Kathy Sierra has a very funny, but insightful post regarding the Wisdom of Crowds, or more specifically, the bastardization of the term.

And the most frustrating part for me is how the “Wisdom of Crowds” idea has been twisted and abused to mean virtually the opposite of what New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki says in the book of the same name. He opened a talk at ETech telling us that while ants become smarter as the number of collaborators increases, humans become dumber. In what is potentially the most misleading book/idea title in the history of the world, the “Crowds” in “The Wisdom of Crowds” was never meant to mean “mobs”, “groups acting as one”, “committees”, “consensus” or even “high collaboration”.

By “crowd,”, I think he meant “more people”, sure, but he also defined a big ol’ set of constraints for how much togetherness people can have before the results became dumber. And it turns out, not that much. By “crowd”, he was referring to a collection of individuals. Individuals whose independent knowledge (and “independent” is a key word in what makes the crowd “smart”) is aggregated in some way, not smushed into one amorphous Consensus Result.

Creating Passionate Users: The “Dumbness of Crowds”

Kathy is dead on in her main assertion, I believe. I’m not sure what percentage of folks who reference the term have actually read the book, but I imagine, unfortunately, it’s not a huge number. Of course, the problem stems from even the misinterpretation of the concepts by those who have already ingested the ideas.

As Kathy points out, there are a number of constraints that surround the power of the wisdom of crowds.  One of these key concepts is the presence of diverse, “specialized” knowledge.  Put simply, this is the stuff we know from our life experience and training.  The main problem with this knowledge in the Internet domain is that this knowledge is quickly, and perhaps easily, tainted as we are often exposed to the internal knowledge of the crowd before formulating our own conclusions.

One example used in the post discusses the Amazon Book Reviews.  The purest review, relatively speaking, is the first review (granted there are any number of reasons why this review is not statstically meaningful, but that’s sort of beside the point).  From the second review onwards, every reviewer is presented the reviews of others and prompted to add their own.  There are a number of reasons why we alter our thinking, but ultimately, we are indeed changed as information flows over us.


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