Cinematrix, Will Of The Audience

Having seen how groups can obtain good results by accumulating their independent knowledge, as in the "The Wisdom of Crowds", how well can they do through concerted effort?

Can people in a crowd will a pong controller to move correctly? How is it possible to coordinate that many inputs into a sensible and effective output? Cinematrix has demonstrated that not only is it possible, but it is universal. Imagine my surprise, as I was holding a red colored reflecting paddle up in an audience of a couple hundred, to see the pong paddle move to strike the incoming ball, as a laser scanned over the audience, counting the responses and guiding the movement. It was truly amazing that just enough people in the audience raised their paddle to control the paddle movement on the large screen in front of us. Further demonstrations have included behavior as complex as controlling a flight simulator. Imagine the possibilities at larger scale, with finer grained control and training? While the accomplishments of crowd coordination to date don't amount to performance above that of a single trained human, it would be interesting to see results after the audience was given extensive training.


Cinematrix

Wisdom of Crowds

"The Wisdom of Crowds", by James Surowiecki, is an interesting book. In a mathematical sense, the wisdom of crowds can be (grossly) summarized as the elimination of error through the random exclusion of outlying, erroneous information, leaving only the coherent truth remaining. It describes some pretty amazing examples, but endless reruns of "Who Want to be a Millionaire" audience voting lifelines are perhaps the most accessible.

Is this phenomenon true for political issues as well?
What about mob behavior, or someone shouting 'fire!' in a theater?
The wisdom of crowds is best extracted under friendly circumstances.

It would be an interesting experiment to see under what circumstances the crowd returns a better answer than, say, a less direct government structure. The US democracy creates a decision layer which 'represents' a constituency, after being elected. Of course the US government has departed from the ideal, given gerimandering, and special interest lobbying. In any case, the indirect representation created by the country founders was always geared towards the preferential treatment of the landed gentry. The 'town meeting' format is a closer comparison, with more participation of common citizens. It would be interesting for an experimental town meeting to take a silent vote prior to discussion, and compare the resulting decision to the one arrived at after extended discussion.

From Surowiecki, "There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks."

The internet can provide an avenue to satisfy these conditions, no question. What can defeat this potential wisdom?
"Essentially, any time most of the people in a group are biased in the same direction, it's probably not going to make good decisions. So when diverse opinions are either frozen out or squelched when they're voiced, groups tend to be dumb. And when people start paying too much attention to what others in the group think, that usually spells disaster, too."
Hmmm, sounds like groupthink frequently exhibited in politics, religion, and corporations!
A mindless conformity can yield some pretty outrageous results...

Line in the Sand

Read the book for a lot more detail and some incredible examples. At our best, humans have some amazing abilities.
Will the coming singularity empower this potential, or muffle it among a barrage of shared biased opinions?

Wisdom of Crowds

The Approaching Singularity

With the approach of the coming singularity, it's time to get a better handle on what it means for us as human beings. There are so many questions, and not all that much time to answer them, as the impending convergence is inevitably approaching in non-linear cognitive time.

If you have not heard of the singularity before, here is a lead in from a couple years back, given by a leading exponent of it's early arrival, Ray Kurzweil.

Ray's World

Some of the related buzzwords or catchy phrases, which are sort of highway markers along the way:

"Wisdom of Crowds", "Memes", "Collaborative Filtering", "Flashmobs", "Lifecasting", "Open Source", "Collective Intelligence", "Omega Point", "World Brain", "Nanotechnology" and of course "The Borg". A deeper analysis of what this singularity will entail brings up deeper questions such as the meaning of time and our very existence.

It's pretty mind boggling to really appreciate that science indicates that time has proceeded for 13 or so Billion years, and we are surfing on the edge of each nanosecond *right now*, only to see it fade into the mass of past moments that have preceded it. Even if you reject this view in favor of a perfect being, you have to admit that as the way is revealed, it's pretty mind numbingly awe inspiring. One way or another we are on the cusp of huge leap. Is it into the void, or perhaps into a world we can not even imagine in our present state, heaven or hell?

I'll take up discussion of my viewpoint for these and other topics in later blogs, and also bring up some lesser known aspects of group collaboration. Once a base of common understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding :), has been attained, it will be time to start discussing ways of controlling this onrushing convergence, and whether it is as bad as Ted Kaczynski projected, or alternatively the saving grace for our civilization?