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."

Comments

Fark.com

[longhairedgnome]

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....

Charles Mackay

[rlp]

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.

Re:Charles Mackay

[john83]

Interestingly, there are four copies on Google books, and every one of them has pages omitted as they're from recent editions. What the hell, Google? Thankfully, Project Gutenberg has a few versions, e.g. this one.

Re:Wisdom of the crowd.

[dgatwood]

What do you mean new?

Missing the point

[pudge]

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.

Re:Missing the point

[Tom]

We know for a fact that when crowds have significant enough motivation (like money), they do an excellent job of predicting things, for example.

Actually, no. We need more research in this area. What we do know is that groups judge better than individuals. Large groups, if there is some selection involves, appear to share that. Don't forget that almost all of the prediction markets used so far have a strong self-selection involved.

If you want to study large-scale crowd predictions, take horse racing or other sports bets.

What crowds are excellent at is predicting the obvious and filtering out the personal bias we all have - you one way, I the other, in a crowd that cancels out and we all together arrive at a pretty good mean estimate. But as soon as the judgement requires any expert knowledge whatsoever, you have strong selection at work (most people don't "bet" on things they don't understand), which kind of violates your core assumption of having a crowd, not just a group of experts.

This Curtis guy...

[eexaa]

..is he, like, new to the Internet?

On the stupidity of crowds.

[MRe_nl]

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".

Re:On the stupidity of crowds.

[LWATCDR]

Interesting. The thing is that people like to believe that crowds are smart.
A good example for me was in a class I took in college.
It was the classic you are on the far side moon and put this list in order from the most important to the least.
The point of the exercise was to show that one person could make choices faster but as a group you made better choices.

Well when we put our scores together I scored higher than my group did.
They really had a hard time understanding that a compass wouldn't work on the moon or that the radio would be limited to line of sight. The decided they knew better than I did.
The professor was really kind of upset with that result because it sort of messed up her point since I had gotten the best answers correctly and quickly on my own.
The professor asked me why I thought that was. The only thing I could come up with was that once you have an optimal solution bringing more people in only increases the chances that you will end up with a sub optimal solution.

Re:kettle, meet pot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Misapplication

[DaveGod]

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:

Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an "information cascade"[2] can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes.

Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria.

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).

Online anonymity = Trash

[udoschuermann]

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.

Irony

[medv4380]

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.

Re:Irony

[lgw]

Wait, did you just use "Youtube comments" as an example of intelligence? You're off your meds, man.

Re:Irony

[osu-neko]

The problem is, if you want to argue for the wisdom of crowds, there are plenty of examples to point to. And if you want to argue for the stupidity of crowds, there are plenty of examples to point to. And some people on either side will use the same examples (e.g. Youtube -- I lolled). I suspect that people who believe there's inherently a tendency either one way or the other are using (or are unconscious victims of) selection bias. I don't see much in the way of evidence for one or the other.

Re:Irony

[sarkeizen]

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

Considering both are anecdotal it's hard to say what is a "counter" of what. However as an argument I found that book pretty lame - it's a lot of anecdote. Not to mention that I think people extend the title beyond what Surowiecki intended he doesn't even assert that all or even MOST crowds are smart. Rather that crowds which have some attributes are smart. However most of those attributes are far more vague than the questions posed which makes the problem of determining a smart crowd from a dumb crowd a harder problem than asking the question. I'd add that even given his assumptions are true for some crowd the kind of question is crucially important. It must be limited in scope. i.e. multiple choice or have some generally understood bounds (that is if we asked a bunch of people what the weight of something nobody knew what it was you wouldn't get good answers). You can't "average" the cure for cancer, or the proof for P=NP, etc...

So, to me anyway even if James is correct in his assertions that some crowds are smarter than all of their constituents this information isn't very useful.

Oh and the ox experiment isn't even close to useful since it wasn't repeated and unless the results were recorded somewhere it's lesson might not even be true. Perhaps there was someone with the same guess as the crowd or within one pound of the crowd - a variance you might be able to attribute to chance. Which would mean that the crowd isn't appreciably more intelligent than it's smartest person. This wasn't repeated multiple times so it's difficult to figure out if the crowd vs. constituents is simply a random occurrence. Not to mention that it's possible there was some bias in the crowd (it sure wasn't a random sample), etc... So again it's at best unclear if this is a useful trait.

Re:Irony

[dgatwood]

At best, the ox example suggests that given an problem that for which:

• an average of the answers can easily be obtained (it's a numeric answer),
• the crowd has enough information and experience to come to a reasonable conclusion (people have weighed other things, or at minimum, themselves, so they all have significant knowledge of the weight of a bag of meat of a given size), and
• the crowd answers honestly without being influenced by people with an agenda,

then the mean value will likely be at least close to the right answer. In other words, a panel of moderately expert individuals can probably come up with the right answer. That's not the same thing as a "crowd" of random people.

Even if the crowd is truly wise on general matters (or at least is smart enough to not participate in things they don't understand), it's unlikely that you'll ever be able to get rid of all of the outside influences on their answers, and thus their answers for any sufficiently complex issue are unlikely to be precise enough to be useful. If the answers all sound like a mix of Democrat and Republican talking points, an average of their opinions is garbage because neither group of people is expressing any fine detail. A significant percentage of those people haven't even considered that there should be fine detail to consider, instead just answering the questions the way someone else told them to answer them.

Even if you somehow could eliminate outside influences, most problems can't be distilled to a simple average. If you could average the public's opinions on complex social issues, you might come up with some useful information, but it's essentially impossible to average a million paragraph-long answers in any useful way, and anything short of that doesn't provide sufficient detail to accurately discern the opinions of the people involved.

If you try to reduce a complex issue to a series of yes and no questions or even "agree, mostly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, mostly disagree, disagree" questions, you'll automatically get bias introduced by the way you distill the issue down to those questions. No finite number of questions can realistically express every subtle detail of a person's opinion on an issue. For example, what if I believe that abortions should be allowed in cases of rape and incest, but not on Sunday? I can pretty much guarantee no question writer will ever ask that one, but in theory, somebody might feel that way. That's a rather absurd one, but not all of the fine details would be, and some of them are the very data you're looking for. The outliers provide critical insight into complex issues.

In short, you're trying to extract an instantaneous RMS of a complex analog waveform by looking at a copy of the waveform that gets latches up to the rail just on either side of zero, which in turn gets transmitted through a noisy channel so that the SNR goes negative by about 60 dB. It doesn't work, but not because it's impossible to get the SNR from the original waveform. You just have to get to it before the data gets quantized, clamped to the extremes, and buried in noise.

Re:Wisdom of the crowd.

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:Wisdom of the crowd.

[PopeRatzo]

The truth is that one-on-one, if you explained a comparatively difficult concept to an individual, you have a higher chance of getting the idea across, because you're giving that person your attention and answering any specific questions they might have.

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.