License to whatever

I continue to work through reference 2, last noticed at reference 1.

This morning, I started to read about the collective delusion which fired up the first crusade, from west to east, in the eleventh century.

Mackay reports that one feature of this delusion was the belief that one would be absolved from all manner of sins by appearing in arms before Jerusalem - which meant that one could commit all manner of sins on the way there. So the armies of Christ, as they worked their way east, were accompanied by even larger retinues of loose women, publicans, bookmakers and other entertainers than was usually the case.

Rather in the way that native Americans were allowed much license between taking their battle vows & dying in battle and Kamikaze pilots were allowed much license between signing up & taking their final dives. Or even ordinary soldiers due to go over the top in the first world war.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/associations.html.

Reference 2: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.

Associations

Since the post at reference 1, I have started to read reference 2.

So far I have finished the first three chapters covering the Southsea Bubble, a French version called the Mississippi Scheme and a Dutch version called Tulipomania, three testimonies to human greed and stupidity. I was interested to see that in all three cases various kinds of middle men rode the waves of fortune and managed to suck a good deal of real money out of it all - which it was their business to stoke up to profitable proportions. While all kinds of other men and women lost their landed estates - or at least their shirts.

Now into the rather lengthy chapter about alchemy, in some large part the quest to extract gold from baser materials. With some people worrying about what the success of the alchemists might do to the price of gold, do the value of their hoard.

From where I associate to the evergreen fascination with the way that cooking up the right kind of ores in crucibles, one is able to extract shiny metal from the most unlikely looking ingredients. A business which was strongly and understandably linked to magic.

It seems that the early moderns went from there to our own crucibles, our stomachs, where all kinds of similarly unlikely looking ingredients are turned into our flesh and blood. With stomachs thought by many to be the seat of our intelligence, rather than our brains. Reflecting in part the fact that, at that time, most people went hungry most of the time. Hunger was much more important than thought, deep or otherwise.

From where this morning, in the course of kneading up batch 488, I associated to the parallel of pouring flour into me with pouring petrol into a car. In my case, at the rate of between half a pound and a pound of flour a day.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/getting-it-wrong.html.

Reference 2: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.

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.