The wisdom of the many

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The wisdom of the many - why groups are smarter than individuals (Original title: The wisdom of crowds. Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations ) is the title of a book by James Surowiecki , das Was published in 2004. He argues that the accumulation of information in groups leads to joint group decisions that are often better than individual participants' solutions.

content

The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its reasoning. Many subject areas are touched upon, but mainly economics and psychology .

The introductory story tells of Francis Galton's surprise that visitors to the West English livestock fair in 1906, as part of a competition, estimated the carcass weight of a cattle extremely accurately, assuming the group's estimate was the median of all 787 estimates. (The mean value of the individual estimates was even accurate and was therefore better than that of each individual participant, including some experts such as butchers .)

The book refers to different groups of independently decisive people, not to phenomena of mass psychology . He draws parallels to statistical selection processes , according to which a different group of individually decisive people can represent the totality of all possible outcomes of an event and is thus able to make better predictions for the future.

The English title of the book is an allusion to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , which was published in 1841.

Types of wisdom of the many

Surowiecki divides decisions into three main groups, which he classifies as problem areas:

  • Cognition : This problem area includes decisions for which there is a concrete solution that can be recognized through the use of cognitive skills. Surowiecki argues that a group can do this much more precisely, faster and more independently of political forces than experts or expert groups.
  • Coordination : Coordination of behavior includes optimizing the use of a restaurant or driving accident-free. The book contains many examples from experimental economics , but this section is based more on naturally occurring phenomena, such as pedestrians optimizing the use of sidewalks or the occupancy of popular restaurants. He explores how shared beliefs / norms within a culture allow amazingly accurate predictions about the reactions of other members of that culture.
  • Cooperation : How groups of people can build a network of trust without the need for central control over their behavior or direct enforcement of the rules. This section is particularly in favor of a free market .

Elements of the foundation of the wisdom of the many

Not all groups are wise. Examples of such considerations are, for example, angry crowds or investors on the stock market after a stock market boom or crash. Investigations are necessary to uncover and avoid more examples of faulty group intelligence. However, it is possible to define key criteria that distinguish a wise group from an irrational group.

  1. Diversity of opinion: Everyone has different information about a situation, so that there can always be individual interpretations of a situation.
  2. Independence: The opinion of the individual is not determined by the opinion of the group.
  3. Decentralization: Here, the focus is on specialization in order to apply the knowledge of the individual.
  4. Aggregation: There are mechanisms in place to form a group opinion from individual opinions.

Failure of collective intelligence

Surowiecki examined situations where the group built a very bad reputation, arguing that in those situations there was a lack of knowledge or cooperation. In his opinion, this happened because the group members listened too much to the views of other people and emulated them, instead of forming an image of the situation for themselves and differentiating them. He gives various details of experiments, after which the group habits are known through a selected speaker. He also claims that the main reason for a group's intellectual conformity is mainly to make systematic mistakes.

If the decisive authority is not able to accept the group, according to Surowieckis, this leads to the loss of personal rights and the right to self-information. In this way, the cooperation in the group can only be as good, or rather worse than better, than the smartest member (the possibility exists apparently). Detailed case studies include the following errors:

  1. Centralism : The misfortune of the space shuttle Columbia , the fault of which shifted to the bureaucratic hierarchy of NASA management, as it claims to have known nothing of the warnings from the engineers.
  2. Opinion sunterschiede: Example: The American Community of the assassination was September 11, 2001 does not prevent because information is probably not forwarded from one sub authority to another. According to Surowiecki, groups work best when they choose their own work and get the information they need (in this case, IQ researchers). The isolation of SARS - virus is an example of the impossibility of coordinating research. He interprets the isolation of the virus as an example of the free flow of data to coordinate research, through laboratories around the world without a central control point.
  3. Ambivalence : Where transitions become visible and are shown slowed down, there can be a flood of information that the decisive individuals, taking into account the choice made, do not notice: Provided this happens, it is easier for the individual to coordinate his behavior with the group, because he can easily copy the behavior of the group.

Loss of independence in the group

Surowiecki spoke in the context of independent individuals and pointed out to groups that some individuals could be too involved ("too well integrated").

He was concerned with the question of how an individual maintains independence in interactions without processing a certain amount of data, which turns out to be a key factor in group intelligence.

He answers as follows:

  • Keep loose connections.
  • Try to get as much information as possible.

Tim O'Reilly and others discuss the success of Google, wikis, blogging and Web 2.0 in the context of the wisdom of the many.

conditions

Surowiecki is a staunch advocate for the benefits of decision-making markets and regrets the mistakes in DARPA's controversial private policy analysis (potential intellectual descendants from the Delphi Method of the RAND Corporation and author John Brunner's Delphi Pool) to get back to the groundwork. It builds on the success of public and internal cooperation as a starting point for a new individual perspective of a group with different experiences and the same motivation (for the success of the cause) in order to create new conditions. Surowiecki's advance prophecies are more telling than any of the predictions made by any other group of speculative individuals. His statements are above all market-related, so that he does not exclude the cooperation of authoritarian markets and companies, as well as unpredictable terrorist activities.

To support his thesis, he states that his editor has information that would publish a compelling statement in a book composed of several individual authors. In this way, it should be possible to immerse yourself in the wisdom of a much larger crowd than would be possible with a team writing at home.

Journalist Will Hutton argues that Surowiecki's analysis is based on prejudice as well as factual background, referring to the experiences of many people who "astonish decently established, own, collected, voluntary experience". He concludes that “there is no better way to teach community, individuality and democracy than with a truly free press”.

Only a few experimental attempts have been made to explore how collective wisdom arises. One of these attempts is a so-called poll or voting server called Opinion Republic. Here, market researchers use the multiple choice principle to collect and evaluate opinions on statements on a particular topic. With the voting mechanism, which is usually also used by passive users, so-called “Lurker”, a very large number of opinions are generated which, according to the law of large numbers, are increasingly gaining in quality and thus in expressiveness. Unfortunately, in contrast to other votes, it should be noted negatively that every user sees the results achieved to date before his vote, which endangers the independence of his judgment. In addition to a wide variety of perspectives and views (spread), these would be necessary if intelligent proposed solutions are to be created.

Application in practice

Numerous methods and applications use this or are even based on the principle that Surowski describes in his book. In the understanding of collective intelligence , the principle "The wisdom of the many" leads to a consensus-based decision-making. The Internet accelerates this process and is itself a medium for implementing the principle: Decentralized knowledge from different people is coordinated, for example, through forums or blogs. Crowdsourcing is a good example of how the principle can be used in application in the Internet medium. By asking questions online, the “crowd”, i.e. the user community, can make decisions together. The principle “The wisdom of the many” is also used in business. The social forecasting method makes use of this principle and builds on it. The framework conditions set by social forecasting ensure that the principle can be used effectively, for example to evaluate products or ideas. In the course of the wisdom of the many, the natural scientist Francis Galton should also be mentioned, who (unintentionally) proved in a test in 1906 that the principle works.

Others

On January 20, 2008, Günther Jauch hosted an interactive , live broadcast television program entitled The Wisdom of the Many . In this program, the question should be clarified whether a single expert is smarter than the totality of the audience. Various celebrities were presented as experts on a topic and had to answer knowledge or estimation questions from this, while the viewers voted on the same question over the phone. At the end of the show, the result was balanced between experts and viewers.

See also

expenditure

  • James Surowiecki: The wisdom of crowds. Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations . Little, Brown, London 2004, ISBN 0-316-86173-1 .
  • James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of the Many. The wisdom of the many, why groups are smarter than individuals and how we can use collective knowledge for our economic, social and political actions (original title: The wisdom of crowds , translated by Gerhard Beckmann), Bertelsmann, Munich, 2005, ISBN 3- 570-00687-5 ; Heyne Taschenbuch, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-15446-3 .

literature

  • Gerald S. Lee: Crowds. A moving picture of democracy . Doubleday, Page, Garden City 1913.
  • Johannes-Paul Fladerer, Ernst Kurzmann: The Wisdom of the Many: How to create Self-Organization and how to use Collective Intelligence in Companies and in Society From Management to ManagemANT . BoD, Norderstedt 2019, ISBN 978-3750422421 .
  • Gustave Le Bon : The Crowd. A Study Of The Popular Mind . Echo Library, Teddington, Middlesex 2009, ISBN 978-1-4068-5151-9 (reprint of London 1895 edition).
  • Angelika Karger: Knowledge management and "Swarm intelligence". Theoretical and philosophical perspectives . In: Jürgen Mittelstraß (Ed.): The future of knowledge. Workshop contributions, XVIII. German Congress for Philosophy . Universitäts-Verlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1999, ISBN 3-87940-697-9 , pp. 1288-1296.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds (English), September 20, 2005
  2. ^ Will Hutton: " The crowd knows best - From cricket to fuel prices, our collective instinct invariably strikes the right note " In: The Observer September 18, 2005
  3. ↑ www.opinionrepublic.com (offline; December 6th, 2015) ( Memento of the original from October 13, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.opinionrepublic.com
  4. ↑ The Wisdom of the Many, RTL, January 20, 2008 . In: www.fernsehserien.de . Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  5. ↑ see Gerald S. Lee: Crowds. A Moving-Picture of Democracy in Project Gutenberg, retrieved May 2005.
  6. ↑ see Gustave Le Bon: The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind . in Project Gutenberg