from elsewhere, anything from creationist screeds to political nuttery with nothing so much resembling a source url. He and his compatriots, many of whom are less intelligent, are the most prolific. Per capita, the amount of bovine excrement generated by them is astounding. Do not try to debate with them. They are fractally wrong.
Like Curtis, I don't see anything good being extracted from the pile of manure that is americaspeakingout.com. It is technologically broken (the dialog boxes even accept pure html - let your mind run wild with the implications) and it is lacking in any kind of design that promotes discussion and debate. Add to this the low quality of posters, the lack of intelligent posters, and the troll accounts, and you've got ... something that needs to be hosed away.
It is an *utter failure* of a website. As I said above, a BBS from the early 1980s would run rings around it.
--
BMO
|Like an earring of gold and an ornament of fine gold Is a wise reprover to a listening ear.| |A fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his own mind.| Contemporaneously -|||- Immense specificity of individual breadth of understanding is being gathered feverishly by the upcoming Institution manipulators. Each opportunity given for one of us to respond to material events/revelations illuminates the landscape constituted by the intellects and hearts of those who participate. Even observation of the matter and the responses given is observed by elevated outlooks(net analysis). This results through inductive reasoning in knowledge of each Cloud traveler and their tendencies. Simply put_No response is garbage unless it was created out of pure chaos and remains indeterminable. A recent short novel "The Devil's Earring" [Matthew Ellise] inquires into the results of our society recreating the primordial collective unconscious into a rudimentary pseudo-material form. It goes on to explain some of the ultimate ends of the aims being taken daily by Global Citizens to remain connected. Not a bad read for 90 pages. http://www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Earring-ebook/dp/B003OUXBVI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1277858185&sr=8-2
Wisdom of Crowds will work only when the crowds are Altruists
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Democrats are actually trying to provide a government, while Republicans are using the imprimatur of government as a means to funnel funds from the treasury to corporations.
Like I said. Anyone who doesn't see that is not paying any fucking attention.
Kerry didn't write a fucking word of it.
It was a PNAC product sitting in Ted Olson's desk drawer, and the day 9/11 hit he dusted it off and the GOP ran with it.
With Republicans these days, it's always difficult to tell who is kidding and who isn't.
He's clearly missing the point behind the concept, but I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose to try to make a joke out of it, or if he simply doesn't understand the term. Since this is the internet, and it's traditional, I'll respond under the assumption that all his comments were intended to be taken at literal face value.
The idea is that the crowd, as a whole, is smarter than the smartest individual within it. If you attract a dumb crowd, you're not necessarily setting a high bar. And, even with a smart crowd, you get a lot of noise. You need a way to filter out all the noise, you can have just one "editor" do it, but that's not really the best way. When the information you want the crowd to process for you can be broken down completely into mathematics, you're in luck because the noise will simply drop out naturally -- as is the case when you, for instance, have everyone guess the weight of an Ox and then simply average the guesses or when you write a search engine that uses links as "votes". Back in the days when Google was new and link farms didn't exist, it was orders of magnitude more effective at returning relevant results (even if you only got a relevant result say 85% of the time, other serach engines could only deliver them maybe 10-20% of the time) simply because it harnessed the "wisdom" of the crowd. It put every other search engine at the time to absolute shame, and that's why it became dominant practically over night. Clearly there is something there.
On the other hand,when its written text like Slashdot or even Fark comments, then you need a good system in place to do it. Yes, you need something akin to editing, but as Wikipedia and Slashdot show us, you can crowd source the editing as well. When you look at the collected moderated-up analysis on Slashdot on any given article, you end up with content that is overall more thoughtful, comprehensive and thorough than any given individual within the crowd could have produced.
Yes, Slashdot could have a single editor in place moderating all the forums, but that would neither be realistic or as effective. Once again, a crowd can do the job better than an individual.
Its also perhaps worth noting that the governments in developed democracies with systems like this tend to be among the worst of those in developed democracies, when measured by opinion of the government held by the citizenry.
That's a fantastic thing. The lower the opinion of the people, the less they will look to government, the less they will entrust to government ... sounds good to me.
Can you guess which "half" I am on? :-)
The original post, and the parent to mine, remind me of a different, economic concept, the wisdom of the markets. In Cold War terms, a free market was usually more efficient than a centrally planned economy because a large economy is too complex to effectively manage. The free market has the advantage of decentralized decision making, broken down into small enough segments that a human can get his arms around it.
However, the market as a whole is stupid. It only knows something like a consensus of what the players - particularly the leading players - know, or more to the point, care about.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Nor is it whether a crowd can be arranged in such a way that it makes better decisions than the average person in the crowd. (THEY CAN.)
It is whether you can arrange the decision making process among a crowd to consistently make wise decisions, even if no individual member of the crowd is consistently wise.
Since, in any sufficiently large crowd, somebody is going to come up with a wise answer to any particular question, the key problem is getting members of the crowd to agree on which of two answers is the wiser. One solution is to get the members who don't have a clue to delegate that decision to others who they think are, in general, good at picking winners. With a sufficient track record, you have an objective basis to decide who is or is not good at recognition, provided there is some correlation between past and future problems, or at least some way to categorise which sort of expertise is relevant to each problem.
It's sad but true, the number of intelligent comments on YouTube is infinitesimal.
Anybody remembers John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory?
Actually Mackay concentrates on the negative and criminal aspect of crowds. The standard book in that field would be Gustave Le Bons's "The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind". You can see that he had something there as several Fascist leaders in WWII reportedly modeled much of their propaganda after Le Bon. (Whatever reference that is.)
I am just reading this and I have problems with his frequent use of the concept of races, but one has to remember that racism was part of the scientific landscape at that time. Apart from that, he has some amazing insights that very obviously still apply today.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
That's how your brain works. No single neuron makes a decision; it's all about thresholds and quorums.
Your brain is not a computer.
Damn !!! I though you were talking about fart.com. The title for this discussion should be: "Fart creator slams "The Wisdom of the Gas".
The discussion about the wisdom of crouds is incomplete if the social, economic, technological, educational and political factors and circumstances are not discussed.
Furthermore, the view that crowds cannot ever be right is the first step to tyranny. We all have seen the past where the actions of few people led to world wars, genocides and holocausts.
Crowd slams fark.com: "...fark just stands around and mutters..."
Or Tyranny of the majority?
Reddit and digg will certainly get you modded down into oblivion if you say something that goes against popular opinion. Even if it's perfectly sourced and hard to refute. Even Slashdot falls victim to this; it's restricted moderation does ensure that people tend to mod up rather than mod down but you still get the occasional "-1, I disagree".
This is an unfortunate use of the word 'Crowd'. I work for a prediction market that utilizes this principal however our use of the word 'Crowd' is best described as a group of knowledgeable people who are willing to bet on their knowledge being better than anyone else. What we do is aggregate the data to produce a consensus of that knowledge. We are accurate, every time we have a lot of 'trading' going on. The larger the better, we have picked the winner in all of the last national elections weeks before the election occurred. But we don't aggregate emotion and opinion, they have no value unless there is real knowledge behind it. We are not gambling, the betting is a measure of the commitment of an individual to the quality of their knowledge. The better the knowledge the better the result, if you combine small amounts of knowledge, you get an amplification of that knowledge.
'Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.'
So, what he's saying is that "crowdsourcing" doesn't magically conjure an army of volunteers to do the grunt work for you and carry out your brilliant plans? Crowds - people, really - do what THEY like best, what THEY want to do, what appeals to THEM rather than listening to you?
Actually, that sounds like an argument in favor of the wisdom of crowds.
That site bans people at the drop of a hat. Put an image up on their photoshop this part that casts "our lord & savior Obama the 1st" in a bad light, and you get knocked off. They green light the dumbest links, block the good ones or they shadowblock them. Quit going there a long time ago.
lets have the idiots who modded the above flamebait explain us what kind of bunch republicans are. and tell me whether there can be any SANE individual among those who follow that bunch :
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/rape-nuts
Read radical news here
maybe, having enough ethics not to defend overseas corporate rape of american female citizens ?
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/rape-nuts
Read radical news here
Completely discounting Emergence because of the stupidity within the Fark community is...
Well, I guess it's redundant.
Mods, here is some shit for you to shovel out.
Crowds are stupid. We need a cadre of the intellectual elite to tell us what to do and how to act. It worked in Cambodia, it will work here. Finally, the wisdom of Lyndon LaRouche is becoming apparent to the creator of Fark.
asshat
Nor a reader of Asimov, cause there is a solution for that "worshiping problem" in the Foundation and Robots books.
Besides which, any AI worth its silicone would immediately pick up on the fact that it is NOT in humanity's best interest to spend its time bowing to it and singing hymns about its wast intellect.
In fact, it should probably do all the "humanity guiding" covertly, from a secret, undisclosed location.
Perhaps somewhere on the Moon?
As for realistic...
Which part of "Churchill ordering Turing to create an actual Artificial Intelligence" did you misunderstand as description of actual historical events or even marginally serious?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Maybe I tricked you by only giving a summery of the Ox experiment because originally Galton wanted to say that the Median was the proper way to Judge the crowd which would put the crowds response way off from the mean. Galton wanted crowds to be stupid so much that he wanted the Median to be the measurement because the Mean would prove otherwise. The concept of the Wisdom of a Crowd isn't that the crowd is some God infallible and immutable. The concept is that the crowd is only better then the individual.
Kerry's own website during his 2004 campaign claimed he wrote specific titles (chapters). Maybe he was just lying about that, but he certainly thought is was cool enough to claim credit for it. This mindset of "if I don't like it the other party must have done it" is why we have the government we deserve. Wake up.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You have the freedom to murder someone, just don't expect it to have no consequences. Asswipe.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'd guess that you're a rabid communist, coming out with this absurd argument to make conservatives sound stupid, but I may be wrong.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'd guess that you're a rabid communist, coming out with this absurd argument to make conservatives sound stupid, but I may be wrong.
Not just wrong, but a moron.