
The stupidity of crowds - imartin2k
http://openforideas.org/blog/2017/04/12/the-stupidity-of-crowds/
======
mike-cardwell
"Lesson two: don’t ask people to make decisions they are not qualified to
make."

He's implying that certain questions (such as whether or not the UK should be
a member of the EU) should be left to the political and economic experts.

What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not
just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a
very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are
important to the people who are not experts in those fields?

Considering what he wrote, I would say we need _more_ referendums, not less.
So that people can become familiar with their votes having an observable
impact on their lives. At the moment, people feel powerless, so when they're
given a vote, they're more likely to use it in anger. Give them _more_
decision making power, not less.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
> _Give them more decision making power, not less._

I can't see this working out at all.

In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote.

For Brexit 28% of people failed to vote. And the younger the demographic, the
fewer people who voted.

In Australia where voting is compulsory, we have close to 6% informal votes.
Donkey votes are believed to be close to 2%. I shudder to think of the people
who vote for Labour or Libs because "their votes doesn't really count anyway".

And you don't have to vote that often! You had one job!

~~~
mike-cardwell
My statement was that giving people more referendums would make them use them
more wisely, and I gave some reasoning for that.

Your response was that, not many people vote. I'm not sure how that addresses
what I wrote?

~~~
bostik
> _giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely_

Psychology and sociology disagree with you:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue)

The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that _require and
enforce_ science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an
affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will
be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.

~~~
mike-cardwell
That link doesn't actually argue either way. It just presents some ideas with
lots of "could be" and "under certain circumstances" and "proponents often
counter" and so on. No sources.

It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with
referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of
question repeatedly in a short period of time.

I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that
of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different.

Do you have a better link?

~~~
bostik
There is research into the phenomenon, but since I don't want to even try to
link to [ _cough_ s __ __b], I can provide a couple of pointers for further
research.

\- 10.2307/2108922

\- (no idea why, but this has no DOI:
[http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895](http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895))

\- (no DOI either:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401000476))

> _I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to
> that of an election_

I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you
actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very
little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the
polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is
_HIGHLY_ unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision.

Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a
binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common
source of scams: [http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-
scam/);](http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/\);) elections
attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues
into a personality contest.

Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side
wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I don't know why you felt the need to call me dishonest.

An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to.
Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The
headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the
things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never
even hear about.

A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably
never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be
an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit.

I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply
equally to those two considerably different things.

~~~
bostik
My apologies for that unclear statement. I meant that in _this particular
issue_ , I believe you are not being honest with yourself.

There are several problems with voting fatigue, but chief among them is that
the actual effects of the result are divorced from the outcome. It usually
takes months, if not years, for a practical change to propagate from election
campaigns to reality. (In the off-chance that an election campaign promise is
actually adhered to.)

So for most practical purposes a vote taking place has little resemblance to
its practical results. We take the expectation of tight feedback loops as a
given in UI design. If usability and results from user actions are not
coupled, the user will get confused, irritated and eventually will just give
up. Why would we expect voting to be any different?

It's not just the vote itself that is causing fatigue, it's also the insane
mental overload of having to deal with and the need to make sense of the
constant (mis)information deluge. For months on end, as a voter you are
supposed to digest a barrage of incoming information. It is _tiring_.

And all this still boils down to the need to eventually set time aside go to a
polling station to drop a piece of paper into a box, only to see that nothing
really changes. Do this often enough and only the activists will be left. The
silent majority can not be bothered to care enough.

------
Safety1stClyde
> On the other hand, asking a large number of people to make a YES/NO decision
> on something they scarcely comprehend is like having a hundred school
> children who have just finished dissecting a frog collectively decide the
> best way to handle a triple bypass operation. That is to say, when the
> question requires expertise to answer, widening the circle reduces the
> collective wisdom of the group. This is one element of what I call the
> Stupidity of Crowds.

If you want to change people's opinions, a good start would be to stop calling
people who disagree with you stupid.

If you go and look at which areas of the United Kingdom voted "leave" the most
strongly, it's the coastal fishing ports. I'd assume that the fishermen know
very much more than the average remainer does about what effect the European
Union has had on their industry, and yet in page after page of post-referendum
discussions by remainers I have yet to see a single remainer even acknowledge
these people's existence, let alone suggest why remaining in the EU would be
better for the fishermen than leaving it.

Edit: removed the word "remoaner".

~~~
aleksei
Isn't that the problem? If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens
of the fishing industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of
Brexit on all of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy
ad hominem "remoaners". Brexit has such wide consequences that it shouldn't
have been a decision based on opinions.

~~~
Safety1stClyde
> If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens of the fishing
> industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all
> of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy ad hominem
> "remoaners".

Not to be sarcastic or rude, but the comment you're responding to actually
does say exactly what you said there. The remainers did not seem to care very
much about the fishing industry, and they've shown no ability to understand
the effects of the EU or leaving the EU on other groups of people, such as the
fishermen.

~~~
notahacker
Alternate hypothesis: the remainers noted that whilst the effects of the EU on
the fishing industry may have been bad there are only around 10,000 fishermen
in the whole of the UK[1] whose livelihoods aren't guaranteed to be improved
by leaving, and there was no reason not to prioritise the far greater number
of jobs and revenues in other industries that are threatened by leaving.

Or more likely, most of them didn't because few people understand the
intricacies of the Common Fisheries Policy or financial passporting and their
respective impacts on the job market and most people actually tended to make
their decision out of a vague sense of whether right-wing politicians shouting
about taking back control of their borders resonated with or appalled them.

[1]and fishing jobs were lost at a much faster rate last century before the UK
joined the EU than afterwards. Needless to say, the proportion of the 17
million people who voted Leave who were affected by the Common Fisheries
Policy is vanishingly small.

------
strictfp
Boaty McBoatface might be a "terrible embarrassement" to some, but to me it's
really good since it shows that you don't take yourself all too seriously.

If all nations took themselves 100% seriously we would all end up like Russia
and probably be instantly catapulted into WW3.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It was a really good name because it appealed to kids, and could have
generated a huge amount of positive PR for Britain and for the earth sciences.

Sometimes smart people are wrong too.

There's a certain irony in calling a blog "Open for ideas" and then putting up
posts that say "But not like _that_."

------
didibus
This reminds me of some research I read a while ago, I think it was here, that
said that what matters most is neither expert nor crowd, but data points. You
want to maximize the total data you've got to decide, but you also don't want
to bias towards one data point more then another.

Their conclusion was that the benefit of crowds is that it adds a lot of data
points, by combining everyone's data, but it skews some way too much, because
if 70% of the people are making the same decision from the same data point,
it's not weighing in other data points.

It was also arguing that most people would decide the same thing given the
same data points.

------
interfixus
Well then, let us ask thousands of people: Had the electorate answer to the
Brexit question been a No instead of a Yes, would the voters still - in the
view of this very same Aran Rees - have been an unfortunately unqualified
gaggle, unsuitable for asking about anything beyond the number of airports in
a given country?

~~~
interfixus
Are the downvoters themselves part of an inarticulate crowd, or would some of
them care to elaborate?

------
wieghant
* The Boaty McBoatface is /r/iamverysmart territory. It was lighthearted and brought interest from across the world - not everything has to be named after a Greek tragedy.

* As for Brexit. Well, the public in general was unaware of the benefits of being in EU to begin with. Ultimately it was the 'experts' \- the people in charge of conveying information - who failed. Not democracy. Democracy is by no means perfect, the metrics for who are qualified to vote hasn't been set.

* The language barrier. For some reason I really doubt that's true. What polls are in questions? I can't find any sources in the article. 4% deviation is completely normal if the question was asked from same people a year later.

Crowdsourcing is amazing, as long as your target group is set properly. This
entire article is regurgitating intro into statistics. I do agree with the
consensus part. The very problem was relevant in assessing difficulty of
'stories' in software development. When devs were asked to just number the
difficulty, people lost sense of responsibility and would normally vote for
extremes (very easy or very hard). Hence, the people who chose lowest and
highest had to explain why they chose that specific number.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Re the langugage barrier. The difference was much more than 4%. What he wrote:

    
    
      When asked if the voting age should be lowered 57% said no.
    
      When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.
    

What he should have wrote:

    
    
      When asked if the voting age should be lowered 43% said yes.
    
      When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.
    

I don't know why he wrote it the way he did. Seemed bizarre to me.

~~~
RyanZAG
Might have wrote it that way to be deliberately confusing.

Where's the source for these numbers? Did the polls have similar number of
respondents? If these were online polls, was one poll shared on certain
internet groups and not the other?

Also the two statements are not the same thing. 'Right to vote' and 'Allowed
to vote' are different. A useful follow up poll would be to gauge the
percentage of people who believed that 16 year olds have a right to vote, but
should also not be allowed to vote. I believe that number may be significant.
You can think of it in terms of death row criminals: there is an argument that
they have a right to life, but also that the victims have a right to justice.
Which right is more important is not something everyone agrees on. That type
of logic applies to the questions of voting too.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I don't know why he would have written it that way on purpose to be
deliberately confusing, as the non-confusing way would seem to have given more
weight to his point, rather than less.

~~~
RyanZAG
I don't know why either, but it seems almost impossible to do it by mistake?
Which leaves doing it on purpose the more likely, but why he would do it on
purpose is a mystery. As you say, it's bizarre.

------
arjie
This is the number one reason that I thought the YC experiment with letting HN
choose someone to receive a grant was a terrible idea. I predicted it would
result in a nightmare and it predictably did.

The people choosing didn't have any skin in the game and they followed
celebrities instead of thinking for themselves.

I hope YC has learned not to offer these choices.

------
probablybroken
I think in the case of brexit, not only were the general public the wrong
audience for the question, their opinion was also informed primarily by the UK
press; therefore the answer to the question was actually the opinion of the
majority of the press - which is just formulated to sell papers.

------
nzjrs
Could not finish article because of stupid pop-up. What was the conclusion?

~~~
_Adam
Same. Couldn't close on mobile, showed up even after re-entering the site.

I don't know if there's data showing those popups work, but they really ruin
the user experience.

~~~
jwilk
Archived copy, no popups:

[https://archive.fo/vlMiq](https://archive.fo/vlMiq)

------
nothrabannosir
counter point:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episode-644-how-
much-does-this-cow-weigh)

And since we are presenting opinions as fact: Boaty McBoatface was the better
name. It would have made the boat and its research subject more appealing to
children. More people would know about it, for better or worse. It would go
down in history and take its research subject with it. The only winner in the
new name is Sir Attenborough himself. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but my
point stands.

------
metastart
Crowds can be intelligent. Crowds can be stupid. It's interesting how they can
really be at either extreme.

~~~
RyanZAG
Is it really the crowd becoming intelligent or stupid, or just that we are
agreeing or disagreeing with the crowd and conflating that with the
intelligence of the crowd?

As a quick test to try and determine this: try to think of occasions where you
thought of a crowd as intelligent: did you agree or disagree with the crowd?
Now try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as stupid: did you
agree or disagree with the crowd?

If these questions are highly correlated, then you may not be measuring the
intelligence of the crowd as much as you think you are. That we think of
crowds in these two extremes is also a hint.

------
hueving
Insufferable pop-up on mobile to add to email list that wouldn't go away 3/4
through article. Awful!

~~~
tajen
Do you have a "reading mode" on your browser? It's a ~new invention for those
who intend to _read_ anything from the mobile web, despite the jounals'
contempt for their audiences.

------
dispo001
In science pop culture [joke mine] there is "the layman test". It involves the
scientist explaining his work to a layman. Failure to do so means the
scientist doesn't understand what he is doing. It is usually used to cut
though a forest of terminology.

(One could [say] argue that Object Oriented Programming has property foo. The
layman test would have you explain what this OOP actually is. Then, foo is
assumed not to be a property of OOP if you fail to explain OOP.)

Nothing is a dead-end topic. If the explanation is successful the layman can
learn some more details. Eventually the layman becomes the professor.

Not everyone is good at explaining their work. One professor (his name escapes
me) once argued that we assume professionals to be good at education while
they never had any such training: Academia works under the assumption their
field doesn't exist. Libraries full of books about teaching and learning, some
dating back thousands of years. All irrelevant?

What fascinated me was the idea that we deploy amateur explanations from mega
overqualified professionals onto the first year students. The ratio is all
wrong.

If the people who need information cant get access to it it doesn't matter if
the information exists.

The solution to collective decision making is to set up a system for
information distribution. Ideally it would be a fully distributed system but
since we cant have that we will have to start with a properly designed server
then work towards a decentralized formula.

The people who have monopolized information distribution will fight you all
the way on this. They will rally their zombie legion of Jackass, Eastenders,
Neighbours, Friends, dancing with the stars and football supporters and teach
you a lesson.

Imagine this was ever on TV:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-5_34QgGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-5_34QgGI)

In stead you got Johnny Knoxville is what you got in stead.

To add a fun story:

If you look at the RSS spec you find a rating element. If you chase that
rabbit down the rabbit hole you end up reading about a mythological creature
called the PICS rating system[1]. It is like the ancient Greeks of internet
design forged a most poetic system for content rating. Wondering why such a
beautiful thing never took off you end up reading authoritative-sounding
attention-monopolists ranting and raving about the mere smell of scrutiny.
Eventually they successfully denounce the concept as CENSORSHIP and proceed to
brand it a porn filter. Today that is the only remaining implementation.

[1] - [https://www.w3.org/PICS/](https://www.w3.org/PICS/)

------
therpe1
The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a
serious idea.

Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots
of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in
good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all
involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to
modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).

The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people
discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and
fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system
to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is
only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined
environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational
accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith.
Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious
institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international
conventions.

I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is
a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost
certainly disaster.

