Wisdom of Crowds a Myth

David Freedman at Inc.com seems to think so.

Now in the age of instant messaging, wikis, social networking sites, and videoconferencing on cell phones, collaboration and consensus are gaining yet more currency. We can, and often do, get everyone to weigh in, all the time, whether it's by cell phone, e-mail, or instant message. As James Surowiecki nicely puts it in the title of his best-selling book, it's "the wisdom of crowds," and it's a glorious thing.

Or it would be, if it weren't for just one little problem: The effectiveness of groups, teamwork, collaboration, and consensus is largely a myth. In many cases, individuals do much better on their own. Our bias toward groups is counterproductive. And the technology of ubiquitous connectedness is making the problem worse.

David's view is sobering, to say the least. But I have to say I kind of agree with this claim: when you make it easy for everyone to put in his two cents, with little filtering or accountability, the scum tends to rise to the top.

Quite often the people most willing to spend time chiming in with reviews and opinions on stuff are the bitter ones, kind of like the folks most willing to phone talk-in political radio shows (i.e. a bit loony). 

 

Comments

[Jason]

I think Freedman gets Surowiecki's point wrong. As I understand it he actually says that group consensus and collaboration are bad things (and having just spent a full day in an "innovation brainstorming", I can personally attest to that). Instead of acheiveing group consensus, "The Wisdom of Crowds" refers to the aggregation of individual points of view. This is why markets are so effective - they aggregate lots of individual opinions. But the interesting catch is, the aggregation works better the more diverse a group you're aggregating from. If too many people think the same way (whether intentional or not), the aggregation isn't as effective. And experience shows this to be true - what was the dot.com bubble and crash if not groupthink taking over the stock market. Too many people started thinking the same way. The crowd is only smart if everyone is thinking for themselves.

Two good quotes from his book:

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms--like market prices, or intelligent voting systems--to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent now what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense, what they all think."

and

"Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible."

[Jason]

One other thought -
The other thing I understand about the wisdom of crowds is that you can't put a lot of faith in any particular answer/opinion. So of course there will always be cranks and complainers, loonies and malicious pranksters, but if the community is big enough and diverse enough, these will be cancelled out. So yes, there are mistakes and malicious changes on Wikipedia, but there's also a ton of accurate stuff on more topics, and that is more current, than a published encyclopedia would ever have.

Now I agree there can also be a highly important role in large systems for filtering and editing, to be sure. The point is just that properly managed collective systems can be pretty powerful stuff too.

ps How's the new gig going?

[Dino]

Jason, I don't think he is that far off from Surowiecki's views. His point is that technology is facilitating the kinds of collaboration that tends to be counter-productive (like the brainstorms session you were in, can now be conducted with wikis and all sorts of neat tools to make it even more of a pain in the ass). He doesn't disagree with J.S. on the "wisdom" of crowds in the context of markets, for instance.

In my opinion, there is a tendency sometimes to champion the wisdom of crowds, collaboration, co-creation, or whatever buzzword is used, in a way that can be misleading. There are times when the opinion of an expert should/could hold more weight than consensus. The obvious example is just about any creative exercise, yet I keep seeing suggestions that co-creation and crowd wisdom can do the job as well (for instance, in music, or design). Rubbish!

The review websites and even the aggregators of the world (like Digg) all come up with the same problem that Freedman talks about: the malcontents or those that are bored are the ones most likely to pollute the waters. If you have ever been a part of a big online community (like a message board), you know just what he's talking about. It's not exactly the same as "wisdom of the crowd", but there are important parallels.