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Social Influence and the Wisdom of Crowd Effect
formfeed writes "A lot has been written lately on the crowd effect and the wisdom of crowds. But for those of us who are doubtful, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has published a study showing how masses can become dumber: social influence. While previous studies show how groups of people can come up with remarkably accurate results, it seems 'even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.' Social influence 'diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.' In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden."
duh?
Just look at Facebook.
You got the touch!
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While most problems today are complex. We still try to cling to the groups ideology to try to solve the problem vs. realizing the ideology isn't the solution just a start of an approach which needs modifications. However political parties leader will not waver too far off their ideology core as the group in the hole still follows that ideology.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden.
Nonsense. Opinions do *not* need to be hidden, opinions are one source of information. What needs to be suppressed are cliques, groupthink, etc.
In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is considered but not blindly followed, where individuals think for themselves.
Interesting. Maybe democracy would work better if we didn't know the opinions of others, have poll data, or hear media commentary other than candidates speaking and their records...
I believe that society fails when context is taken to the extreme and not countered or debated. When a one sided argument is presented and no one is allowed to counter that argument, it inevitably causes ignorance.
Examples are all over our society, such as these recent examples. "Creationism" issue, what is "Fox News", and what happened during the Bush Jr era presidency. Jon Stewart had an issue just last week with Fox News presentation of a rapper and Fox News's inability to maintain a "status quo" in their arguments.
So, when it comes to social influence, if one were to put themselves in a bubble, such as Facebook can, and online games allow due to heavy handed administrators, then yes... ignorance can perpetuate itself.
Of course the counter to this is "trolls", those that make obviously inflamatory or ignorant counter arguments that defy belief and logic. But the reality is that some trolls are "for real" in their thinking. Is it really that far fetched to believe that some people in this world have no logical function what-so-ever? The proof is all around you.
So, of course, because of this conundrum that they present, we shield ourselves from others opinions and call them trolls.
Free flow of ideas was the internet, and never will be again.
Herd mentality implies a fear-based reaction to peer pressure which makes individuals act in order to avoid feeling "left behind" from the group.
Qualified as "fear-based" and a "reaction to peer pressure" already implies a negative force. It's always nice to have studies to back it up though.
Twinstiq, game news
but more dangerous is a self-selecting subgroup who believes they know better than anyone else, and based on that, feel they have a right to impose their "wisdom" on everyone else. no, i'm not talking about math or hard science, i'm talking soft sciences or ideology. education isn't a protection, as "education" is often just indoctrination into a set of assumptions that cannot be doubted on fear of banishment from the group
so i cast my lot with the wisdom of the mob. i don't trust the mob, but at least its allegiances are simple and easy to discern. in other words, yes, the mob is dumb, but the mob is also honest. so-called experts meanwhile are more often just ideologues with a political agenda to promote
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Please watch Eli Pariser's talk at TED about Filter Bubbles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbi2i_Y7gSE The "wisdom" of the crowds is "managed" via cherry picked search results, etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
somehow a debate came up about whether cats eyes glow in the dark or are highly reflective, making them appear to glow in the dark in low light situations. The teacher honestly did not know the answer (facepalm) and asked the class to vote on it. It was almost unanimous that they did in fact glow in the dark, aside from me and one other poor soul. I remember that day very vividly. It was the day I realized people are dumb and a general consensus means NOTHING in terms of accuracy.
Facebook is just plain crowd: like a mob with everyone shouting.
Slashdot is a crowd moderated by randomly selected crowd-members, with multiple-moderation, meta-moderation, and karma-influence.
That's a huge difference. And you can see it. On Facebook, there's an endless stream of garbage. On slashdot, you can go back to an article that has matured and just read the 4s and 5s and get a pretty good sense of the best content.
No slashdot ain't close to perfect. What this shows however is that "wisdom of the crowds" is variable based on the system used. The more complex and well thought-out the system, the more wise the crowd gets.
The most common way is for crowd members to transmit and receive most information from each other, instead of all doing their own research. This tends to amplify distortion (Remember the "telephone" game from your childhood). When intra-crowd communication is minimized, the crowd again becomes accurate.
This principle can be demonstrated by blogs that repeat stories from blogs that repeat stories from blogs.... Copy and paste, oddly enough, serves to minimize some of the distortion effects, however, additional commentary that accretes around the original story with each telling inevitably creates more distortion.
Another distortion is the "Fox News" effect, where erroneous information is repeated endlessly to a large portion of the crowd. Repeated enough times, this method too distorts the information picture by adding single-source bias. FYI, this happens with all MSM media outlets. Fox News is just the most obvious example.
So the wisdom of crowds exists and is useful, but the internet has provided a friction free means by which it can be distorted and become useless, or worse.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. "
Jean Jacques Roussea once famously argued (famously amongst political philosophers at least) that it is necessarily rational to follow the majority decision, because the larger a group you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is going to be.
He argued this roughly as follows:
(1) The average person is at least a tiny, tiny bit more likely to be right than to be wrong on any given question.
(2) Any bias in a set of figures will tend to be more pronounced in a larger set [e.g. a coin weighted 51% toward heads will be more likely to show a greater proportion of heads to tails in a series of a million flips than it would in say, two flips, where you might very reasonably expect one heads and one tails].
Therefore:
(3) The larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be correct.
I am fond of inverting that argument against his position, showing that if we deny the first premise and instead adopt the inverse, that the average person is most likely going to give you an incorrect question to a random question (which I find much more plausible than Rousseau's assumption), then by the same statistical reasoning, the larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be incorrect.
Voila, statistical proof that people are stupider in crowds than they are on their own.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."