Getting it wrong

The other week in the Economist, we had an interesting article by a journalist and a tip about an interesting paper from a trio of east coast academics – references 1 and 2 respectively – both about the merits or otherwise of collaboration in the pursuit of knowledge. From the pair of which I offer the thoughts following.

I start with the curious phenomenon, known as the wisdom of the crowd, where many trials, tests and experiments appear to suggest that taking the average of many peoples’ guesses about things like the weight of the cow or the number of smarties in the jar gets one surprisingly close to the right answer. Lots of stuff about this out on the Internet, much of it in the realms of journalism and popular science – with reference 3 being a founder member of the genre – but unread by me. All of which is to be contrasted with the madness of the crowd, documented many years ago at reference 5.

Examination of this wisdom results in two qualifications. First, the guesses need to be independent, one person should not know about the guesses of other people. Second, the guesses need to be unbiased estimates, otherwise they will average out to the wrong answer. If these two requirements are met, the wisdom is no more than a restatement of the well known law of large numbers.

Lots of work has been done on the first requirement and on the way that mutual knowledge disturbs the working of the law of large numbers. I have come across very little about the second requirement.

Another line of inquiry is more about finding the answer to more complex questions. Questions to which there is apt to be no right answer and where it is hard to know how much credence to give to any particular answer.

In these circumstances, working in isolation is not a good approach. Different people go at things from different points of view, bring different skills and experiences to the question, and pooling all that is apt to produce a better result than any one person could produce by themselves. Reference 2 further suggests that the best result is apt to be produced by a good mixture of working alone and working together, with too much of either one being bad.

Bartleby does a decent job of summarising all this and then goes on to consider the needs of creatives, who work best alone, and the need for leadership. Groups do need leaders – not joint leaders and not triumvirates – with the failure of the triumvirate in charge between the first two Caesars being a famous example.

Further inspection has revealed considerable industry in academe: the stakes are high and there are lots of people out there trying to build the magic bullet for taking difficult decisions.

Industry in which personnel departments and executive search committees rightly take an interest, with the ability to extract, articulate and exploit the wisdom of the collective clearly being something worth buying into. All bundled into that ubiquitous and annoying phrase ‘must be a team player’.

References

Reference 1: When teamwork works – Bartleby – page 59, The Economist, September 8th, 2018

Reference 2: How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer – 2018.

Reference 3: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations – James Surowiecki – 2004.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds. An article about reference 3.

Reference 5: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841. Plenty available on ebay for less than £5. Alternatively a facsimile of an original can be found at DPLA (https://dp.la/), from which the illustration above is taken.

Reference 6: Log or linear? Distinct intuitions of the number scale in Western and Amazonian indigene cultures - Dehaene S, Izard V, Spelke E, Pica P – 2008. Relevant here for its connection with the wisdom of crowds and included here for its playing to my mathematical background.