
The diversity trumps ability theorem - michael_nielsen
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full
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michael_nielsen
The punchline, from the abstract: "We find that when selecting a problem-
solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of
randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing
agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of
problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become
similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is
more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity."

It's not always true, of course, that a randomly selected group will
outperform a group of top performers. But the result does suggest that it's
worth thinking hard about the tradeoff between diversity and ability, and that
sometimes the former is more important than the latter.

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Eliezer
Scott Page again? See here for a deconstruction of one of his previous,
simpler arguments.

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/the_error_of_cr.html>

This one looks more complicated - as near as I can tell, he's assuming that
organizations never get stuck in poor solutions, so they can always pick the
best of a sufficiently large crowd.

Math and political correctness don't mix well.

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maxklein
In my experience, diversity in temperament is essential for any team to
function. If you put two people who are highly excitable together, they will
keep running after new ideas and feeding of each others excitement. If you put
two optimists together, they will tend to gamble and play too risky. If you
put a team of idea men together, you tend to have designs and nobody doing the
actual work.

I believe every team should be made up of a bunch of slow and steady chaps,
and a few creative people, with the creative people split into excitable and
careful.

The guys that one often assumes are slow usually have really good solutions,
but when the team is too fast paced, those ideas get drowned out by the people
who are loud and confident of their own ability. Soon, the quiet chaps stop
talking, because they know nobody will listen to them.

Diversity has nothing to do with ethnicity if you are faced with a programming
task. If you were to solve a socio-cultural problem, then diversity in terms
of ethnicity would probably be a good division criteria.

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DanielBMarkham
Very insightful. Excellent catch.

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thras
Unlikely. This is a theoretical paper, not based on any actual data. What the
authors get wrong is assuming that there is no correlation between
intelligence and original thinking. It is an unwarranted and frankly stupid
assumption.

The claim that diversity trumps ability is defeated in nearly every real world
test.

I notice that the author's advice, to hire a random sample of candidates for
the position instead of the best, is not followed by any great companies that
I can think of. In fact, it's 180 degrees away from the hiring practices of
places like Google, etc.

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Alex3917
"The claim that diversity trumps ability is defeated in nearly every real
world test."

Completely false. C.f. The Wisdom of Crowds. The reasons why this is true
aren't entirely clear, but empirical studies show that is true.

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AlexeyMK
Didn't like it, personally. The book cherry-picked examples to suit its thesis
from the first page. Not that there isn't Wisdom in Crowds, but J.S didn't do
himself any favors by picking and choosing facts.

What would be interesting, would be to see some empirical research on a
fascinating topic like this.

~~~
Alex3917
I agree the book itself was pretty half baked, but I suspect the thesis is
correct. He's not claiming that crowds are smarter than individuals all the
time, only when four specific conditions are met. He relies too much on
anecdotal evidence and not enough on the academic research, but in the end I
found the core of the argument convincing, if not particularly well expressed.
Maybe I'm not skeptical enough, I dunno.

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newt0311
Short summary: The best problem solvers will think of similar solutions and so
may take longer to solve the problem than a random group because the random
gorp will come up with more ways of solving the problem.

