Personal Or Common good - a choice.
Upon turning the last page of The Wisdom of Crowds I find myself wanting to remember key motifs about human behavior as an individual vs. that of a person when part of a group. They differ. People alter their actions, temperament, even beliefs when surrounded by others. More so, the degree and the type of action is fully determined by the constitution of the group within which one operates. For example depending of whether and how many “radicals” a group contains, is decisive in pushing the crowd over the threshold towards violence. James Surowiecki’s study enumerates conditions under which a crowd is at it’s best, creating the right balance and moral force for the individuals within it. It is also a manual on how to harness the positive group dynamic and turn it into a powerful and constructive decision making instrument. There is one observation which lingers with me however, tapering my excitement about this new societal power plant. It is the indisputable fact that learning is a “social process”. Herbert Simon is quoted saying:
A man does not live for months or years in a particular position in an organization, exposed to some streams of communication, shielded from others, without the most profound effects upon what he knows, believes, attends to, hopes, wishes, emphasizes, fears and proposes.
I very much agree and like to say that: we are all “victims” of our circumstance. Victims, because we are forever bound to experience a singular reality at one time, and usually lack the perspective and insight to all others which we are not part of. Surowiecki argues that:
… the more influence a group’s members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the more likely it is that we will believe the same things and make the same mistakes. That means it’s possible that we could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.
He lists Independence, specifically independence of thought as a critical factor for collectively wise decisions. When averagely informed members do not consult, their personal errors are odd and random and therefore don’t accumulate in the final aggregation of the group’s decision. When however, members of the group communicate and their judgment is a consensus or a co-informed decision, the margin of error is much greater. Imitation and interaction with Others is the way humans learn and develop personally. Ironically, it is exactly what is undesired for a collective intelligence.
That’s actually very fascinating…”margin of error is much greater”…religions? But not surprising, really…the brain as an organ is tightly integrated and evolved (meaning it has compensated for error over a long time), but “man” sharing information is a relatively new development, and the setup for processing shared information is not as coordinated…even though we are talking about a collection of similar systems, this doens’t give us one metasystem that functions at all like its (evolved) cognitive units.
On another note, could humans be characterized are in environmental/advanced evolutionary terms as the organism that is able to take the greatest amount of far-distant resources and turn them into a single asset? In other words, trees for example, effect an area that their branches and roots touch for their resources. Foxes or what have you, roam and are able to utilize a greater resource zone. By the time you get “up” to humans, you see, well, computers, or an avocado-grapefruit-mache salad, and see that our “reach” is immense and are able to create very complex new things with geographically disparate resources, hence our burden on the rest of the environment. Can species be measured by their ability to gather natural resources, as a way of explaining dominance?
Comment by khyber — 4/8/2005 @ 8:29 pm