This was an interesting talk. It is clear that the “wisdom of the crowds” can expose or create new knowledge: the Page Rank algorithm is an excellent example. I did feel like I wanted more information about his model–what was his evidence that his assumptions are necessary and sufficient, and how does one determine which applications do so? I want a framework for when to use a public-at-large wisdom-of-crowds models and when to use expert systems and published papers.

Prediction markets, when played fairly, are also useful, but can be manipulated. I believe that as the government, media, and industry begin to pay more attention to prediction markets, there will be more temptation for these players to exploit loopholes or to bid their own positions way up. However, if important decisions are not based on short-term fluctuations, we can expect a certain amount of self-correction: if prediction markets are like the stock market, we can expect the loophole advantage to eventually get spread very thin over many people.

His three important factors are aggregating judgments, cognitive diversity, and independence. He implicitly bases these on the work on groupthink–simply reversing each factor. I think these are backed up by his citation of Asch’s work, which has also been used to conclude that smaller juries are more likely to bring guilty verdicts, especially against minorities. The big question, one he does address in the longer recording, is that independence can be hard to find. I think this is part of the initial power of the Page Rank algorithm, social bookmarking sites, etc.–it found patterns among things people had done passively, for their own use. How do we keep this from eventually turning to circularity, where everyone links to the top two results so that they are always the top two results, etc.?

So I just finished listening to the 7 min version, which completely blew me away so i’m gonna have to listen to the hour talk now.

I posted the link in the previous post cause it was my first exposure to the idea of Wisdom in Crowds, sometime last year. I thought the idea of this was asinine. Jumped to conclusions I did. If you only knew how many times, with groups at work, I have been involved with some of the most hair-brained, well-intentioned people that the only benefit they brought was the days they missed calls. As was called out in the audio, I have left meetings where I DID feel dumber. Matter of fact, if your IQ could decrease cause of others, I would be in IQ debt.

This is the piece that makes this idea credible with me: The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group.

Forgive me, I have been jaded by 7 1/2 years in the corporate world

One clarification…I did not mean to insinuate that egos and politics are non-existent in the corporate world. Just that they are *extra-special* in the academic world.

This was certainly an interesting talk. The use of examples was really helpful. When I come to think of it, the 3 important factors that he mentioned, aggregating judgments, diversity and independence seem really true.

Coming from south-east Asia, the only thing that ring bells in my head when someone says ‘crowd’ is the “tyranny of the masses”. That is one of the things I’ve been exposed to since childhood. Tyranny of the masses is the basic concept that sometimes the majority might be wrong. As Michelle mentioned, ‘independence’ can be hard to find. Whenever a group of people sit down to do something, there’s always an agenda. When there’s a lack of independence, crowd is regulated by the powerful few with their own agenda and bias. The mass mentality can be particularly frightening because once people as a whole are headed in a particular direction, there is an incredible amount of inertia that can be very hard to redirect. For me, the idea of ‘wisdom of crowd’ was certainly a change………like an ideal dream. To sum up, I really liked the notion that the wisdom of the crowd does not come from the consensus decision of the group but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts of each individual in the group.

I think what he had to say was very true. Groups can be smarter with diversity but only if people think for themselves rather than going with a consensus. When people try and “go with the lowest common denominator” then groups are not that smart but if people think for themselves the group as a whole can be very productive.

A couple of thoughts after class

Validity or factual nature of the internet:

Does this produce a more questioning society overall as the internet inserts itself into our lives? Is that a bad thing? Is this based on age?

I personally take everything I read on the internet with a few grains of salt….but not all do:
How do we (society) educate individuals to decipher the difference? Is that necessary?

Pedagogy and the Internet
As a young student, my only option was to learn from encyclopedias, books, etc. You read the book and that was it. The web seems to lend itself to proactive leaning. If users want to learn more from an article online, they simply click on a corresponding link within the text. To answer Greg/RH’s question, I think it encourages/increases our need for information. I am sure it mires some people but the same is true for any kind of learning. In very simplified terms: obtaining new info out about a type of music, cooking technique, technology, or a cool website, is learning. Transfer of new information=learning.

BTW- html tags are meant as a test