Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

[Owen Densmore]

I've been reading this critter:
   http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
.. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and  
possibly business/organizational modeling.

The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
- Diverse
- Independent
- Decentralized
- Good method for aggregating the results.

I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the  
democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking  
crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.

Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to  
community modeling?

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org

[Scholand, Andrew J]

Owen, Surowiecki gave an excellent talk covering the topics of the book at CTC05.  You can view the streamed archive here:
http://www.collaborationloop.com/blogs/ctc-ramp-up-surowiecki-2.htm

My interest has been chiefly in trying to leverage the recommendations to make professional (programmatic) collaboration more effective.

Cheers,
Andy


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] on behalf of Owen Densmore
Sent: Mon 6/5/2006 10:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam
Subject: [FRIAM] Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki
 
I've been reading this critter:
   http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
.. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and  
possibly business/organizational modeling.

The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
- Diverse
- Independent
- Decentralized
- Good method for aggregating the results.

I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the  
democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking  
crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.

Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to  
community modeling?

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


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[Bill Eldridge]

I'll give some somewhat random thoughts after skimming one chapter:

1) The Democrats acted less like a crowd than a controlled partisan group.
They did less to express individualized opinions, and instead reacted to
politics on a national level. Assuming as one might that Florida and Ohio
were stolen through black box voting, etc., and that Kerry actually won,
the Democrats as a whole still did poorly simply because they failed to
reflect
localized priorities, which would have given a more robust
opinion/platform/strategy.
Dean's strategy of building up the party in 50 states rather than keep
trying to
pick the hot contests seems to fit well in the "good decisions of
crowds" mold.
E Pluribus Unum, not E Unus Unum. (or E Anus Anum?)

2) I saw an economic analysis of the tulip bulb crisis quoted in Charles
Mackay
(Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds). This analysis noted that the
type of tulip bulb hording that went on made economic sense under the
conditions.
A cartel had just been broken, and there was good reason to speculate,
similar
to a hot IPO. That doesn't mean everyone comes home a winner, only that the
odds are better than the local lottery.

3) I think the thesis' 4 points leaves out at least two points, which
are the transparency
of the issue/information and the evaluation of the result. If the deck
is stacked (WMD's
in Iraq, say), the resulting decision is likely to be flawed.
Unfortunately, most of our
decisions have skewed information in numerous ways. The second aspect,
evaluation
of the result, is non-trivial with non-trivial problems. Short-term?
Long-term? General
good? Field specific? Under whose terms are we evaluating the fitness of
the solution,
and are those the best, most sensible?

An example of the latter is the Betamax vs. VHS contest. The market made
a wise decision -
Betamax didn't offer compelling advantage to the consumer for the extra
price, and it
locked in manufacturers, but for the professional recorder it turned out
poor.
A somewhat similar tradeoff was made between analog cassette and DAT
audio, and
as consumers we got stuck with pretty crappy sounding home recording for
about
20 years (and it wasn't much better for professionals thanks to high
costs). A short-term
"good" decision can have long-term consequences.

4) The book does seem to point to a view many of us probably share,
"going it alone is
not the best policy". Advice and input are important for more robust
solutions, though
if the input is not diverse, independent and decentralized, it merely
reflects the thinking
of Great Leader. But that is a different issue and model from the idea
that a crowd
of non-coordinated agents shows decision-making ability as good as an
individual.
Group Think => Extended Sampling => Mob Think

When testing a GUI or other system, one rule-of-thumb has been that of
marginal returns
after 4 or 5 unique testers, i.e. you will find 95% or so of the
problems with 4 or 5 sets of
eyes, so instead of getting another 100 sets of eyes, fix the problems
and then run a new
test with 4 or 5 unique testers.

5) The use of the Imo monkey stories is a bad sign. While Surowiecki at
least doesn't
give us the Hundredth Monkey myth, he seems to exaggerate the actual
takeup and
transmission of potato washing and dunking-wheat-in-the-sea among monkeys.
One piece of recent research shows that kids favor imitation far more
than monkeys,
even where imitation is a poor strategy for the circumstance.

http://rocketjam.gnn.tv/headlines/6663/Children_Learn_by_Monkey_See_Monkey_Do_Chimps_Don_t

Is there something compelling about human allegiance? Would human crowds
decide better than monkey crowds, and would that relate to "autonomous"
agents
still wanting to imitate or be like others in the group, whereas monkeys
might be
more autonomous? Or is desire to please unimportant in this evaluation
process.

6) In my study of offshoring, I came across  several  economists - John
Dunning, Rugman, Verbeke -
that used the imagery of flagships steaming into foreign port with their
consorts surrounding them -
basically that offshoring was much more of a symbiotic relationship
involving competitors who
helped each other as well, shared resources, advantages in numbers, and
various alpha, beta, delta
roles

I wonder if a similar analogy works for opinion "clusters" - where you
have opinion groups and
communities that form around alphas - some as beta supporters, some as
delta "lurkers", competitors
that often prop each other up through thesis-antithesis healthy debate
and that if you're
trying to aggregate opinion, getting a cross-cut of these clusters could
make a robust system.
Deltas would probably be better for idea transmission between groups,
Alphas would be better
in coalescing solid opinion.

Unfortunately, the Internet seems to be removing diversity,
independence, and ironically
decentralization from Web/blog political thought. Even as it excels at
methods for aggregating
the results.

Hmmmm....methinks that's enough before my first morning coffee.


Owen Densmore wrote:

> I've been reading this critter:
>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and  
> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>
> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
> - Diverse
> - Independent
> - Decentralized
> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>
> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the  
> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking  
> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>
> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to  
> community modeling?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore
> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>  

[Jim Duggan]

Definitely a worthwhile read, and Surowiecki presents his arguments well,
especially for such a counter-intuitive hypothesis, as before I read the
book I would have associated crowds with "lowest common denominator"
decisions where the best solutions are "diluted".

As previously mentioned, a necessary requirement is that the decision makers
are independent, diverse and decentralised (this principle would probably
apply to the jury system also... remember the movie with Henry Fonda?).

However, one thing that Surowiecki does not seem to address is what to do
when you cannot resolve the wisdom of crowds, where you have a number of
competing solutions to a problem where averaging might not be
appropriate.... how can you reconcile views in these situations?

One technique I've come across before is Soft Systems Methodology, where
different world views can be presented and accomodated... I wonder if people
have come across similar approaches?

regards,
Jim.

See
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471986054/104-2590797-3530315?v=glance&n=283155
for info on SSM.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Owen Densmore" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam" <friam at redfish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 5:02 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

> I've been reading this critter:
>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and
> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>
> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
> - Diverse
> - Independent
> - Decentralized
> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>
> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the
> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking
> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>
> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to
> community modeling?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore
> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

[David Mirly]

I have not personally read the book but it is on my list.

However, I did recently read this article which focuses on the  
negative results of collective thinking.
It does give a mention or two to positive uses of crowd thinking though.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html


On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:02 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> I've been reading this critter:
>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and
> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>
> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
> - Diverse
> - Independent
> - Decentralized
> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>
> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the
> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking
> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>
> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to
> community modeling?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore
> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Bill Eldridge]

I'm reminded of Kesey having trouble getting into a rock 'n roll concert
at the Cow Palace.

American Idol has nothing to do with Lennon & Dylan,
but more to do with Don Kirschner's work in creating the Monkees.
(Before the Monkees thought they were a real group, though to his
credit, Nesmith was brilliant in his work on the Repo Man soundtrack).

So popurl's missed a diabetes development. Most mainstream media is busy
covering
Brangelina in Namibia and misses the slaughter in Africa of thousands
every day.
Come to think of it, I didn't see anything on the diabetes issue, and I
peruse
the NY Times, LA Times, IHT, CNN and a few blogs.

David Mirly wrote:

> I have not personally read the book but it is on my list.
>
> However, I did recently read this article which focuses on the  
> negative results of collective thinking.
> It does give a mention or two to positive uses of crowd thinking though.
>
> http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:02 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>  
>> I've been reading this critter:
>>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
>> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and
>> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>>
>> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
>> - Diverse
>> - Independent
>> - Decentralized
>> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>>
>> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the
>> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking
>> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>>
>> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to
>> community modeling?
>>
>>      -- Owen
>>
>> Owen Densmore
>> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>    
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>  

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[Michael Agar]

Book's on my shelf, too, haven't read it yet. Don't forget De  
Toqueville's line about the tyranny of the masses, not to mention  
decades of work in mob psychology. Not so easy to map those key  
conditions onto real social swarms. Doesn't swarm formation weaken if  
not contradict the first two conditions right away? Coupling and  
constraints and all that?

Mike


On Jun 6, 2006, at 9:30 AM, David Mirly wrote:

> I have not personally read the book but it is on my list.
>
> However, I did recently read this article which focuses on the
> negative results of collective thinking.
> It does give a mention or two to positive uses of crowd thinking  
> though.
>
> http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:02 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> I've been reading this critter:
>>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
>> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and
>> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>>
>> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
>> - Diverse
>> - Independent
>> - Decentralized
>> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>>
>> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the
>> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking
>> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>>
>> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to
>> community modeling?
>>
>>      -- Owen
>>
>> Owen Densmore
>> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Jochen Fromm-3]

 
That's a good summary of the basic book thesis, but in my
humble opinion it is already widely applied, because it seems
to be the fundamental principle behind the "Web 2.0" buzzword.
The power of "Web 2.0" systems comes from the centralization
of decentralized information, from the unification and aggregation
of widely distributed knowledge: user-generated content
(file-sharing, information-sharing, blogs, blogging, and wikis)
and user-organized content (tags, tagging, and "folksonomy"), see
http://www.vs.uni-kassel.de/systems/index.php/Web_2.0

-J.


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 6:02 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam
Subject: [FRIAM] Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
- Diverse
- Independent
- Decentralized
- Good method for aggregating the results.

I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the  
democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking  
crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.

Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to  
community modeling?

     -- Owen

[Marko Rodriguez]

Indeed, the idea of collective intelligence has been embodied within Web
2.0 trend.

Amazon.com recommender system is a collective intelligence for artifact
recommendation.

De.lic.ious is a collective intelligence application for artifact
categorization.

Smartocracy is a collective intelligence application for collective
policy making.

These systems, and their relatives, all take the perspective of a
diverse group of individuals and use that information to support the
collective either at the local level (personal recommendations) or the
global level (social decision making).

Even algorithms like Google's PageRank is a collective intelligence
algorithm for recommending prestigious websites. Given the local
perspectives of webpage authors (their href links to other pages), the
aggregate network structure provides the medium for the PageRank
algorithm to calculate a webpage's rank/prestige based on its location
in the network.

Marko.


On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 19:10 +0200, Jochen Fromm wrote:

>  That's a good summary of the basic book thesis, but in my
> humble opinion it is already widely applied, because it seems
> to be the fundamental principle behind the "Web 2.0" buzzword.
> The power of "Web 2.0" systems comes from the centralization
> of decentralized information, from the unification and aggregation
> of widely distributed knowledge: user-generated content
> (file-sharing, information-sharing, blogs, blogging, and wikis)
> and user-organized content (tags, tagging, and "folksonomy"), see
> http://www.vs.uni-kassel.de/systems/index.php/Web_2.0
>
> -J.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:Friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf
> Of Owen Densmore
> Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 6:02 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam
> Subject: [FRIAM] Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki
>
> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
> - Diverse
> - Independent
> - Decentralized
> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>
> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the  
> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking  
> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>
> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to  
> community modeling?
>
>      -- Owen
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
Marko A. Rodriguez
CCS-3 Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Phone [phone]
Fax [phone]
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram

[Steve Smith]

Just my $.02

So much of "collective" behavior can be attributed to one of the
following 3 very linear principles:

1) Breadth... a group of individuals often has a wider range of
        A) experiences
        B) ideas
        C) contacts
when what is being sought is a rare or unique piece of knowledge or
perspective, a group is more like to have it in its "union" than an
individual.

2) Smoothing... the "average" of many ideas is sometimes fairly
"stable" compared to any one idea/opinion... when a "stable" response
is more functional, a "collective decision" may be what is called for.

3) Positive feedback.   When a bold decision is needed, a group can
reinforce eachother into making it, or following through.   The
darkside of this is mob violence, panic, etc.

This last example might be considered "nonlinear" in one sense of the
word, but is hardly as interesting as what we usually seek (emergent,
qualitatively different/better results), no?

[Giles Bowkett]

I haven't read it but Surowiecki presented at South By Southwest this
year (because of the Web 2.0 connection) and I've listened to the
podcast of this presentation a couple times while working out. I
definitely recommend it and the book's on my list to read.

Judging from that presentation, it sounds as if the book would have
probably had a more accurate but less catchy title if he had called it
"The Wisdom Of Decision-Making Markets," because what he says in the
speech is that it's really about how aggregate decisions, summed from
the decisions made by all individuals in a large group of people
competing against each other, consistently outperform the decisions of
the best-informed experts in those groups.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

[Marko Rodriguez]

If you are interested in Surowiecki's ideas, I'd recommend reading some
of the work by myself and my collegues on Social Decision Making using
Web 2.0 applications (basically a push to bottom-up governance through
social network-based power structures and web technology interfacing).

Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram/papers/smartocracy-hicss2007.pdf

AND

Social Decision Making with Multi-Relational Networks and Grammar-Based
Particle Swarms
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram/papers/grammar-decision-hicss2007.pdf

AND

Societal-Scale Decision Making Using Social Networks
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram/papers/societalscale-naacsos2004.pdf

Enjoy!,
Marko.

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 14:47 -0600, Giles Bowkett wrote:

> I haven't read it but Surowiecki presented at South By Southwest this
> year (because of the Web 2.0 connection) and I've listened to the
> podcast of this presentation a couple times while working out. I
> definitely recommend it and the book's on my list to read.
>
> Judging from that presentation, it sounds as if the book would have
> probably had a more accurate but less catchy title if he had called it
> "The Wisdom Of Decision-Making Markets," because what he says in the
> speech is that it's really about how aggregate decisions, summed from
> the decisions made by all individuals in a large group of people
> competing against each other, consistently outperform the decisions of
> the best-informed experts in those groups.
>

--
Marko A. Rodriguez
CCS-3 Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Phone [phone]
Fax [phone]
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram

[Bill Eldridge]

All good and well, but I think Surowiecki weakens his case
by mixing examples that don't quite rightly belong together,
cherry-picking some behavior. It's an attractive populist
message, which should start up the warning bells to be
careful at least.

First, his first big example is the crowd "picking" the weight
of a hog by having the mean almost exact (say 1187 pounds
to 1188 pounds actual). Uh, okay, that proves what?
I would guess that if you went from county fair to county
fair, the mean of the means would deviate quite a bit, but
the averages of the 10 best hog breeders would be much
more accurate and deviate less. Just a hunch that the item
in question was a fortuitous instance. Try it with marbles
in a very large jar rather than the weight of a hog. By what
I take is the author's thesis is that we could get 6 billion
humans to vote on the weight sight unseen and they'd get
it right because they're a wise crowd, or perhaps I'm not
reading him right - he doesn't lead me towards understanding
the wisdom.

The lack of rigor is added to when you hear that a group of
traders in Iowa pick the Presidents better than the Gallup poll.
Of course they do, or you wouldn't be hearing about them,
you'd be hearing about a group of stock car drivers in Alabama
who pick better than the Gallup poll. Of how many crowds
trying to be correct, how many show Surowiecki's "wisdom"?
1/1000? Now, it might be that Iowa is situated enough between
Montana myopia on the right and New York myopia on the left
that it balances to be less deceived than those in other places.
But meanwhile, a group somewhere else like Texas, just as authoritatively
a "crowd", would be mixing signals and betting wrong - getting it
right in the Bush years, getting it wrong in the Clinton years perhaps.
(And considering that an election might be decided by a few electoral
votes or a single Supreme Court justice, what really does that prove,
except that you might be as predictable as a coin toss?)

Now, I thought the American public was very wise at the end of
the Clinton years when it was not swayed by the Lewinski scandal.
But if I were Republican, I might think the public very stupid and gullible.
We're into value decisions, and is the public more or less consistent
on values versus deciding how much something weighs and whether
the sky is a particular hue?

The Google example is something different. You're able to model
what people expect by modelling lots of people. Especially if people
are more satisfied with 20 different answers, you can cross-correlate
the answers from a million people and make sure the top 20 don't
resemble each other, and that will be much much more satisfactory
than if every one points to the same URL. But this only tells us that
it's useful to model people's expectations if we want to derive an
answer that people expect (and want). An important result, and I
like Google, but very different from crowds being inherently "wise".
Crowds are inherently human, and Google caters to that humanity.
But its results on WMD's may not satisfy a right-winger or a left-winger
or neither, though folks in the middle might be happy. I just clicked
"I Feel Lucky" for "Monica", and there was some singer I'd never heard
of - I thought the name Monica had been retired with Lewinsky, but
I'm wrong. So Google is more like having the house working for you
rather than against you in Vegas (unless you're doing clicks for ads,
but let's not go there). But that still doesn't address "wisdom", it
addresses "humanness". We're doing a bell curve on human expectations,
not on right vs. wrong.

Now what happens if Google aggregates Pakistan with Germany,
or instead separates Asia from Latin America from North America?
Is Google deriving wisdom to appeal to all sectors equally, or splitting
by domain ending/country (certainly I get different answers depending
on what languages I check, but does it change based on my IP address
as well?). If I'm an African Googling from New York, will I get the
same satisfactory results as if I'm Googling from Dakar, or will
Google miss my demographics?

Some of the mathematical work on deriving a neutral stock portfolio
is very interesting and very similar in some respects to finding the mean
"wisdom" of the human crowd (or subsets thereof). You end up with
different classes of investors with different risk and gain requirements,
so different appropriate investment tools. And you can track
performance of various popular stocks, mutual funds, people who bet
the Dow vs. those who are conservative or risky. If Surowiecki really
wants to test his hypothesis, he should get together the minimum number
of people that make a "wise" crowd, get them to choose stocks, and
then figure out the mean choice, and they all take the plunge.

I apologize if I sound negative, but I think he would have been better
off trying to model the different agents involve and develop a complex
theory that might have some simplistic analogies. People with experience
will on average do better than people with no experience in most fields.
People with accurate information will do better than those without
accurate information, most of the time. But there are some types of
decisions that are simply counter-intuitive, and this might depend on
culture and time - whether the earth is flat, whether rock 'n roll is
harmful, whether rent control is healthy, whether gay marriage is
"okay". Some of these judgments have measures, some not.
There are some areas where expert knowledge is of no help,
but that's a far cry from saying lay knowledge in aggregate is
always more "wise" than expert knowledge to whatever measure.


Giles Bowkett wrote:

> I haven't read it but Surowiecki presented at South By Southwest this
> year (because of the Web 2.0 connection) and I've listened to the
> podcast of this presentation a couple times while working out. I
> definitely recommend it and the book's on my list to read.
>
> Judging from that presentation, it sounds as if the book would have
> probably had a more accurate but less catchy title if he had called it
> "The Wisdom Of Decision-Making Markets," because what he says in the
> speech is that it's really about how aggregate decisions, summed from
> the decisions made by all individuals in a large group of people
> competing against each other, consistently outperform the decisions of
> the best-informed experts in those groups.
>
>  

[Robert Holmes-2]

So if Surowiecki's thesis is correct, our discussions are almost certainly
more reflective of reality than his because we're a crowd and he's a lone
expert. But then if we decide his thesis is flawed and maybe experts do have
more insight than crowds then - because he's the expert - we should accept
his thesis. But if Surowiecki's thesis is correct...

Robert

On 6/8/06, Bill Eldridge <dcbill at volny.cz> wrote:

>
>
> All good and well, but I think Surowiecki weakens his case
> by mixing examples that don't quite rightly belong together,
> cherry-picking some behavior. It's an attractive populist
> message, which should start up the warning bells to be
> careful at least.
>
> First, his first big example is the crowd "picking" the weight
> of a hog by having the mean almost exact (say 1187 pounds
> to 1188 pounds actual). Uh, okay, that proves what?
> I would guess that if you went from county fair to county
> fair, the mean of the means would deviate quite a bit, but
> the averages of the 10 best hog breeders would be much
> more accurate and deviate less. Just a hunch that the item
> in question was a fortuitous instance. Try it with marbles
> in a very large jar rather than the weight of a hog. By what
> I take is the author's thesis is that we could get 6 billion
> humans to vote on the weight sight unseen and they'd get
> it right because they're a wise crowd, or perhaps I'm not
> reading him right - he doesn't lead me towards understanding
> the wisdom.
>
> The lack of rigor is added to when you hear that a group of
> traders in Iowa pick the Presidents better than the Gallup poll.
> Of course they do, or you wouldn't be hearing about them,
> you'd be hearing about a group of stock car drivers in Alabama
> who pick better than the Gallup poll. Of how many crowds
> trying to be correct, how many show Surowiecki's "wisdom"?
> 1/1000? Now, it might be that Iowa is situated enough between
> Montana myopia on the right and New York myopia on the left
> that it balances to be less deceived than those in other places.
> But meanwhile, a group somewhere else like Texas, just as authoritatively
> a "crowd", would be mixing signals and betting wrong - getting it
> right in the Bush years, getting it wrong in the Clinton years perhaps.
> (And considering that an election might be decided by a few electoral
> votes or a single Supreme Court justice, what really does that prove,
> except that you might be as predictable as a coin toss?)
>
> Now, I thought the American public was very wise at the end of
> the Clinton years when it was not swayed by the Lewinski scandal.
> But if I were Republican, I might think the public very stupid and
> gullible.
> We're into value decisions, and is the public more or less consistent
> on values versus deciding how much something weighs and whether
> the sky is a particular hue?
>
> The Google example is something different. You're able to model
> what people expect by modelling lots of people. Especially if people
> are more satisfied with 20 different answers, you can cross-correlate
> the answers from a million people and make sure the top 20 don't
> resemble each other, and that will be much much more satisfactory
> than if every one points to the same URL. But this only tells us that
> it's useful to model people's expectations if we want to derive an
> answer that people expect (and want). An important result, and I
> like Google, but very different from crowds being inherently "wise".
> Crowds are inherently human, and Google caters to that humanity.
> But its results on WMD's may not satisfy a right-winger or a left-winger
> or neither, though folks in the middle might be happy. I just clicked
> "I Feel Lucky" for "Monica", and there was some singer I'd never heard
> of - I thought the name Monica had been retired with Lewinsky, but
> I'm wrong. So Google is more like having the house working for you
> rather than against you in Vegas (unless you're doing clicks for ads,
> but let's not go there). But that still doesn't address "wisdom", it
> addresses "humanness". We're doing a bell curve on human expectations,
> not on right vs. wrong.
>
> Now what happens if Google aggregates Pakistan with Germany,
> or instead separates Asia from Latin America from North America?
> Is Google deriving wisdom to appeal to all sectors equally, or splitting
> by domain ending/country (certainly I get different answers depending
> on what languages I check, but does it change based on my IP address
> as well?). If I'm an African Googling from New York, will I get the
> same satisfactory results as if I'm Googling from Dakar, or will
> Google miss my demographics?
>
> Some of the mathematical work on deriving a neutral stock portfolio
> is very interesting and very similar in some respects to finding the mean
> "wisdom" of the human crowd (or subsets thereof). You end up with
> different classes of investors with different risk and gain requirements,
> so different appropriate investment tools. And you can track
> performance of various popular stocks, mutual funds, people who bet
> the Dow vs. those who are conservative or risky. If Surowiecki really
> wants to test his hypothesis, he should get together the minimum number
> of people that make a "wise" crowd, get them to choose stocks, and
> then figure out the mean choice, and they all take the plunge.
>
> I apologize if I sound negative, but I think he would have been better
> off trying to model the different agents involve and develop a complex
> theory that might have some simplistic analogies. People with experience
> will on average do better than people with no experience in most fields.
> People with accurate information will do better than those without
> accurate information, most of the time. But there are some types of
> decisions that are simply counter-intuitive, and this might depend on
> culture and time - whether the earth is flat, whether rock 'n roll is
> harmful, whether rent control is healthy, whether gay marriage is
> "okay". Some of these judgments have measures, some not.
> There are some areas where expert knowledge is of no help,
> but that's a far cry from saying lay knowledge in aggregate is
> always more "wise" than expert knowledge to whatever measure.
>
>
> Giles Bowkett wrote:
> > I haven't read it but Surowiecki presented at South By Southwest this
> > year (because of the Web 2.0 connection) and I've listened to the
> > podcast of this presentation a couple times while working out. I
> > definitely recommend it and the book's on my list to read.
> >
> > Judging from that presentation, it sounds as if the book would have
> > probably had a more accurate but less catchy title if he had called it
> > "The Wisdom Of Decision-Making Markets," because what he says in the
> > speech is that it's really about how aggregate decisions, summed from
> > the decisions made by all individuals in a large group of people
> > competing against each other, consistently outperform the decisions of
> > the best-informed experts in those groups.
> >
> >
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

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[Jochen Fromm-3]

Collective efforts vs. individual creativity:
 
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
 
The Rise of Crowdsourcing
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

-J.

[Joshua Thorp]

Apropos the wisdom of crowds and web 2.0, Jaron Lanier wrote a  
combative essay for the Edge about the new "Digital Maoism".  Part of  
it seems to be a standard libertarian rant on the importance of  
individualism and may be a bit attacking the forest without  
acknowledging it is actually made up of trees but is interesting none-
the-less.  As are the many rebuttals.

For those interested in wikipedia bashing or hive mind dialogue:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html

--joshua

[Joshua Thorp]

Sorry Jochen just got to reading this yesterday though I opened it  
when I sent it.  Forgot where I had gotten it from!

The hive mind strikes again!

--joshua


On Jun 15, 2006, at 1:39 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

>
> Collective efforts vs. individual creativity:
>
> The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism
> http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
>
> The Rise of Crowdsourcing
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html
>
> -J.
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org