On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The
Wisdom of Crowds by
James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of
experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run
this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give
public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that
wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I
don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it
requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and
decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP.
Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
[[[
The wisdom of crowds
* p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA r=20040921
An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions
when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within
the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science,
committees, companies, markets and democracy.
The wisdom of crowds
+ 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right
91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent
10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the
diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and
aggregation
22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are
all successful decision markets
Diversity
+ 30 smaller groups need to actively pursue diversity
31 March: stale groups (without an influx of new naive
members) spend too much time exploiting and not enough time
exploring
34 experts aren't just wrong; they don't know how wrong they
are
36 Irving Janis identified "Group think" in small homogeneous
communities
38 Solomon Asch found that people often go with the wrong
answer in a group -- but at least one confederate of a
dissentor increases their autonomy
Independence
+ 41 Independence isolates errors and garners more information
43 Milgram et al put increasingly large groups of men on the
street corner looking up, others did the same, but not
because of conformity, but of "social proof"
49 herding: no one ever got fired for buying IBM
53 information cascade: following a leader and with imperfect
information, people stop looking to their own local knowledge
64 Hung and Blott performed an experiment with 2 urns, one
with 50% more white or black marbles respectively. When an
individual correct choice was awarded, people incorrectly
cascaded; yet, when collectively rewarded, it was best to
reveal one's own marble color
Decentralization
+ 78 the problem with U.S. intelligence was not
decentralization, but a bad form which didn't permit good
filtration and aggregation
87 Brian Arthur "El Farol" problem: should one go to a bar
that might be too crowded or empty? No easy solution , but
it demonstrates that we used inductive processes in
considering problems.
[1]
http://reagle.org/joseph/2003/freemindbrowser.html