A book written by James Surowiecki in 2004 attracted great attention with its title and propositions. This book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, also achieved great popularity. So what was the wisdom of these crowds?
It may be healthier to get opinions from independent crowds rather than a small expert opinion than the opinion given by a small group of experts. Thus, it will be possible to obtain a result that is closer to reality, rather than the estimation of a certain group of experts. At least that’s what the wisdom of the crowds upholds. Let’s exemplify this:
Can you approximate a calf’s weight at 1 kg?
We recently celebrated Eid al-Adha, which is one of the important days for the Islamic world. I alone can go to a cow in the sacrificial market and say, “This animal comes out with 300 kilos of meat”, but it is not possible for me to estimate the weight of the animal, because it is not a subject I understand. If you ask someone whose job is animal husbandry, they will estimate the cow’s weight by looking around the chest circumference of the animal and tell you 60% of this weight as the general rule. (I think I understood a little bit, I’m not sure now.) Let’s say we have a few experts, but these experts think that animals are fed salt and fattened, and yet this year’s animals do not eat much meat. The figures for this group may be lower. If we stand by the cow and ask everyone’s opinion, the arithmetic mean we will get can be very close to the truth.
In fact, there is a very common example of this. Francis Galton runs into a competition at a farmers’ festival in Plymouth, England. It is asked how many kilograms of boneless meat will be produced from the ox that is put on the stage in the competition. A grand prize will also be awarded to the farmer with the closest guess. About 800 farmers, one by one, write their estimates on a piece of paper.
The boneless meat weight when the ox is slaughtered is very close to the arithmetic mean of the estimates. In this method, where each farmer’s estimation is equally weighted, the result is close to 1% in the probability distribution. Those who know statistics will agree that this prediction is quite successful. Galton also explained this situation as the common mind of ordinary farmers is superior to the individual mind of an expert.
But are the crowds always right?
Crowds may have correctly guessed the amount of meat that can come out of a cattle, but the crowds are not always right. The author of the book, Surowiecki, believes that certain conditions must be met for the wisdom of the crowd to be active. The first of these is diversity. So the wisdom of the crowd doesn’t work very well when asking a question to people who all agree.
A second point is that whether there is a centralized structure or not is effective in reaching the right results of the collective mind. Timely action could not be taken in the famous Columbia space shuttle accident because the common sense of the engineers was not taken seriously by the upper echelon.
The third factor is that people are independent when making decisions. At the core of democracy, everyone should be able to decide independently, but Honduras had become so dependent on banana production and the giants in the banana market that people had to vote according to their wishes. The word Banana Republic has already been said for this country.
The fourth and final decision is, of course, that there is a decision-making mechanism. The only way to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd without being asked for their opinion is to hear the ideas that pass through people’s minds one by one. This is something that only happens in X-Men movies, of course. However, getting the general opinion of the crowd on such forecasting issues gives a chance to get an accurate result.
On social media, we hardly see the wisdom of the crowd.
Now, we said above that when we bring together the independent estimates of people and work in an environment where everyone has equal weight, the crowds make very accurate predictions. Then we added the conditions for this. So what happens if these conditions are not met? What we need to do to get the answer to this question is actually very simple: look at social media.
Seeing some content on social media, “What the hell, why is this popular?” do you say This is because algorithms act on the wisdom of the crowd. Let’s say you went and started to follow hamburger-related content on a social media platform, then the algorithm started to show you hamburger content. So far everything is normal.
Then a popular hamburger maker came out and invented something called the challenge of eating things that look like hamburgers but are not hamburgers as a joke. Here he made bread from sponge, cheese made of plastic, put rubber pieces as meat, etc. All of a sudden, this ridiculous challenge became popular just because that burger place is famous. You, too, are exposed to this content just because you liked hamburgers at the time. Just because the person who shared the first post is popular and gets interaction, people start to like this content more and make it themselves.
Worse still, as humans, we tend to imitate the behavior of those around us. There are various social and psychological reasons for this, but it is undeniable that we have a tendency. Interactions, especially in small groups, cause an error in the evaluation of the data. Due to this error, a worthless content becomes valuable in the eyes of the algorithm and is constantly shared and highlighted.
Let’s give more realistic examples.
Let’s say the hamburger example is a bit absurd, in fact, we see these problems very often. When a false news is made, people suddenly start to share it because there can be posts that are suitable for their own views or the social environment they want to be accepted. If nothing else, people can accept things as true just because something is popular. Remember the election manipulation allegations made against Facebook. At the time, Facebook was accused of constantly imposing a single view by putting like-minded people into an echo chamber.
In other words, the wisdom of the crowd is weak at the point where people can see and interact with each other’s ideas, and it can even turn into stupidity rather than wisdom. After all, estimating cow weight isn’t the same as judging someone’s comment on a topic you see as your mentor. Already, technology platforms are looking for ways to prevent these manipulations.
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