This week I learnt about something called “wisdom of the crowd”. It suggests that an estimate or opinion a crowd makes is more accurate than one made by an individual. I thought Vera and Viha did a great job illustrating that theory with their jelly-bean experiment. Basically, they picked Messiah to estimate how many jelly beans were in the container and compared it with the collective estimate of the rest of the class. The crowd/class won.
I was pretty intrigued by the concept of it to say the least. I mean my personal estimate was about 30 jelly beans off the answer and some of the estimates by my other classmates were pretty far off as well. How did our individual stupidity result in collective intelligence? Then i had an epiphany, the fairly accurate result was due to the canceling out of under-estimates and over-estimates by members of the crowd. Then the people who came close to the answer helped to make the collective estimate more accurate.
So how can wisdom of the crowd help in situations other than estimating the number of jellybeans in a container? Vera gave an example of wisdom of the crowd helping in consumer-related situations in the form of Amazon. As you probably know, Amazon gives you recommended products that are derived from what other like-minded users like. Google and social bookmarking site, Digg use wisdom the crowd to gauge the relevance of websites to a search term and the popularity of a particular link, respectively.
However, don’t take just take whatever appears at the top of Digg’s homepage as representative of what the “crowd” thinks. I put crowd in open inverted commas because sometimes the crowd is not really the crowd. I found an article that challenges the credibility of the “crowd.”
link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_dirty_little_secret_about_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds.php
Basically, what it says is that the research findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. That means, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the “crowd” really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.
That has some serious implications, I mean it completely shatters the common perception that online reviews are more objective and therefore more credible. But if groups can distort what is thought to be the majority’s opinion, then we have a scary problem. Who knows, companies may start using these groups as a marketing tool in the future. Who knows, they might be already using it.
I think this is scarier than the influence of opinion leaders in say a forum because users can somewhat determine the credibility of the opinion leader better by checking the consistency of his posts. But this is different because people are under the premise that it is the opinion of many individuals, therefore not being able to discern whether the crowd’s opinion is distorted or not.
For me the solution is to find a reliable way to aggregate the opinions. What do you think?
Noel backwards 