by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Clay and the Wisdom of the Crowd
Great post by David Wilcox following a lecture that Clay Shirky gave at the ICA in London. Dave explains that Clay confessed to not believing that the crowd is always wise. Interestingly, one of the things that prompted him to make this point was how the Citizens Briefing Book that I have mentioned before was hijacked by campaigners for the legalisation of marijuana. So Clay suggests that mass online participation will not always work well because special interests groups will often hijack it. So perhaps what is needed is smart groups of people arguing with each other. My view would be that we probably need both. Mass involvement so as to maximise the input of ideas, smart group discussions to choose the best ones and shape them into a package, citizen input aggregation tools to show which proposals are most popular and then elected politicians and democratic processes to take all this input and make the final decision.
On the phrase "the wisdom of the crowd" I have always found it a bit misleading. It is tempting to take it to mean that whatever the largest number of people vote for must be the right answer, but of course when it is put that bluntly it no longer seems very appealing! I would see it as meaning: the more people you bring into a debate the more likely you are to get the fullest possible picture of solutions. This is particularly useful when there is a fairly clear right answer (e.g what is causing the bug in this piece of software?). It is also good at promoting innovation. If there is a consensus view that there are 5 possible solutions, then involving a lot more people is likely to generate unconventional solutions from people who would not normally get the chance to put their ideas on the table. But then if you vote on all the ideas (even with a representative group of voters), there is no particular reason to think this will generate the “wisest” decision. The point of any voting is not to guarantee that the wisest decision is made, but to involve people and to ensure that there will be sufficient support for the way forward that is chosen.
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It sometimes helps to remember that according to Surowiecki (author of the book "The Wisdom of Crowds", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wisdom_of_crowds) the following four conditions must be met in order for crowds to be considered smart or wise:
1. Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
2. Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
3. Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
4. Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
By that standard, the groups that formed during the various e-participation efforts on Change.gov clearly weren't wise. For example, in violation of the second rule above, not only were participants' choices (aggregate number of votes for, say, an idea) exposed while voting was still in process but also ideas were listed in order of popularity. This led to herding, favoring those relatively few ideas that managed to gain an early lead.
More importantly, though, I wouldn't consider any of these efforts decision making quite yet. Rather, what we saw was some kind of low-level input gathering: fairly broad, with little structure and little to no process (and still flawed in many ways). At best, this is what I would imagine a first phase of a decision making process might look like, not the end result.
posted about 1 year ago
Many thanks, Tim. For some more great analysis by tim in this area see his blog and in particular his commentary on some of Obama's initiatives via change.gov.
posted about 1 year ago
I've picked up this discussion on my blog: Clay Shirky on Change.gov and crowd wisdom
posted about 1 year ago
Always good to go back to the original text...sometimes these famous lines, like 'wisdom of the crowd' take on a life of their own with little resemblance to their original intent. My take on Surowiecki is the idea that, when you are looking for insight, ideas and innovation, the wide you throw the next the more likely you are to stumble across the spark of imagination or simple insight you need. Someone once described innovation to me as "the collision of the unfamiliar". Surowiecki is exactly in this track, it strikes me.
Also like Tim's distinction between 'low level input gathering' and any kind of mass decision-making process.
posted about 1 year ago