The Wisdom of Crowds: Collective stupidity
or: how collective wisdom makes us stupid
Once upon a time there was an ant colony. Mister Ant was looking for food and found some sugar. Quickly he marked his trail with pheromones, a chemical substance to communicate with other ants. Soon the other members of the ant colony gathered and followed the trail. It appeared that Mister Ant found the food and that about 10 other ants slightly moderated the trail to find the quickest possible way from the nest to the food source. The other 89 ants just followed the path and helped bringing in the food. Abundance and prosperity was celebrated in the nest. The news was also spread to other ant colonies. “Stop searching for food, but use the collective wisdom to find the food. Do not re-invent the wheel.” And they were right. There was no need to educate young ants to develop knowledge to find food. All they had to do is only follow the trail of pheromones to find the food.
Some days later mister Ant died and the Ant colony mourned a while. Again some days later the sugar storage pot was empty. Youngster Ant was the first to find out and after some hesitation he decided to walk on. His trail of pheromones tracked the path he went. The rest of the colony followed his trail. Younster Ant looked around, hoping to come across some new food. At a certain moment in time he smelled pheromones and decided to follow that trail. Soon he catched up on a fellow ant and was happy to follow him, convinced that following the track would lead him to the food source.
The ants walked and walked. Some ants moderated the track to smoothen the path, all the others just followed the trail.
What they didn’t know was that they were walking in circles and that Younster Ant just catched the tail of his own-created track.
Some days later the ants one by one died of exhaustion.
Why is this story compelling to me? Because it is telling the story of our current lives. Spoiled by the abundance and prosperity, brought to us by Google and Wikipedia we are about to loose our competences to develop new knowledge. Why should i write my master thesis if i can find enough information on the internet? Sometimes i think that the internet has evolved in a self-maintaining mechanism. The understanding that a network is made up not only of links, but first and foremost of the nodes has faded away. Current days’ measurements are the number of visitors, the number of trackbacks, links or referrals. Google’s pagerank system is ranking search results on the amount of times a website is ‘quoted’ by other websites. Technorati is ranking blogs on the number of referring blogs. Even CNN starts to incorporate ‘most popular’ weblogs in its news system. Am i the only one?
A thoughtprovoking essay is written by Jaron Lanier:
“The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.”
Where will the current understanding of the value of knowledge lead to? As long as we see it as ‘the most popular will be considered as having the most value’, then there will be a massive convergence in crowd knowledge. Ideas and concepts will be copied (did i hear about the number of companies considering wiki’s and blogs as the new holy grail of knowledge management) and we will all think that this will lead us to abundance and prosperity. But suddenly the well of experts supplying new knowledge will dry up. But because we are all busy copying, we won’t recognize that there are no new ideas coming in. As Lanier mentions: ‘John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan wouldn’t have made it in the current Idols-alike competitions of most popular artists’. Would Einstein and other great scientists from the past break through in the pagerank? We know that some very influential painters did not have any recognition of their work during their lifetime.
I criticized earlier the originality of blog posts. I consider this phenomenon as typical ant behavior, or herd behavior. Follow the trail that everyone is following. In general there is nothing wrong with it. As long as the pre-conditions are set, namely that
- you are aware of the quality of the knowledge; and
- there is enough transparancy.
The moment you are not able anymore to evaluate the knowledge one should stop following. Because that is the moment you risk ending up in the ant situation, walking in circles. Furthermore it is of highly importance that there is a transparant network, and the original sources, that is the experts are visible.
That is why i think that Wikipedia is starting to fail. Although the page history does give some information, there are too many edits involved to determine the quality of the outcome. We all know the outcome of a formula:
when the average reliability of the individual editor is 99%. An interesting research is done by IBM on collaborative writing. See the gallery here.
I will leave you with some interesting comments in this field made by leading Wikipedia practitioners in an interview of Dirk Riehle
DR: What about the ‘collective intelligence’ or ‘collective wisdom’ argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?
EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.
KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content
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