
Neurobiologists Reveal The Wisdom Of The Confident - espeed
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528941/forget-the-wisdom-of-crowds-neurobiologists-reveal-the-wisdom-of-the-confident/
======
tedsanders
This is the main idea behind prediction markets.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

Prediction markets aren't effective because they average over a big crowd;
prediction markets are effective because they provide a financial incentive
for people who know nothing to bow out of the discussion, leaving only the
confident people to form a market consensus.

~~~
SilasX
I'm not sure it's the same here -- the write-up doesn't mention providing a
reward based on correctness. It just says they're weighted based on how little
their opinion moves when learning the group's beliefs.

EDIT: I stand corrected. As klochner points out, there was a monetary
incentive to get it right, so this is like prediction markets. Not sure why
the article doesn't mention this critical part.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032493)

~~~
x1798DE
I believe the parent is actually saying that the financial incentive is used
to select people who know what they are talking about.

It's not necessarily a 1:1 match, but basically that selects for people who
believe that they know what they are talking about (and thus are less likely
to be swayed by the group opinion). To the extent that the current price of a
proposition in prediction markets represents the group opinion, you only
expect to win the bet if you think you know better than the group opinion.

------
SilasX
Caveat: In this context, "confident" means "updates their belief less after
learning the group opinion" \-- i.e. continues to believe what they did before
even after knowing the group disagrees.

EDIT: per klochner's correction, the following is wrong, and they did get a
monetary incentive, though it's not mentioned in the linked article (only the
paper), which is a pretty significant difference!

Note that they did _not_ provide a material incentive for accurate guesses, so
I'm honestly surprised that this kind of confidence correlates with
correctness. It requires that this feeling of confidence is more likely to
happen in people who really do know better compared to those two don't know
better. (Per the writeup, if you weight each guess in the average by
confidence per this metric, then you get even more accurate answers than the
simple mean).

~~~
klochner
_Subjects received monetary payments for each good estimate. Possible rewards
were 4, 2, or 1 points if their estimates fell into the 10%, 20%, or 40%
intervals around the truth; otherwise, they received no points. The rewards
applied to all rounds to make sure that individuals took all of their
decisions seriously. The correct answer and the rewards for all five estimates
were only disclosed to the subjects after the fifth estimate. This reward
structure in- troduced incentives only to find the truth and avoided
incentives to conform with others. Furthermore, there were no incentives for
strategic considerations. For example, there was no benefit of being better
than others or of misleading others, because this did not affect individuals ’
payments. There was also no possibility to help others by deviating from the
strategy to find the best estimate. Therefore, our experimental design put
subjects into a situation in which they would try to get as close to the truth
as possible by using their own knowledge and the estimates of others._

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf)

~~~
apalmer
basically this is saying the entire story is pretty much bunk. Its more than a
significant omission, it invalidates the entire analysis presented.

~~~
eevilspock
Seems to me you're proving the point of the article. Rather than contributing
independent critical thinking, you're more motivated to pile onto the comments
of others, to the point of not even bothering to understand the comment you're
piling onto.

------
jhanschoo
I wish the headline made it clear that the 'confidence' it refers to is not
the personality trait associated with risk-taking and leadership but the more
specific 'confidence' and stubbornness in one's own opinion that one has on a
topic when one believes that their opinion is founded on valid information
related to that topic that few others are aware of while they were forming
their opinions.

~~~
soneca
You took 3 lines to explain the difference between the two meanings. How do
you expect the writer to make it clear on a headline?

~~~
SilasX
FWIW, I did it in one line [1]. But even better, I think the term "stubborn
believers" is a better term and would have decreased the confusion, but note
that it requires stubbornness _plus_ disincentive for being wrong to correlate
with correctness.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032288)

------
zxcdw
Did I interpet something wrong, but isn't "confidence" here something like "
_inverse_ herd mentality"? As in, while herd mentality[1] is " _Herd
mentality, or mob mentality, describes how people are influenced by their
peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and /or purchase items._",
here "confidence" is exact opposite of that, right?

This is very interesting though, because for example in some subreddits score
of a comment (or submission) isn't shown right away, but after a defined
delay. This is to combat herd mentality, so that people do not vote something
just because others have voted it so-and-so. Instead, it sort of forces
individuals to make up their own opinion and vote based on it, thus it sort of
forces individuals to be "confident". It doesn't let them delegate the opinion
forming to the herd.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality)

------
JackFr
This is research? I'd summarize the results as: "People who actually know
answer to an objective question are less likely to change their mind when
presented with an alternative than those who don't. Thus one should value
their opinions over those of people guessing."

~~~
apalmer
Its more than that. This study does not isolate based on knowledge or know how
as in 'people who actually know answer to an objective question'. This study
isolates based on influence of 'social' stimulus.

~~~
JackFr
But the thing is, they specifically don't isolate 'social stimulus'. They
offer new information, and those who knew they were guessing revised their
estimates. Those who had a good idea of the value did not. There is nothing
'social' here at all.

A better control would be to ask them how sure they were of their answers, and
use that to adjust the bias.

------
nate
Two other interesting recent articles on crowd behavior:

1) Why can't we be better at predicting successes? (movies, music, etc.)

Turns out when the crowd has social information thrown at them (previous
number of downloads shown in listing) the ability to predict a success based
on quality gets very unpredictable.
[http://www.filosofitis.com.ar/archivos/experimentalmarket.pd...](http://www.filosofitis.com.ar/archivos/experimentalmarket.pdf)
Social data is a strong force.

2) Rice vs. wheat.

Wheat farming might be a reason why the industrial revolution started in
Britain vs. China. Even though China was highly educated, people working in
rice farming depend on large groups working collectively. A culture of
collectivism then forms. Collectivism has been shown to breed less innovation
than cultures where people are more individualistic (wheat farmers).
[http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp-
content/uploads/20...](http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/RicePsychologyandInnovationScience-2014-Henrich-593-4.pdf)

Thought a discussion of Wisdom of Crowds might enjoy those if you haven't seen
them.

~~~
nemesisj
The industrial revolution starting in Britain as opposed to China is almost
certainly completely unrelated to farming methods, and much more related to
politics. China during the industrial revolution was in the grip of a very
weak, corrupt, and financially mismanaged dynasty. This set the stage for the
Opium Wars and continued decline for the next 200 years, a period which has
only recently ended. Prior to that, China was one of the most advanced
civilisations in the world for most of its history.

Also note that the staple food of most of Northern China (including Xian,
Beijing, and huge amounts of the population) is and has historically been,
wheat based.

~~~
apalmer
Its always key to take these kind of 'indirect' causation in anthropological
fields with a huge grain of salt. It might be true but it is not really
'science' if the hypothesis can't be tested quantitatively.

------
HSO
I think there is an important difference between situations where the truth is
objective (and can and will be measured accurately and fairly when the payoff
is determined) and situations where the truth is "made", for lack of a better
word.

The best example, of course, is financial markets vs weight of an ox. In
financial markets, we are often dealing with a "Keynesian beauty contest"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest)).
I would doubt that those whose beliefs are insensitive to data concerning the
crowd would do well, at least in the short to medium term.

Whereas in weighing an ox at a fair, that truth is absolutely orthogonal to
what the crowd thinks (granted, the odds of a bet structure may vary, but the
study didn't get into such things AFAIK). There would be no benefit for an
informed observer to dilute his prior with the crowd's ideas, so having a
concentrated prior may signal experience, inside knowledge, etc. much more
clearly than in the above situation.

~~~
gohrt
This was famously in the news as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-
based_community](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community)

(where anti-Bush folks mocked Team Bush's supposed irrationality, ignoring the
aspect that truth in human sociopolitical issues is not independent of actors'
choices)

~~~
incision
The power of framing is fascinating stuff.

Running through a chain of articles and excerpts from Lakoff and Luntz one
week seemed to work wonders for making sense of difficult sociopolitical
conversations with certain friends.

------
Apocryphon
The famous ox weight example demonstrates the wisdom of crowds, but doesn't
seem applicable to this article. I doubt that fairgoers who entered into the
contest were conferring each other on the guesses enough to influence each
other, as opposed to say debates on public policy.

~~~
dsugarman
that's why the wisdom of the crowd works better for guessing a slaughtered
ox's weight at the fair than it does on HN or Reddit. There is obviously a
very large group of very smart individuals who regular HN, to disagree comes
with the fear of looking stupid and being downvoted

~~~
bignaj
Wait... are you actually, genuinely afraid of being downvoted? It's okay to be
wrong sometimes, dude! Sometimes being very wrong is the only way to learn and
help you further down the road. You win some, you lose some. If you're afraid
of being wrong on the internet anonymously I can only imagine what it's like
in the real world...

Maybe this speaks to the timidity/introversion of many HN posters but remember
we are also entrepreneurial -- gotta take some risks!

~~~
dsugarman
haha check out my post history, I am far from afraid of being downvoted, I
actually feel like I usually know when I will be downvoted and I still post. I
would guess most others would not and that affects the overall quality in a
negative way.

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1hackaday
For those who want more information, the following article provides a good
overview of the research on the Wisdom of the Crowd, as well as what are its
limits:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457222](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457222)

------
NickWarner775
I would like to see the outliers from the experiment, see if there was a large
group of individuals who were overconfident and made their estimates way off
compared to the crowds.

