Criticism
In his book Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet finds fault with this notion. He explains that this notion may work in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire scenario because audience members have various levels of knowledge that can be coordinated to provide a correct answer in aggregate: Some persons will know the correct answer, others will know what are not the right answers and some will have no clue. Those who know the right answer will choose it, and the others will choose among what might seem the possible answers. The result will be to give a slight edge to the correct answer, even if only a few actually know the correct answer.
However, Tammet points out the potential for problems in systems which have less well defined means of pooling knowledge: Subject matter experts can be overruled and even wrongly punished by less knowledgeable persons in systems like Wikipedia, citing a case of this on Wikipedia. Furthermore, Tammet mentions the assessment of the accuracy of Wikipedia as described in a study mentioned in Nature in 2005, outlining several flaws in the study's methodology which included that the study made no distinction between minor errors and large errors.
Tammet also cites the Kasparov versus the World, an online competition that pitted the brainpower of tens of thousands of online chess players choosing moves in a match against Garry Kasparov, which was won by Kasparov, not the "crowd" (which was not "wise" according to Surowiecki's criteria.)
In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization, but ill-suited for problems that require creativity or innovation. In the online article Digital Maoism, Lanier argues that the collective is more likely to be smart only when
- 1. it isn't defining its own questions,
- 2. the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value), and
- 3. the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree.
Lanier argues that only under those circumstances can a collective be smarter than a person. If any of these conditions are broken, the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Read more about this topic: The Wisdom Of Crowds
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)