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The Limits of Crowd Wisdom
Peer Review
Scientific communities make good use of the peer-review process (individuals checking each other) to achieve quality on the basis of a meritocracy.
No mechanism is fool-proof, with bad reporting, incompetency and self-delusion among many individual contributors diminishing the quality of the solutions.
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Key Ideas
Collective Intelligence
While looking for solutions and answers, we find that an individual provides a different answer than a group of people. Wisdom of the crowd is often considered better, as an individual might be biased, manipulated or have some ulterior motive. Depending on the problem, the wisdom of the crowd may be inferior to the individual.
One Brain Vs Many Brains
Multiple brains work well when the answer is a simple numerical figure or fact, and the question is not coming from the collective intelligence themselves. It helps when the input mechanism posing the problem to the collective intelligence has strict quality control.
Individuals, when given substantial powers, start to achieve ‘optimal stupidity’, especially when they are not held accountable for the results and consequences.
Peer Review
Scientific communities make good use of the peer-review process (individuals checking each other) to achieve quality on the basis of a meritocracy.
No mechanism is fool-proof, with bad reporting, incompetency and self-delusion among many individual contributors diminishing the quality of the solutions.
The Hive Mind
It is now more accessible due to the internet and to get optimal results, there has to be certain checks and balances:
- Members of the crowd should not be the ones forming and framing a question.
- Answers should be limited to a single number or a multiple-choice answer.
- Complex problems with unknown outcomes are the ‘Fourth Quadrant’ and should not be solved by crowds.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
"The core of the engineering mind-set is what I call modular systems thinking. It’s not a singular talent, b..."
Guru Madhavan
Thinking in Systems
It means to be able to break down a big system into its sections and putting it back together. The target is to identify the strong and weak links: how the sections work, don’t work, or could potentially work and applying this knowledge to engineer useful outcomes.
There is no engineering method, so modular systems thinking varies with contexts.
Fundamental Properties of the Engineering Mind-Set
- The ability to see a structure where there’s nothing apparent.
- Adeptness at designing under constraints.
- The capacity to hold alternative ideas in your head and make considered judgments.
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Key Ideas
Innovation at work
When you look at great geniuses like Newton, for example, it can be easy to imagine that their ideas and work came exclusively out of their minds. But that is seldom how it works.
Innovatio...
Everyone gets a lift up
We get to see further than our predecessors, not because we have a greater vision or greater height, but because we are lifted on their gigantic stature.
There are giants in every field. Don't let them intimidate you. Take from anywhere that resonates with you and inspires or fuels your imagination. Build upon it and improve it. Doing this will make your work authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.
The "Not invented here" syndrome
The syndrome can also show up as a reluctance to delegate work.
Creating a new solution may be more exciting, but new solutions create new problems.
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Understanding the world through mental models
A few months ago, the world seemed reliable, but now it is changing so fast and has so many unknown dimensions, it can be hard to try and keep up.
Mental models can help us understand the wo...
Compounding
Compounding is exponential growth. We tend to see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, e.g., how one test diagnoses one person.
The compounding effect of that relationship means that increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in disease transmission because one infected person can infect more than just one person.
Probabilistic thinking
In the absence of enough testing, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to take. Reasonable probability will impact your approach to physical distancing if you estimate the likelihood of transmission as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.
When you have to make decisions with incomplete information, use inversion: Look at the problem backward. Ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, then avoid doing those things.
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