I wish to apply the notion of the Wisdom of the crowds to this reader-response criticism to be able to come to a synthesis together to be able to answer our question.
Accurary of the rrepresentation is determined by the reader, and many readers lead to a truth.
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Introduction xi
I
Fall of 1906 Francis Galton
fat ox - weight-judging competition pxi-xiii
"Galton wrote later: "The result seems more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected." That was, to say the least, an understatement." p xiii
Remember I can link this and extrapolate this from matters of fact, such as this
to politics, members of parliament, the LAW, jury
to then art and matters of opinion which is not a far strettch from law.
II
under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent p xiii
"groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision." pxiii-xiv
ensure I can put, I am basing my main source of knowledge from this particular book
calls it wisdom of crowds
-same reason how Google can give correct webpage searching billions
-why its so hard to bet on NFL games
-polls
-tells us why stock market works (can stop working)
-collective intelligence allows us to get milk at 2am
-why people pay their taxes
-help coach little league
-essential to good science
-"it has the potential to make a profound difference in the way companies do business" p xiv
this book is about the world as it is, also as it might be
"As sociologists Jack B. Soll and Richard Larrick put it, we feel the need to "chase the expert." The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake," p xv
After we kill the author, and then if we leave the author as it is, they are both problematic. we need to reach some sort of compromise as either extreme does not appear to be correct and so this is why we must lead down the literary criticism theory ADD THIS IN
III
CRITICISMS
the stupidity of groups
would be seen that the crowd wasn't very wise at all, wouldn't it?
"In the popular imagination, groups tend to make people either dumb or crazy or both." p xv
"Thomas Carlyle put it succinctly: "I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." pxvi
"Le Bon lambasted juries, which "deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove." Parliaments, he argued, adopt laws that each of their memebers would normally reject. In fact, if you assembled smart people who were specialists in a host of different fields and asked them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," the decisions they would reach would be no better, on the whole, than those "adopted by a gathering of imbeciles." " p xvi
IN THIS BOOK
he folows Le Bons lead, to give broad definitions for "group" and "crowd"
the crowd are good at problem solving and smart
Gustav Le Bons had things backwards
big enough + diverse enough crowd....
" "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that groups decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart of well informed he is." pxvii
IV
Concentrates on three kinds of problems
-cognition problems, those that have definite solutions. (who will win the super bowl)
-coordination problems, members of group to coord behavior, market for fair prices, drivers in heavy traffic, students looking for party
- cooperation problems, getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together... paying taxes, pollution, reasonable pay e.g
STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
first half = theory, leavened by practical examples.
chapter for each problem 1 2 3
chapters for conditions crowd needs to be wise:
diversity
independence
decentralisation
1st half - begins with wisdom of crowds, explores 3 conditions that make it possible, cord then cooperation.
2nd half - CASE STUDIES
how the collective intelligence flourishes or flounders
does this not sound like collective unconscious, Jung?
groups work well under certain circumstances
"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise." pxix
best way for a group to be smart is for each of its members to think and act as independently as possible.
V
started with a simple problem - weight of an Ox
end with a complex problem - locate a lost submarine
- Baye's theorem is a way of calculating how new information about an event changes your preexisiting expectations of how likely the event was. pxxi
5 months later, the ship was found 220 yards from where the group said it was
"even though no one in the group knew any of these things, the group as a whole knew them all." pxxi
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1. The Wisdom of Crowds - p1
I
Who wants to be a millionaire? if stuck - 3 solutions.
the crowd option was correct 91% of the time/
experiments by American socialogists + psychologists 1920-mid1950s
1) Hazel Knight asked classto estimate room temperature = 72.4, actual = 72 p4
2) Kate H. Gordon asked 200 students rank items by weight, group = 94% accurate p5
3) jelly beans, Jack Treynor, jar = 850, average = 871, 1of56 guesses was closer. p5
two lessons learned from these:
1) most, people weren't working together/talking on the problem
(sometimes interacting can change things, for better or worse) this can be the case in judging artistic work, well sometimes you need to be able to converse with art, but retaining your own personal opinion.
2) the group guess is not better than that of EVERY single person in the group
so sometimes people will outperform the group, but not same person every time.
II
space shuttle Challenger blew up, 1986 p6-7
stock market stopped, traded out other stocks of challengers builders
seemed to have labelled Morton Thiokol as the cause of the challenger disaster
Maloney and Mulherin point out there was no public comments singling out Thiokol p7
Six months later, truth was revealed, the stock was correct.
possible was due to luck...
That day, it was just buyers and sellers trying to figure out what happened and getting it right." p8
many bits of information came together to find something close to the truth.
Market was smart that day - satisfied the 4 conditions that characterise wise crowds:
1) diversity of opinion (some private information)
2) independence (not determined by other peoples opinions
3) decentralisation (draw on local knowledge)
4) aggregation (mechanism for private judgements into collective decision)
p10
mathematically, errors ultimately cancel themselves out with large groups
"Each person's guess has two components: information and error. Subtract the error and you are left with the information." p10
Now, still possible a groups decision will still be bad...
could say we've been programmed to be collectively smart (not running example)
III
How does it perform when the answer is seemingly unknowable? hasn't happened yet?
Robert Walker's career depends on this... gambling/betting
sets the line where people bet on A, or B, needs a line in the middle to profit.
IV
Internet and Googles performance p15
Google is built on the wisdom of crowds p16
seems to be a nice talking piece, real world for me to go off of.
relies on page ranking , casts things as important if they rank higher, voting system
V
IEM Iowa electric markets project, 1988
designed to predict the outcomes of elections. p17
IN THIS CHAPTER WE HAVE p22
looked at different ways to tap into what a group knows, stock, votes, computer algorithns, future contracts...
These are all attempts to tap into the widsom of the crowd, and that's the reason why they work
the key is not perfecting the method but satisfying the conditions, diversity, independence and decentralisation - that a group needs to be smart
As we'll see in the next chaptes that's the hardest and the most interesting part of the story
What makes a crowd smart, obviously this will be relevent to me and how to determine a good photograph representation.... I think I will assume some kind of self-correcting system to be in place.
I may just stick to the theory passages as opposed to the case studies as they may not be completely releveant to what Iw ant to say, evidence for this may become self-evident without referring to too many texts etc
2. The difference difference makes:
waggle dances, the bay of pigs, and the value of diversity
I
1899 Ransom E. Olds - cars, cheap enough for people to buy? p23
after fire, turns out to have produced the first mass produced car
all new technologies follow this pattern, the winners and the losers are decided, which will folourish and which will disappear p26
CULTURAL INTERCONNECTION
example of Bees, Thomas seeley, author of the wisdom of the hive. p26
when a scout bee comes back with a good source he found, does the waggle dance!
finding sources of nectar different from the other examples we had, because the "set of possible solutions was already, in a sense, determined." p27
"In the case of problems like finding the most nectar-rich flower patches, though, the task is more complicated. It becomes a twofold process. First, uncover the possible alternatives. Then decide among them." p27
first process, smart thing is to send out as many scouts
"what makes a system sucessful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognise them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest." p29
II
Not enough. Crowd has to distinguish good from the bad.
diversity helps - adds perspectives
small groups more important
Scott Page - computer simulated problem solving agents demonstrates positive affects of diversity p30
groups of smart and lesser were better than just the smart groups
"Adding a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group's performance." p30
smarter people are too much alike
"As March wrote, "[The] effect does not come from the superior knowledge of the averge new recruit. Recruits are, on average, less knowledgeable than the individuals they replace. The gains come from their diversity." p31
III
p32 example of chess, imprinted on memory of professional
examples of experts being wrong p33
"Shanteau recounts a series of studies that have found experts' judgments to be neither consistent with the judgments of others experts in the field nor internally consistent." p33
overconfidence
suvery found physicians, nurses, lawyers, etc all beleive they know more than they do p34
Armstrongs -seer-sucker theory
" "No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers." " p34
"why do we cling so tightly to the idea that the right expert will save us? And why do we ignore the fact that simply averaging a group's estimates will produce a very good result? " p35
Richard Larrick and Jack B. Soll suggest the answer is we have bad intuitions about averaging. p35
-assumption that true intelligence resides only in individuals
"trying to find smart people will not lead you astray. Trying to find the smartest person will." p36
IV
positive case for diversity
-expands a groups possible soltuons + allows to conceptualise problems in numerous ways
negative
-makes it easier to make decisions based on facts, rather than infleunce, authority, or group allegiance. p36
when decision makers are too much alike, they easily fall prey to groupthink.
become cohesive more easily
more dependent on the group + insulated from outside opinions
So this is why diversity is important, don't want them all to think the same thing
Bay of Pigs Invasion p37
-1200 men could take over all of Cuba
"When the pressure to conform is at work, a person changes his opinion not because he actually beleives something different but because it's easier to change his opinion than to challenge the group." p38
Soloman Asch experiement p38
3 lines same size as a line on card
confederate involved too.
more people just went along with the group
more than 70% changed their opinion at least once
"Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. As we'll see in the next chapter independence of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve that independence, it's hard to have a collectively wise group without it." p39 concluding.
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3. Monkey see, monkey do: imitations, information cascades, and independence
I p40
William Beebe - Guyana jungle
ants moving in a huge circle 1200 feet circumference. took ant 2.5hours
scientists call a circular mill, "follow the ant in front of you" when got lost.
Ant colony, no one ant knows anything, yet the colony itself managed to find food, get work done and reproduce itself.
so far in this book "I've assumed that human beings can be independent decision makers. Independence doesn't mean isolation, but it does mean relative freedom from the influence from others." p41
Ox example illustrates this, all the independent guesses helped get the correct answer.
Important for two reasons: p41
1) keeps mistakes people make from becoming correlated.
errors won't wreck the group's collective judgement.
2) independent indivuduals more likely to have new information, rather than same data everyone is familar with.
"the smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." p41
-Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality... can still be biased and irrational, as long as you're independent won;t make the group and dumber p41
We are autonomous beings but we are also social beings p42
we want to learn from each other
"sociologists and social-network theorists, by contrast, describe people as embedded in particular social contexts, and see influence as inescapable." p42
Surowiecki suggests the more influence they have one each other, more personal contact, less likely decisions will be wise. will believe the same things, more mistakes. p42
could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.
THE QUESTION BECOMES:
can people make collectively intelligent decisions even when they are in constant, erratic interaction with each other? p42-43
II p43
Social psychologists
Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz
1 person staring up at the sky for 60seconds
then 5 people staring up
= 4 times as many people stopped to look as well
--- at first appears to be people easily conform
illustrated something else... " social proof "
"which is the tendency to assume that if lots of people are doing something or beleive something, there must be a good reason why." p43
this means they're looking up at the sky, not to conform but because there must be a good reason that so many people are looking up at the sky.
THE CROWD BECOMES MORE INFLUENTIAL AS IT GETS BIGGER
"if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart" p43-44
NFL example I don't understand.
imitating managers (doesnt matter)
III
herders, follow the herd because that's where it's safest p50
plank road example - p53
problem starts when people's decisions are nit made all at once but rather in sequence... p53
everyone can make the wrong choice because the first people make the wrong decisions
Do cascades exist? p55
not always a bad thing, some of the best technological innovations are because of informational cascade. p55
Seller's screw cascade - successful
cascades are different, not collective decisions fro diverse opinions
disatrous information cascade example, telecommunications business when internet was new and the figure was an increase at 1000% per year, this figure was kept unchecked and so billions was invested and subsequently lost. p57
IV
should we stop listening to other people??
let others guide us, easier.
example, should I take an umbrella? look on werather, look outside.. EASY
imitation
-each person can't know everything p58
Herbert Simon speculated humans genetically predisposed to be imitation machines p59
example of monkeys
how was the crowd wise?
"The wisdom was in the decision to imitate Imo" p59
inteliigent imitation
V p63
best to make decisions simultaneously, as opposed to one after another.
marble example p63-5
"One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying." p65
4. Putting the pieces together: The cia, linux, and the art of decentralisation. p66
I
can relate wisdome oft he crowds back to examples already used, such as the missle guy in chapter 4
Donovan, US intelligence agency
split into many different things, cia, fbi, all same broad goal,keep the US safe from attack p67
Until September 2001, flaws of this system was overlooked p68
pearl harbour all over again, could have been prevented.
criticises the US failures in preventing 4 major terrorist attacks 1993-2001
"decentralisation had led the United States astray. Centralisation would put things right." p69
II
Internet, most visible decentralized system in the world
"The idea of the wisdom of the crowds also takes decentralisation as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people to work in a decentralised way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with." p70
Why did these people fail then? Was decentralisation really the problem?
NEED to answer a simpler question first
What do we mean by decentralisation?
flocks of birds, free market economies, peer to peer computer networks...?
couple of things that do matter:
specialisation - of labour, interest, attention p71
seems to make people more productive and efficient. increases scope and the diversity of the opinions and information in the system.
essential for 'tacit' knowledge, can't be easily conveyed to others, may be too specific.
"Decentralisation's great strength is that it encourages independence and specialisation on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other." p71
----> great weakness, no guarantee valuable info will get through the whole system
"need to find the right balance between the two imperatives: making indivudual knowledge globally and collectively useful (as we know it can be), while still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local." p72
III
1991 hacker Linus Torvalds, created own version of UNIX --- LINUX p72
releaased source code, allowed people to contact him with bugs
much like the bee
you cna let a thousand flowers bloom and then pick the one that smells the sweetest
IV p74
who picks the sweetest smelling one??
ideally, the crowd.
aggregation - important to the success of decentralisation
Iraqi war 2003 example
V p77
problem wasn't decentralisation, it was the kind of decentralisation US was using
missing not just aggregating information, but judgments. p78
"centralisation is not the answer. But aggregation is." p78
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5. Shall we dance?: coordination in a complex world
I p84
William H. Whyte 1969, author of The organisation man, grant to begin: "Street Life Project'
- I remember reading about this.
"In crowds, walking "there is a collective genius at play here" p85
different from the NFL or Google problem
coordination problems are ubiquitous.
"What defines a coordination problem is that to solve it, a person has to think not only about what he believes the right answer is but also about what other people think the right answer is. And that's because what each person does affects and depends on what everyone else will do, and vice versa." p85-86
obvious way of controlling peoples actions is
authority
coercion
"How can people voluntarily - that is, without anyone telling them what to do - make their actions fit together in an efficient and orderly way?" p86
"When it comes to coordination problems, independent decision making (that is, decision making which doesn't take the opinions of others into account) is pointless - since what I'm willing to do depends on what I think you're going to do, and vice versa. As a result, there's no guarantee that groups will come up with smart solutions. What's striking, though, is just how often they do." p86
II
bar example, problem if it's crowded, no-one has a good time p86-87
-assume everyone else thinks the same
problem, everyone may go, or everyone won't go...
have to strike a balance so they right number of people go.
"When Francis Galton's fairgoers made their guesses about the ox's weight, they were trying to evaluate a reality that existed outside the group. When Arthur's computer agents made their guesses about El Farol, though, they were trying to evaluate a reality that their own decisions would help construct. Given those circumstances, getting even the average attendance right seem miraculous." p90
III
Thomas C. Schelling - asks students in New York where would you meet? p90-91
then added the problem of not knowing the time to meet.
chose Noon.
examples of self-cordination, such as ticking a box, top left [√]
Schelling points
"Schelling wrote, "People can often concert their intentions and expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same" " p91
IV
culture also enables coordination - different way
simple convention: first come first serve.
in relation to seats... may give up a seat for elderly person on bus, less likely to do so in cinema. p93-94
surprising to actually ask people to give up their seat - without reason
intruder in a queue
V
Convention
prices paid for things
VI
flock of starlings move purposefully
group behaviour, follows simple rules, allows this superorganism being to happen
VII p103
example of student market, converging on one price.
in the words of Smith "As indivuduals, they don't know where they're going. But as part of a market, they're suddenly able to get there, and fast." p107
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6. Scoiety does exist: taxes , tipping, television and trust p108
I
Italy football, referee's call, conspiracy? or just bad decision p108-109
two teams, not just competing, they're working together, to be entertaining.
"they need to be able to trust those around them, because in the absence of trust the pursuit of myopic self-interest is the only strategy that makes sense. How does this happen? And does it make a difference when it does?" p111
II
examples suggesting fairness, and punishing greediness/selfishness
III p116
IV p119
Quackers, honesty seems to pay
V p126
"they do create a problem: the more people trust, the easier they are for others to exploit."
VI p128
"co-operation, on both a small and a large scale, permeates any healthy society. It's not simply the obvious examples, like contributing to charities or voting or marching on picket lines, all of which are examples of collective action that people participate in. It's also the subtler examples, like those workers who, by all rights, could shirk their responsibilities without being punished (because the costs of monitoring them would be too high) and yet do not, or those customers who leave tips for waitresses in restaurants in distant cities. We can anatomize these acts and explain what gives rise to them. But there is something irreducible at their heart, and it marks the difference between society on the one hand and just a bunch of people living together on the other." p142
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remember at the end of this I have the choice, or the opportunity to discuss how social media will work in the way that I have forumalted it... such as a facebook picture.... I doubt I will even need to do this but it is a possiblity if the word count would permit me... perhaps 1000words rto allow for this?
I doubt I have time, however.
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki [book]
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