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 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]
What do you mean new?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I believe a soon to be classic movie explained it best.
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
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.
..is he, like, new to the Internet?
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
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.
That's why I keep coming back here.
You mean its not for the endless jokes about living in the basement, not having a girlfriend, no social life, or the strong usage of the soviet russia meme?
Posting boobies and weenies links does not ipso facto mean a person is stupid.
You should also cite some of these "people with letters after their names". I can cite one Bryan Caplan, Ph.D. In his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, he argues that, even if a crowd is 99% stupid (he uses the term ignorant), it can make wise decisions. How? Because those 99% of idiots choose rather randomly, canceling each other out, and the remaining 1% choose "properly".
This is assailable, of course, but it's rather myopic of you to pretend that your view is unquestionably correct. Rather than attacking the person (Curtis, in this case), attack the idea.
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.
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."
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.
This same "theory" has been made countless times before, and it's BS.
[...]
"well, I don't get it now, but I'm not going to be the idiot who raises his hand and asks questions..."
You just put forth the perfect evidence to SUPPORT that theory. The fact that a bunch of people getting together makes a person seperate from the logical process of asking for more information.
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.
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.
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.)
There's more to it than that. I've observed many times that stupidity is contagious. People who are smart tend not to be loud and obnoxious, but idiots love to holler. It's hard not to notice someone who's hollering, and as we can all attest, it seems the stupider you are, the louder you're going to holler. Talk radio has become a huge business on this principle alone. So now you've got a bunch of people who are at the fat part of the bell curve, who are all paying attention to the idiot hollering, and after a while, they start to think: "Well, he's pretty loud so he must know what he's talking about". And if the idiot is not only loud, but plays upon most peoples' preference for standing behind the bully instead of in front of him, then you've got a recipe for a stupid stampede. Finally, because a lot of people like to be in the biggest, loudest group just because it seems safest there, you've got a group that's inoculated against the incursion of information. Game over, stupidity becomes the new norm.
No, I'm inclined to believe the article, that crowds are indeed stupid, perhaps dangerously so.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat
Argh! No, they didn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_myth