Groups can be smarter than the smartest people in them.

That's the contention of James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds.

The book opens with an illustration in which a crowd at a county fair collectively comes closer to the actual weight of an ox than their individual guesses and even the guesses of cattle experts. (Source > )

I suspect this concept has a role in other collective decisions - elections, pedagogy, language, science, philosophy, religion, or art (what is a good painting or book or movie? what is a bad one?).

Anywhere you have enough time, a large enough sample, and the right conditions, the crowd will come closer to the truth than any one part of it.

Here's the tricky part: What are those right conditions?

There are a few, but the two most interesting to me are:

• The three conditions for a group to be intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization.
• The best decisions are a product of disagreement and contest.

And the ways to foster the best environment for wise crowds?

• Keep your ties loose.
• Keep yourself exposed to as many diverse sources of information as possible.
• Make groups that range across hierarchies.

(See the same Wikipedia link again > )

What does this say for group decisions about intangibles like morals, ethics, philosophy, religion, or even string theory?

I think two things, at least:

1. Nothing is entirely intangible. From parchment to super colliders to the traditions and principles that relate them to human behavior, beliefs - from the mundane to the sublime - are fixed in something physical.
2. There will always be aberrations and outliers.

The End of the Matter

All of this leads us to a truism: all other things being equal, diversity and consensus are good.

There will always be strong personalities and the products of those personalities - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, etc.

1. I would argue that those are distillations of the crowd, fashioned into something primally beautiful, elegant, or practical.
2. And they succeed by virtue of the wisdom of the crowd, not in spite of it.

For all their genius and sublimity, they are utterly egalitarian and bourgeois.

The Beginning of Another Matter

This is a principle I find primary and elemental to any discourse:

Human inquiry corrects itself, whether directly, as when consciously guided by principles (science, law, trial and error), or indirectly, as when guided by our natures (evolution or introspection).[1]

All self-correction involves aberrations. These are sometimes painful segues that derail science (homeopathy), or democracy (despotism), or art (monkeys with paint brushes tied to their tales), or education (good spelling = good writing), or religion (heresy).

There will always be a group that wants to make its own rules. If those rules are based on new evidence and consensus, it's a course correction; if they're based on personal preference, it's a course deviation. Sometimes a deviation is benign ("the earth is flat") and sometimes it's dangerous ("vaccinations are unsafe").

And it ends where I wanted to end this post...

... with the concept of orthodoxy.

The larger group is often right because principles that guide consensus among large groups lead to conclusions that are in some sense "wise." When they are unwise, forces outside the group provide a correction.

Beliefs, practices, principles, etc. that are in some sense "wiser" can be discerned across a sufficiently broad swath of peoples and time.[2]

If there is a fork in which a large group belief splits off but persists alongside another large group belief, and each resists correction over time, I would suggest that both beliefs share essential wisdom that contributes to their durability.

c0

[1]
My formal background is linguistics and literature. I'm not a philosopher or theologian. If any of this sounds ignorant or simplistic, I'm guilty as charged. I'm working from what my brain happens to contain at this moment.

[2]
This is often recast as "a million people can't be wrong." Of course, a million people can be wrong; it's not a matter of the precise number, but the relative size; when a lot of folks think sufficiently alike and an idea survives scrutiny by many others over time, there's something to it.

The "survival" process is sometimes metaphorically called "winnowing," or separating the wheat from the chaff. And sometimes a little chaff remains, which can be annoying, but relatively harmless in the long run.

 

c0

If you read this far, I'd be interested in your opinion.

Started: 2012-10-01