Wisdom of the Multitude
From Deliberative Democracy Institiute Wiki
In some settings, the many can produce very smart solutions and knowledge. Today we know on two ways to achieve the wisdom of the multitude. One is the "Mean of the answers" and the other is synthesis, which is based on wise aggregation of the knowledge and ideas of the multitude. The well known way to synthesis the wisdom of the multitude is by "crowed sourcing", but there are other ways like using benevolent dictators in open source communities[1].
In ancient Greece, the Atheinians had the idea that the many can be more able and wiser then the one. They in many aspects of their political life, they installed system of goverment that relied on decision by large publics. Thy have a consule 500 consulers (the Boule) and an a weekly assmbly more then 6000 citizens. and courts with 201 to 1501 jouries. As Aristotle put it, the many are beter the the one:
- "the many, who are not as individuals excellent men, nevertheless can, when they have
- come together, be better than the few best people, not individually but collectively,
- just as feasts to which many contribute are better than feasts provided at one person’s
- expense"[2].
The notion of the wisdom of the multitude was lost, and then redescoverd by Francis Galton[3]. Galton accidently discovered this property, when he participated in a fair, in which the crowed was asked to estimate the wight of an ox. About 800 tickets were issued and after the end of the game, Galton had taken these tickets, and caculated the mean of the estimations. he found out the the mean of all estimations was very close to the real wight of the ox. The ox wighted 1207 lb (547.48 kg), where as the mean was 1198 lbs (543.40kg).
Another showed that the crowed that shifts his mind, due to experts, may cause bias, while the unmoved part is the more wise and accurate[4].
Group intelligence
A way to measure group intelligence[5]
Decision accuracy in complex environments is often maximized by small group sizes[6]
contrary to popular belief, small groups with access to many sources of information tend to make the best decisions.
That’s because the individual decisions that make up the consensus are based on two types of environmental cue: those to which the entire group are exposed – known as high-correlation cues – and those that only some individuals see, or low-correlation cues. Couzin found that in larger groups, the information known by all members drowns out that which only a few individuals noticed. So if the widely known information is unreliable, larger groups make poor decisions. Smaller groups, on the other hand, still make good decisions because they rely on a greater diversity of information
Wisdom of thr Multitiude and Deliberation
Deliberative democracy is based on the normative assumption that public, plural discussions offer a superior form of collective decision making. In contrast with other forms of political participation like voting, which consists on the aggregation of choices that individuals make privately, deliberation is based on social interactions between heterogeneous individuals that are able to revise their preferences in the light of the arguments defended by others. According to the literature, by revealing private information deliberation is able to overcome the impact of bounded rationality, and to build consensus and improve the intellectual qualities of the discussants[7]
References
- ↑ Tal Yaron, Two ways to the wisdom of the multitude: Mean and Synthesis, 2012, On Deliberation Blog
- ↑ Politics III, 11, 1281a41–1281b2 (1998): 83
- ↑ Galton, F. (1907). Vox Populi. Nature, 75(1949), 450–451. doi:10.1038/075450a0
- ↑ De Polavieja, G., & Madirolas, G. (2014). Wisdom of the Confident: Using Social Interactions to Eliminate the Bias in Wisdom of the Crowds. arXiv Preprint arXiv:1406.7578.
- ↑ Woolley, Anita Williams, et al. "Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups." science 330.6004 (2010): 686-688.
- ↑ Albert B. Kao, Iain D. Couzin (2014) Decision accuracy in complex environments is often maximized by small group sizes, Proceedings B - Royal Soceity
- ↑ Elster, J. (1998). Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(p.11)