There’s some sexappeal in the concept of the „Wisdom of the Crowd“. It promises you only need to have enough people building a crowd to get a wise solution! But what kind of problems are fitting to this concept of problemsolving? Kathy Sierra has now thought about this in detail and put up a really thought provoking blogpost entitled „The Dumbness of Crowds“. What will result if you would let the crowd design e.g. a product can be seen if you boot up your windows operating system. Its a system designed by consensus, it was designed the „Swiss Army Knife Way“.
I think wisdom will appear, as soon as the unique efforts of every individual are summed up to complement something. So the wisdom is lying in the very individual effort. Dumbness will establish as soon as the unique effort will become meaningless by amplification or consenus. So, from my perspective it is amplification of the already known versus complementing the already known with a different approach in hope for „the best unique effort takes it all“-consensus.
An example may improve the understanding of this:
If there is a family in a car leaving their home for a holliday trip, there is ONE person doing the steering of the car. The clasic wisdom of the crowds concept suggests that you should have FOUR drivers. but this would mean e.g. steering the car to the left to introduce some overtaking-maneuver and at the same time slowing the car down (because perhaps one person descides to cancel its opinion about overtaking). Driving a car using wisdom of the crowd seems to result in 100% chaos.
In contrast to this rather chaotic approach to problemsolving having ONE driver and THREE passengers which instead complement the driving process e.g. by planning the next stop for coffee or figuring out the best route around some traffic jam would complement the driving-process. Another solution would be to just give all the other three passengers an automobile, too. But this solution needs more energy and promotes individualization even more.
So the praised „Wisdom“ may also be better known as the „Too many cooks spoil the broth.“-approach. Problems arise as soon as the CROWD needs to take responsibility for its actions. WHO is responsible for the results the consensus will bring? In case of one driver of the car the situation is easy: it is the driver who is responsible. But as soon as we have four drivers, who is responsible for the – though consensus-based – car-crash then? The same position is taken by Jason Lonsdale who commented „an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions“. Also user Gray comments in the same direction „My preference is the ‚Director-as-Dictator‘ model; where there is a good design team, a lot of different ideas brought to the table, but that energy is harnessed and focused by the Director, who (along with great power) also has ultimate responsibility.“ Did he mention the responsibility question here? I think it is all about responsibility.
The naive „Wisdom of Crowds“ approach results in NO ONE taking responsibility for action. That’s why it will fail! It seems to be a different situation, if we have a crowd in search for direction, so an indifferent crowd for example. In a case where no efforts are made the slightest effort will be in the position of „the best unique effort takes it all“-consensus immediately. This is what we admire in social groups of animals (like ants) which operate in swarm structures. There the group/swarm steers itself as soon as some kind of „the best unique effort takes it all“-consensus is reached. Perhaps the basic effect which drives the socalled „Wisdom of Crowds“ is more some kind of „Storytelling of Crowds“ because everyone now is able to tell (at least to distribute) a story. All these told stories influence us and therefore steer us in a way. (triggering blogpost found via weiterbildungsblog)
Why do I blog this? I think there are no easy solutions for what kind of problem may ever arise. The promise of the crowd is not delivering. The opposite is true, it seems dangerous to not complement but equalize efforts of individuals. At the same time responsibility cannot be shared among a crowd. As soon as you cannot identify who is responsible, risky actions will happen, which won’t happen if someone would have been uniquely identifieable. We see this also in political descisions (e.g. german VAT-increase in 2007) and science-projects everyday. One nice example of a „Frankenproduct“ seems to be the consensus-built swiss army knife versus a no-compromise-machete (see images above).