101 week agoWisdom of Crowds is Not Wisdom At All

This is a reaction to "Why The Wisdom of Crowds Fails on Digg". I had thoughts on this matter a long time ago, maybe it's time to put them in writing. My thesis is that there's no such thing as "wisdom of crowds".

From the linked article:

The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes.

This is an insane argument, there's no relation between collective ability to estimate weight of livestock and performance of averaged strategies. Weight is just one linear parameter, most people get it wrong but it makes sense to take an average of their estimates. With opinions however this doesn't work. Opinion is not a single parameter, it cannot be averaged, it's not even objective. Digg and others however reduce it to one axis -- "I'd like to read that".

Let's put that aside for a moment and look at a forefront example of "wisdom of crowds" -- Wikipedia. There's no doubt that Wikipedia contains a lot of 'wisdom', but crowd editing model has nothing to do with source of that wisdom. All of the relevant and quality information that appers on it is a representation of information discovered somewhere else and by someone else. Wikipedia does not generate wisdom. This is trivial but is somehow ignored. Wikipedia works because it has a handy mechanism for publishing, uses hypertext well and avoids the bottleneck of on-staff editors. Once again, no crowd on Wikipedia or otherwise has wisdom. Democracy is just a way to make sure that different viewpoints are represented accordingly, this is balance, not wisdom and surely not intelligence. Crowds are not smart, they are representative, that's all.

Now back to averaging opinions. There's nothing strange with the fact that Digg top articles are what they are -- they are the common denominator for the audience of the site. There's no way to fix it (as in make Digg a place everyone will love), because such a thing cannot exist.

I'll make it really simple: No matter how many or few people click 'Digg it' that will not create wisdom. Dare to disagree?

Questions?