Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet takes a look at how crowd-moderation can capture and reflect the prejudice of individuals. 'As more web content is crowd-sourced and crowd-moderated, are we seeing only the wisdom of crowds? No, we're also seeing their prejudice. The Internet reflects both the good and ugly in human nature. ... Any system relying on people implicitly encodes prejudices as well. In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected, there is no hope for moral or intellectual consistency in crowd-sourced or moderated content.'"

Comments

Clearly

[Corbets]

Anyone who needed ZDNet to tell them this clearly hasn't been on Slashdot very long.

Re:Clearly

[AnonymousClown]

Anyone who needed ZDNet to tell them this clearly hasn't been on Slashdot very long.

Yeah, just look at many of the moderations in the previous two articles on Linux and Apple.

Re:Clearly

[edumacator]

That's just stupid. Let's all mod this jerk down...

Re:Clearly

[Yvanhoe]

http://oldweb.ct.infn.it/cactus/peter_principle_sup_material.html

Actually, some serious works seem to indicate that when promotions are randomly distributed, an organization is more efficient than when promotions are distributed by regular managers. So we can now say with scientific proofs that comparing managers to monkeys is actually insulting for the monkeys.

Re:Clearly

[Mr. Slippery]

Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate.

Citation needed.

CEOs of large companies do not generally get there on merit, but on the "old boys" network. I would not surprised if randomocracy generally produced equivalent results.

Calling Hari Seldon

[Black Parrot]

Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.

Re:Calling Hari Seldon

[jc42]

Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.

It's been done. Years ago, it was determined that the intelligence of a group of humans is inversely proportional to log(N), where N is the number of people in the group.

Actually, there has been some dispute over exactly what sort of (inverse) function applies, since in some groups, the leaders find ways to divide the group up into functional sub-groups. This produces a set of smaller groups, each with a higher intelligence than the entire group would have if it worked together. But then the top-level intelligence is limited by the inter-group communication, so a similar function may be used to combine the subgoups' intelligence into a measure of the entire group's intelligence, and we all know how exponential functions combine, right? What? Some of us don't? Uh ....

There have been some wags that claim that the inverse function actually involves N squared or cubed, but there seems little evidence that (outside of politics) it's really all that bad.

There has also been some confusion caused by tests being done that included religious groups. But that data had to be discarded, since those groups tend to have a firm ban on the application of intelligence in any group activity, and researchers don't have tools capable of measuring the intelligence level of people who are blindly following (and misinterpreting) the commands of a leader. But there is hope that we may some day be able to measure quantities that small, similarly to how physicists can measure individual elementary particles. This may lead to some interesting results in the study of intelligence.

Wow! Have they discovered Wikipedia?

[Chas]

Welcome back to reality newbs!

Who, ANYPLACE, promised you prejudice-free surfing on any site on the Internet?

And did you buy a bridge from them?

Re:Why should this suprise anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also called the illusion of confidence.

I propose...

[drmofe]

...not having RTFA, that the article is bogus.

Who's with me?

Re:I propose...

[sco08y]

...not having RTFA, that the article is bogus.

Who's with me?

Having read the article, the author was irritated that some listings on craigslist got deleted, thought that it was unfair, and spun that into speculation about how moderation through the crowd might encode some prejudices in some way that he hasn't really thought through.

So, it's not bogus so much as half-baked.

I am Shocked!

[Loopy]

Shocked, I tell you, to find humanity in here!

And another great quote: a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Or, how about a big plate of SPAM?

[one cup of coffee]

More and more it appears the so called voice of the crowd is becoming the voice of the organization paying the spammers.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/11/02/follow-the-%E2%80%9Ctruthy%E2%80%9D-tweets-to-find-twitter%E2%80%99s-political-spammers/

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[MokuMokuRyoushi]

I'll prove your first point, watch.

Jesus Christ is the resurrected Lord and Life giving Spirit.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[TapeCutter]

Yes the system you used to post your comment was created by a singular fisherman, that's why it's called the "net". /sarcasm

I'd hazard a guess that your karma is in the cellar because your Gallileo complex prevents you from fully thinking thru what you are saying.

Our findings prove our findings are prejudice.

[VortexCortex]

Wait, so someone actually used crowd sourcing as a way to gather information for a study against the common wisdom of crowd sourcing -- which reveals that crowd sourcing is prejudiced?

They expect us to believe that their "wisdom" gained from "crowd" sourcing shows "'the wisdom of the crowd' is prejudiced", and theirs isn't?

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[catbutt]

I disagree with the crowd all the time on slashdot, and yet my karma's pretty good. If you can express your point of view intelligently, it doesn't matter so much if you agree or disagree with "the masses". Slashdot's system is far from perfect, but if you compare it to other online forums, it's clear that a well designed karma system can mine the intelligence from crowds. The fact that wikipedia is pretty good, and that it is hard to out-guess prediction markets are other examples.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[Rakishi]

I disagree with people all the time and am a downright asshole on here quite often. My karma is still high.

Of course, karma is an aggregate measure of reputation in a way. If your karma is low than you're likely a useless asshole to the community who is best gotten rid off. Not always but it's a good rule of thumb I'd say. Disagreeing with people all the time across every topic also likely means you're insane and delusional. Plus not contributing anything worthwhile, trivial to gain karma in various utterly neutral discussions, indicates you're here just as an ego trip and have no desire to help the community.

In general I found slashdot users actually quite good at moderating up intelligent and logical posts.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[shutdown -p now]

That is precisely why an my karma is in the cellar. Anyone who disagrees with the crowd anywhere, even on Slashdot, will get moderated into oblivion.

The reason why you have your karma in the cellar on Slashdot is because you're a creationist with a long posting history. The first time someone is seen making posts like that, they usually get a reply explaining why they're wrong. But when they persist in posting exact same arguments, already thoroughly debunked in countless past discussions, again and again - yeah, you'll get a Troll mod or whatever pretty soon.

Not from me, since I haven't seen mod points in years now (I think I post too much). But I'm not exactly surprised.

And, yeah, it's "groupthink" for sure. I don't see a problem with it, though. "Murder is bad" is also groupthink, and I'm certainly fine with that one.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[shutdown -p now]

Dissenting opinions are fine when they are substantiated. However, when the same opinion is repeatedly expressed without being substantiated, or when the arguments given in favor are obviously false (as they were reviewed and debunked when they first appeared a long time ago), and nothing new is added - such an opinion becomes mere boring drivel, and will get modded accordingly.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[Rakishi]

Interesting how you stretch what he said beyond it's meaning in an attempt to support your own point. Good example of how not to post.

OK, I got it - as long as the dissenting opinions are acceptable and not debunked, they are acceptable.

Yes, if it's been debunked then it's wrong and as such of low value. Glad to see we're on the same page.

Of course, if they were acceptable and had been approved by the authorities, they wouldn't be dissenting opinions, would they?

Yes, the mysterious secret alien authorities running slashdot and sucking out our brains wish to keep you in your place. Now shut up and stand still while they insert the straw.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[francium de neobie]

Yet, there're many unwritten rules on Slashdot that have nothing to do with your comment's quality:

1. If you post near the top, you're more likely to get modded up even if your comment is only mediocre or group think. You can actually quite accurately predict a post's mod points by measuring its position on the thread and its relevance - mod are lazy.
2. Any rebuttal to your comment, even a very half-assed one, and especially the personal attack kind (!), is likely to get you, the parent poster, modded down. Happened to me many times, the mods are basically encouraging flamewars.
3. Long, original posts take a long time to get moderation points - even though it can eventually get a 5 Informative from patient mods. Long, unoriginal post get the same points very easily because the poster copied it from the article or Wikipedia. So, original insights are being discouraged from this system unless you're someone famous like Steve Woz.