Videos of Chubby Kids A storm has been a’brewin’. It’s about the wisdom of crowds, or according to [...]

I don’t know plnelson – maybe these are examples where individuals or smaller groups (with agendas) manipulated large crowds. The Market is manipulated by interest groups as the occupation of Iraq certainly was…
If the crowd was left to decide without false guidance -it is hard to imagine that the Iraq war would have occurred.

A follow up show / discussion –
The manipulation of crowds

…..from ringleaders in football hooliganism to the WMD and other fear-mongering and greed-satisfying tactics of would-be crowd manipulators (such as that wielded by religious leaders of all sorts).

BECAUSE – what would really move this discussion along would be a rigorous understanding of what SORTS of things crowds are good at. It’s clear that crowds are good at guessing the weight of large animals. It’s also clear that they have a remarkable capacity to get some things dramatically wrong – War in Iraq, Dot-Com bubble, Japanese real estate bubble, etc. But right now we have no way to predict WHICH things to trust the crowd about.

I think you can read Emerson either way.

Emerson: “It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things”

Which is Emerson emphasizing?

The crowd can, but does not necessarily, rise to attain/embody that universal nature, nor does the individual though each have that potential thus:

Emerson: he that is once admitted to the right of reason is made freeman of the whole estate

and “what Plato has thought, he may think� (my bold and in other words not necessarily)

“If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience..�

But he also says you can explain man by all of history.

Laniers’ essay had some good points but what it did best was inspire ( can crowds so inspire?) to make way for some good thinking on this including all the interesting responses on Edge.org. ( linked at the end).

Allison- I also saw the similarity between Jung and Emerson on this point. I believe you mean the “collective unconscious� which also contains archetypes that exist before experience.

Chris Lydon did a Radio Open Source show today about digital democracy and individual rights featuring an extensive conversation between James Surowiecki and Jaron Lanier. This is one the most salient issues in the Web 2.0 debate and I commend

Emerson’s contemplation of the distribution of ideas and information is very much like the Jungian super-conscious. It also ties into the “100th Monkey” observation.

I think we have here two or three different conversations about crowds and mass intelligence. One is about mobs. How people behave when a great number of them come together physically. (And, perhaps, virtually.)

The second is about the decision making and discernment. How many people can be involved in a decision-making or creative process and still increase the quality of these activities.

The third is about information sharing. Tonight’s show seems to be more about that. Is the presence of the internet increasing information sharing? I think we can safely say, yes. But is it improving the quality of the information that is shared? Hmmm…. There is a lot of spurious and questionable content. But I’m not sure if its really any worse than the word of mouth that has gone on since the beginning of time.

“White House Spokesman Tony Snow mirrored these sentiments in a press conference last week, when he said, “If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’â€?”

Henry, I purposefully didn’t speak of people’s attitudes after we got into WW2.

As is usual with this White House they missed the point.

What is at stake is what would we have done had The Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbour and had Hitler not declared war on the US in 1941.

Remember that we didn’t declare war on Germany, they declared war on us.

Most Americans in 1940 and in 1941 were dead set against our entering the war in Europe. Most war talk was blames on a “Jewish” lobby, or to use the language of the day a “Jewish conspiracy.”

Yes, Chris, he says the same thing in his essay “On nature.” He also says thought that

” There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.”

The “one mind” open to all individuals is but potential. It is something not given to all individuals but only to those those who can rise above the mass of men.

At the very least Emerson distinguishes between the crowd and “the poet.”

Moreover to make his point Emerson goes on the speak of those who seek for what “is common to all …men” he uses the first person singular and not the voice of the crowd.

“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”

It is the singular man (or woman) of which he speaks and not of the mass of men.

Finally even in your example Emerson says:

“There is one mind common to all individual men.” The focus is still on indivdual men and not on the collectivity.

As to your point that:

“As I added in the homework you apparently didn’t master: “When [Emerson] speaks of “access to this universal mind,â€? he could be describing the leveling effect of Google search engines. He encompasses the idea of distributed intelligence, and the ideal of networked computers as a democracy of end-users.â€?”

I couldn’t disagree with you more.

Emerson would be horrified at the idea that a engine of factoids could somehow elighten humanity.

Besides, the notion of “distributive intelligence” only has meaning in a quantitative sense and not in a qualitative one.

The crowd can predict what is put before it, it can select from what is given it . Though it cannot place before itself those options from which it must select. It can play the stock market but it can’t build a stock exchange ,or a business for that matter. To do that you need the rational mind of the individual.

btw: if the crowd had voted on WW2 my guess is that we would all be speaking Deutch right now those who might have made it past the genetic censor.

White House Spokesman Tony Snow mirrored these sentiments in a press conference last week, when he said, “If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’”

The Washington Post, Andrew Sullivan and Joshua Micah Marshall, as well as many other bloggers, followed a discussion of polling data conducted during World War II. The poll asked, “If Hitler offered to make peace now and would give up all land he has conquered, should we try to work out a peace or should we go on fighting until the German army is completely defeated?” 73 percent of respondents said that the U.S. should refuse peace.

For further reading, consult these links: the Post article, by Al Kamen; the TPM post; the Daily Dish post; and the Mystery Pollster post.

As I added in the homework you apparently didn’t master: “When [Emerson] speaks of “access to this universal mind,” he could be describing the leveling effect of Google search engines. He encompasses the idea of distributed intelligence, and the ideal of networked computers as a democracy of end-users.”

how anyone who can quote Emerson, that philosopher of anti-crowd, can extol the “wisdom” of crowds is beyond me.

Anonymous individuals are not the same as groups or collectives.

Even in collectives it is individuals who are the real producers.

Groups don’t think, it’s only the conceit of individuals that attributes a mind to crowds.

Crowds have no existential reality.

Chinese Ceramics of Song Dynasty, 960-1279 ( for example) were produced in collectives.These were areas of production and the wares were so named ( Cizou, Ru, Guan etc).. Anonymous individuals, groups, each perfected their art, an art handed down to them, in preparing the clay, wheel-throwing or moulding, making and applying glaze and finally the long arduous process of firing. Making a pot was a communal effort. There was no other way to achieve such wares. The beautiful wares, their forms, their glazes, that you see in our museums today are the products of a collective and are anonymous.

So the community, the collective, stood on the shoulders of the achievements of those who innovated before them. They were also guided by the various and varying tastes of the court and the needs of society.

http://www.asiasocietymuseum.org/region_results.asp?RegionID=4&CountryID=12&ChapterID=28

Four guys talking about crowds. (All males) Is the wisdom of crowds male or female? Is it old or young? Does it include the blind and the deaf or is only for the all seeing all hearing know it alls?

Finally, I missed the crowd, such as it is, in this discussion. No phone calls from the great unwashed and no email communication.

On the other hand, Wikipedia seems to be more authoritative, whether it’s written by an anonymous collective or not. It may not be Britannica, but it is centralized and self-monitoring. The reader is aware when a posting is in question because it is clearly marked.

78% of the population supported the invasion of Iraq. In a recent poll of 1000 Americans exactly ONE PERSON could identify all 5 rights granted under the First Amendment, but 24% could identify all 5 Simpson family members. We have a huge federal budget deficit because Americans want all sorts of government services but they don’t want to pay the taxes to fund them. The vast majority have abysmally poor knowledge of geography, history, science, etc, and this is reflected in public policy. I could go on, but you get my point, I hope, that the collective seems a lot DUMBER than an intelligent, educated, thoughtful individual.

But the wisdom of the crowd only provides something “good enough”. I was struck by the comment on the show about the Silicon executive who thinks music will soon by synthesized by the collective. It might, but it will never be great music, just good enough for most folks, in the same way that the judgement of American Idol provides pop music that is good enough for most. If the “good enough” is the best we know, will we ever be able to do better?

And isn’t that odd that a small jazz group can create genius, but 20 million voters can’t do any better than average?

And, to comment on the esteemed guest, he seems to be joining in the “beat up Wikipedia” bandwagon without being well informed, and while “inventing” people’s so called response to it.

Most writing on WP *is* signed, every change to a page is archived, and most of the people signing have user pages saying who they are.

And I certainly wonder where this idea comes from that because the article itself has no “by line,” people take it as if Moses himself brought it down the mountainside.

A key point from the article: Flickr gets lots of publicity, but Photobucket is is serving a much larger set of pictures. The blogs don’t always talk about what Internet users are really using.

I am having a problem with this discussion thus far.

If crowds are wiser than individuals than the voice of the crowd will eventually overide the voice of individual authority.

Personally, I see crowds and individuals poised in a dialectical relation with each challenging the other and offering us a sort of synthesis.