6 ms·

The stupidity of crowds

43 points by imartin2k 10y ago

strictfp 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  Yeah, this example seems more like a case of, "the stupidity of ignoring crowds"
interfixus 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Are the downvoters themselves part of an inarticulate crowd, or would some of them care to elaborate?
probablybroken 10y ago
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.
mike-cardwell 10y ago
"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.
- Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  We probably don't need more referendums, but a constitutional change like Scottish independence or leaving the European Union does warrant a referendum.
  - barking 10y ago
    Paraphrasing some French commentator, the problem with referendums is that the electorate don't necessarily answer the question asked. Voters often like to give a government a kicking mid-term.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
  > 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!
  - Swenrekcah 10y ago
Safety1stClyde 10y ago
> 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".
- foldr 10y ago
  He didn't say that there were no well-informed leave voters.
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  > a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid. Or for that matter calling people 'remoaners' who don't think that because at one instant people voted for Brexit by a thin margin this means an irrevocable mandate for politicians to do as they please. The absolutist, partisan nature of current British politics not only is very unproductive but also divisive. Then let's not forget, had the result turned out the other way round Brexit supporters would have been moaning, too. Even more so, the most fervent of them wouldn't have stopped clamouring for another referendum (and another ...) until they would have had it their way.
  - Safety1stClyde 10y ago
    OK, I probably shouldn't have used the word "remoaners", I'll edit my comment to "remainers".
wieghant 10y ago
* 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
nzjrs 10y ago
Could not finish article because of stupid pop-up. What was the conclusion?
- _Adam 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Archived copy, no popups: https://archive.fo/vlMiq https://archive.fo/vlMiq
metastart 10y ago
Crowds can be intelligent. Crowds can be stupid. It's interesting how they can really be at either extreme.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  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 10y ago
Insufferable pop-up on mobile to add to email list that wouldn't go away 3/4 through article. Awful!
- tajen 10y ago
  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.
didibus 10y ago
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.
nothrabannosir 10y ago
counter point: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episode-644-how-much-does-this-cow-weigh http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episo... 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.
arjie 10y ago
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.
therpe1 10y ago
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.
dispo001 10y ago
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/

43 points by imartin2k 10y ago

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 10y ago
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."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mike-cardwell 10y ago
Yeah, this example seems more like a case of, "the stupidity of ignoring crowds"

interfixus 10y ago

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 10y ago
Are the downvoters themselves part of an inarticulate crowd, or would some of them care to elaborate?

probablybroken 10y ago

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.

mike-cardwell 10y ago

"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.

Safety1stClyde 10y ago
We probably don't need more referendums, but a constitutional change like Scottish independence or leaving the European Union does warrant a referendum.
- barking 10y ago
  Paraphrasing some French commentator, the problem with referendums is that the electorate don't necessarily answer the question asked. Voters often like to give a government a kicking mid-term.
2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
> 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!
- Swenrekcah 10y ago

Safety1stClyde 10y ago

> 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".

foldr 10y ago
He didn't say that there were no well-informed leave voters.
BjoernKW 10y ago
> a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid. Or for that matter calling people 'remoaners' who don't think that because at one instant people voted for Brexit by a thin margin this means an irrevocable mandate for politicians to do as they please. The absolutist, partisan nature of current British politics not only is very unproductive but also divisive. Then let's not forget, had the result turned out the other way round Brexit supporters would have been moaning, too. Even more so, the most fervent of them wouldn't have stopped clamouring for another referendum (and another ...) until they would have had it their way.
- Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  OK, I probably shouldn't have used the word "remoaners", I'll edit my comment to "remainers".

wieghant 10y ago

* 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

nzjrs 10y ago

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

_Adam 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Archived copy, no popups: https://archive.fo/vlMiq https://archive.fo/vlMiq

metastart 10y ago

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

RyanZAG 10y ago
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 10y ago

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

tajen 10y ago
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.

didibus 10y ago

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.

nothrabannosir 10y ago

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

arjie 10y ago

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.

therpe1 10y ago

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.

dispo001 10y ago

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/