week 2 in gist
im not saying other topics are just frivolous and unimportant, but the topic that really stands out for me this week is ‘Wisdom of Crowds’. i remember hearing it for the first time in my lecturer’s room last week when we were asked to choose the topics that we wanted to lead a discussion on. and my initial reaction was like, a ‘eureka’ moment for me because firstly, as is with other new terms/words/things that i hear for the first time, i was intrigued. secondly, ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ sounds philosophical to me. like something a wise philosopher would conjure, so i thought maybe that topic would make an interesting debate. haha!
during class discussion, ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ reminded me of ‘word-of-mouth’. i thought i could see some similarities between the two and the only difference is that ‘word-of-mouth’ sounds more like a marketing, or consumer behaviour term. you see, wisdom of crowds means ‘collective intelligence’. and this ‘collective intelligence’ supposedly influences one’s decision. ‘word-of-mouth’ means as people talk about how brilliant a product is, one will buy their words, and eventually buy the brilliant product. there. do you see the ‘influencing’ factor? i do.
it also reminded me of Bernoulli’s ‘Law of Large Numbers’. it’s a theory of probability that says the average of results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected result. that means, the more one tries, the more likely he is to be correct. spot the similarity. both ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ and ‘Law of Large Numbers’ use aggregation.
and as inane as it might sound, it also reminded me of the clichéd english idiom, ‘two heads are better than one’. hahah, go figure.
as i’ve learnt during tutorial, Google uses ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ as a basis for its search results ranking. And if you google any term or definition, more than half the time, the first result comes from, hold your breath, wikipedia. even for all wikipedia’s flaws and fallacies (because anyone can edit the content to his own liking), it appears to be the number 1 search result. is this ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ at work?
apart from aggregation, for ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ to stand its ground, the people within have to be independent – they should be making decisions on their own. this brings about ‘decentralisation‘ – that power is not in one central location and decisions are made by select individuals (this is where diversity of opinion comes in) based on their speciality and specific knowledge.
question is, if that’s ever possible. in my opinion, it’s bordering impossibility because any ideas that a group of people have must have originated from at least one of the individual members within the same set. i think it’s human nature how sometimes, our opinions are determined by those around us. James Surowiecki believes in ‘crowd behaviour’ but even for all its triumphalism, the cynical me thinks that the crowd is not really wise. many instances in history happened because the crowds made bad decisions, or rather, making bad decisions because the people were acting as a crowd and not as an individual. hmm to each his own. im sure everyone judges wisdom of crowds differently? right? or are you judging the way you are because you’re following the crowd?
and here’s something to lose sleep over. is ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ a sign that one has no backbone to stand his ground/decision? that one has the mob herd mentality and that he is blindly following the supposedly ‘intelligent’ crowd? and when beliefs converge, do they converge to consensus?
