Why So Many Dumb Crowds?

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Lenore Skenazy rightly mocks a popular "viral" "tip" for parents who might use smartphones to photograph their kids:

The fact that the vast majority of crimes against kids are not committed by criminal masterminds poring over the Internet to find a stranger to stalk makes no difference to the news team. It prefers to dream up the wildest, least likely chain of events (seriously, what kind of predator has the time for all this?) and act as if it's a danger all parents must be aware of.

And now -- thanks to the "share" button -- we are.
I wouldn't blame technology for the popularity of uncritically passing along bad advice couched in life-or-death language any more than Skenazy blames technology for child predation. Technology is only a tool that can be used or misused, just like any other.

The problem is cultural. Most people continually hear that reason is no better than -- or even inferior to -- faith. On top of that, many of these same people have such poor educations that they have little introspective basis to question such assertions. Too many people are unable to construct an independent hypothesis based on actual evidence, at least past a certain point of complexity; and they are also fed a steady diet of propaganda in government schools. That is, too many people have had the virtue of independence beaten out of them, if they ever really had a chance to cultivate it.
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. -- Ayn Rand (linked above)
The Skenazy piece puts a face on two blog postings I ran into recently regarding the "wisdom" of most crowds. In the first, Vivek Haldar examines a common assumption about the Internet:
Ever since James Surowiecki published "The Wisdom of Crowds", I've often heard the glib "rule" that "many minds are smarter than one." But as Surowiecki constantly stresses in the book, crowds are wise only if each individual judgment is uncorrelated with the others. When the judgements are correlated, you don't have a wise crowd, just a stupid herd.
The second post examines such a phenomenon mathematically, considering the simple case of a five-member jury whose members independently have differing chances of reaching an incorrect verdict on their own. The chance of the whole jury reaching an incorrect verdict rises dramatically if everyone follows one juror than if everyone votes independently -- even if all who follow are worse at evaluating the evidence than the one they followed.

Of course, a stupid herd can be behind something that stands on its own merits, just as a jury with only one person doing any thinking can render a correct verdict. But can you really say that most of the people involved in either case really judged anything? "What he said," could summarize such "thinking". It would also serve as a warning to someone seeking to make his own judgement that he should ignore such a person.

Whether something is regarded as conventional wisdom is inconsequential for seriously considering it unless most supporters can give solid reasons for holding it as such. If Skenazy makes a mathematical paradox or a speculation about the wisdom of crowds more concrete, Rand explains them: The probability involved is the chance that a check of a claim against the facts has been done correctly. When two or more people do this, the chances of an error being detected rise. When everyone trusts an authority figure, they put themselves at the mercy of any error or deception on his part.

Part and parcel of the popularity of spreading panic on the Internet is human psychology. What confidence level can someone have if he never thinks for himself? Such a person will be easy to panic and quick to adopt a "fix". And he will want to feel good about himself by passing along the "tip".

-- CAV

2 comments:

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, you write, "That is, too many people have had the virtue of independence beaten out of them, if they ever really had a chance to cultivate it." Have to say, my first thought on reading this is one of Despair.com's many classic demotivators, Conformity.

And then when you write, "The chance of the whole jury reaching an incorrect verdict rises dramatically if everyone follows one juror than if everyone votes independently -- even if all who follow are worse at evaluating the evidence than the one they followed." This immediately put me in mind of Meetings. And also Consistency.

And once my synapses got steered down that path, I lit on this passage: "Technology is only a tool that can be used or misused, just like any other...The problem is cultural...Too many people are unable to construct an independent hypothesis based on actual evidence, at least past a certain point of complexity; and they are also fed a steady diet of propaganda in government schools." Which reminded me of nausea-inducing "inspirational" posters the land-grant behemoth where I did my grad school put up a decade ago to try to boost enrollment in liberal arts majors, "Liberal arts, for when robots take all the jobs that don't require thought." While that probably did not directly inspire Adaptation, it sure could have. (Never mind the grotesque irony in the fact that if thinking were the requirement of employment in that future, majoring in many of the liberal arts majors at that school would probably leave you eternally unemployable. --I think my complete disenchantment set in when I went to lunch at a decent Thai restaurant one bright autumn day in 2000 or so and happened to sit at a table next to that where the university president and someone he was trying to hire were eating. He explained his educational philosophy and the future of the university, and I knew that the old pieties of seeing life steady and seeing it whole, sweetness and light, all the best that has been thought and done, and all the rest were as dead, diced, and cooked as the chicken I was eating. Coming from a professional philosopher of all people, it was especially saddening.)

But above all, those posters, in combination with the gag-triggers hanging on the walls of so many of the university offices, bespoke the deep truth of Motivation.

Gus Van Horn said...

Thanks for reminding me of Demotivators. "Motivation" is a classic. My favorite of the lot was "Consistency", though. That one was new to me and made me laugh out loud.