Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds' 507
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Wisdom of the crowd. (Score:2, Interesting)
Signal-Noise ratio of crowds ain't too high ... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the stupidity of crowds. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plus2sd/200809/the-stupidity-crowds [psychologytoday.com]
"What can you do? I gained some insight into this problem several years ago when my research group performed an fMRI study of social conformity. We recreated a version of the famous Asch experiment of the 1950s and used fMRI to determine how a group changes an individual's perception of the world. Two things emerged from the study. First, when individuals conform to a group's opinion, even when the group is wrong, we observe changes in perceptual circuits in the brain, suggesting that groups change the way we see the world. Second, when an individual stands up against the group, we observed strong activation in the amygdala, a structure closely associated with fear. All this tells me that not only are our brains not wired for truly independent thought, but it takes a huge amount of effort to overcome the fear of standing up for one's own beliefs and speaking out".
America Speaking Out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage. Worse; because of the, er... exceptional quality of political discourse in America, you ran into the "Poe's Law" problem.
If your mods are remotely on the ball, or your wiki editors are up to snuff, or whatever, it is pretty trivial to resist obvious and unsubtle attacks. Worthless posts get modded down, somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough. If, though, a fair part of your "crowd" is utterly batshit crazy, you run into a real problem: your most committed users will produce output almost exactly like your most vicious, cynical parodists(the same thing happened to Conservapedia. Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).
Similarly, with America Speaking Out, the problem isn't going to be with trivial vandalism, which is annoying but quick to clean up, the problem will be that it is impossible to distinguish between people ranting about how Barrack Hussein is a communist fascist muslim sleeper agent because they believe that, and the ones doing exactly the same thing because it amuses them to associate such views with the RNC. Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
Re:America Speaking Out... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm stunned by the effort that people will take to subvert stuff - from the admin side i've seen a couple of users maintain totally distinct persona that I don't think any of my actual users would connect together. The difficulty in battling against noise is that the side with more time will win, and for most small internet sites that's not going to be the server admin. I'm pretty much convinced that the only real way to deal with trouble makers is to just ignore them and hope that the signal drowns out the noise.
I know drew went through various battles to sanitize his site a few years ago, and while i don't harbor any personal resentment towards him, it quickly became apparent that it wasn't the place for me. My main issue with fark is that the signal was attenuated more-so than the noise.
Re:kettle, meet pot (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting boobies and weenies links does not ipso facto mean a person is stupid.
You should also cite some of these "people with letters after their names". I can cite one Bryan Caplan, Ph.D. In his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, he argues that, even if a crowd is 99% stupid (he uses the term ignorant), it can make wise decisions. How? Because those 99% of idiots choose rather randomly, canceling each other out, and the remaining 1% choose "properly".
This is assailable, of course, but it's rather myopic of you to pretend that your view is unquestionably correct. Rather than attacking the person (Curtis, in this case), attack the idea.
Re:Missing the point (Score:1, Interesting)
Come on. "America Speaking Out" is not about getting wisdom from people, any more than the White House's solicitation of ideas for the oil spill was. It's about allowing people to feel like they have a voice.
As, these days, are elections.
With a few well-placed Supreme Court decisions recently, America has been turned from a democracy to a plutocracy. But, like the Church, the true rulers will hide behind the trappings of a cult (religion, patriotism, entertainment, opportunity; pick one or more) the true purpose of their decisions, and will allow the "government" to appear to be in charge.
But they aren't, and you aren't really choosing them. Not any more.
Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Come on. "America Speaking Out" is not about getting wisdom from people, any more than the White House's solicitation of ideas for the oil spill was. It's about allowing people to feel like they have a voice. Don't spoil the illusion!
I'd take that a half step further: it's also about the illusion that that voice matters, and that when the entity soliciting feedback takes actions in some way in line with that voice, that it's because the entity is obedient to the will of the masses.
Really, this kind of phenomena is not new or unique to the Internet -- for example, my congressman recently (snail) mailed out a survey to his constitutents, in theory to solicit their opinions. It consisted solely of multiple choice questions that weren't even really questions (or simplified complex issues to the point of stupidity), along the lines of "Do you think that A) we should make government smaller and eliminate regulations or B) we should give government all of our money and let it control every aspect of our lives?" Great, you spent a bunch of taxpayer money creating, distributing, and collecting a survey so that you could assert that your constitutents want you to spend less money.
Processing (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the main things that one might say about the crowd is that it leads to groupthink, in which false statements are allowed to be pushed as true because no one has the ethical or moral ability to deny them as true. No matter one's political persuasion, one cannot say this of America Speaking Out. On the healthcare page, the listing show that people are overwhelming against limiting abortions, though not so much for the absolute legalization of abortion. This shows that people are thinking for themselves. The idea to make english the official language is also way down. When I first say the site I thought it would be a joke, but it has been kind of interesting to review. One of the first ideas to make it to the top was the taxing of churches.
I think if we did do what the people wanted, the crowd, we might be ok. The problem is that what the people wants tend to be a weighted average in which the amount of money one has plays a significant role. This is not necessarily bad, but if we want to do what the people want, then it should be all people, not just the rich. Look at the oil spill. It was said that we all want cheap oil at any cost, but it turns out people want fresh seafood as well. People make more money off oil, so that is priority of the rich. The common person though likes affordable food as well.
"Fark" is still around? (Score:4, Interesting)
I hadn't heard that site mentioned in years.
If Politico or the New Republic or the Huffington Post said that, they might have a point. Any anonymous site is going to have low-quality comments.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One man's "garbage"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow dude, way to try and down fark while pushing your own weak ass bullshit site in your sig.
So what (it's not "my" site anyways)? Challenge: Post this url [bannination.com] in any Fark thread.
Re:America Speaking Out... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage.
Yes. To paraphrase Tolkien, "It does not do to leave a live troll out of your calculations, if you post near him."
Never mind the tribes of trolls overrunning teh Intarwebs 2.0.
Re:Charles Mackay (Score:3, Interesting)
Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay (first published in 1841). His book discusses Tulip-mania in the Netherlands and witch persecutions (and many more incidents) to illustrate the distinct LACK of wisdom of crowds.
The best part is to read it and mentally substitute the words "tulip bulb" with "dot com stock" and you'll never again believe people are wise, or will ever learn from history
Re:What ? Wisdom ? Republicans ? (Score:1, Interesting)
The differences are straw men... and they're not. Each has certain fringe groups associated with them which are used by the inclusive party as a power base and by the exclusive party as a target. Then, in the middle, you have the jockeying back and forth for voters who have been convinced that there are always two (and only two) choices. At any given time, there are also fringe groups that have splintered, but will return in time (to be replaced by other splinter groups) once they see that they don't have any power without one of the two big names behind them.
Crowds Promote Ignorance (Score:1, Interesting)
One thing I've noticed is that certain websites tend to attract certain types of people. Digg, for example, has an extremely high concentration of liberals and atheists. You may agree with liberals and atheists, but one thing I've noticed with digg is that a lot of users have become ignorantly liberal. They surround themselves with other liberals, and now the userbase is much more socialist than it used to be (and much much more than the average population). You may not disagree with socialism, but the way that it has come about on digg still demonstrates the point I'm making, which is that crowds promote ignorance. Many users who were moderate liberals a couple of years ago are not complete socialists, and in my understanding it is because it has become cool to go against conservatives.
wisdom of crowds == democracy? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is too bad Drew finds it difficult to detect {sarcasm, parody, irony, ...} without some lame ASCII-art version of a laugh track tacked on. Being dull and slow must be quite terrible, but recognizing your limitations must help somewhat. At many points in time you can look at democratic choice as being awful; pretty much every country can point to repeated elections of imbeciles and thugs. Overall, though, democracy has done a pretty good job of filtering out the wannabe Caesars, Napoleons and their ilk. Ron Paul, I'm talking about you.
While democracy ( or crowds ) don't seem to offer much in star appeal, there is a long term stability in mass decisions which are likely more right than wrong.
In contrast, dictatorships, monarchies and brilliant individuals don't really pan out in the long term, other than how their gross failures help foster new democracies.
Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not a new concept. David W. Moore discusses something very similar in his book, The Opinion Makers [amazon.com]
Basically, Moore argues that the purpose of polling is to measure the opinions of those who have considered an issue, not to measure 'top of mind' opinions.
One of the most interesting examples discussed in the book was a poll done leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The poll asked respondents if they felt the U.S. Government should invade Iraq, then depending on how the respondent answered, the pollster followed up with a second question that basically asked if the respondent would be disappointed if the Government performed the opposite action. I don't recall the exact breakdown, but basically if you evaluated only the first question, it appeared that around 60% of those polled wanted us to invade Iraq, but after evaluating the second question, only 28% desired us to go to war and 30% desired us not to go to war. A plurality were indifferent to the actions of the Government.
Well, duh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:On the stupidity of crowds. (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing I could come up with was that once you have an optimal solution bringing more people in only increases the chances that you will end up with a sub optimal solution.
What I took away from your experiment is that one knowledgeable person is better than a group of nimrods.
Even if you couldn't come up with the optimal solution, adding uninformed opinions to even a semi-informed opinion will only degrade the outcome.
I only believe in the wisdom of the crowds, in the sense that with a crowd, you're most likely to find at least one expert to supply relevant information/answers.
Re:kettle, meet pot (Score:3, Interesting)
problem is they aren't choosing randomly. They're choosing the person they think is most like themselves. So the stupid population will vote for someone stupid.
Re:What ? Wisdom ? Republicans ? (Score:3, Interesting)
During one part we had some where close to 500 issue reports which needed to be reviewed to determine whether it should be voted on or dropped. Issues were health care, internet, data security, energy, open source software....
Most of these reports contained nothing more than opinion. I reviewed a report that was interesting on energy distribution close to 100 pages, which had been presented in a 25 page slideshow. Some of the ideas were very interesting and compelling, but nothing was documented. Where did you find this number? How did you arrive at this figure?..... There was nothing to verify that any of these numbers were anything but random numbers. But most there took it as gospel. I asked for supporting documentation and was given copies of more papers by the same author or other papers which had nothing showing that they weren't pure gibberish.
I think I went through about 50 of these. Pretty much all were the same.
The best document out of all that I saw was something on 'George Bush should be charged for criminal activities' it was well documented with instances of supposed malfeasance and had references to supporting legal documents and laws. The presentation wasn't really bad either, but it just wasn't going to go anywhere with regards to the Democratic platform. If it wasn't so controversial, I would have asked that further documents put forward had at least 10% of the documentation and references before they were to be considered.
But basically after that I have not put any serious effort into the Democratic party, because I saw they had a number of major issues within the organization. By and large after putting out a lot of effort, I felt the whole process wasn't geared around influencing change within the goverment , but more so to make people feel they had a voice.
Re:One man's "garbage"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow dude, way to try and down fark while pushing your own weak ass bullshit site in your sig.
So what (it's not "my" site anyways)? Challenge: Post this url [bannination.com] in any Fark thread.
No, he has a point. Bannination is mostly fark ex-pats. Some banned, some not. But moderation at bannination is crowd based and rarely utilized. Nothing legal is verboten. Try that on Fark.
Re:Fark.com (Score:5, Interesting)
A shadowban is where you can see your posts, but nobody else can. When it's done, the only way you can find out is by disabling cookies and searching for your comments - which will have vanished. Not fun, especially if you're a paying subscriber to the site.
On Fark, they also play "fun" tricks like faking database errors or randomly hiding half the comments on a story for users the moderators don't like for whatever reason.
Me, I was permanently shadowbanned for replying to a comment which mentioned a site that the Fark mods disapprove of, so you can see why I'm not well disposed to the place or their policies.
Re:Fark.com (Score:4, Interesting)
Not saying it's the same, but I've been a member here and regular visitor for longer than I care to mention, I hit the karma cap back when it was a number not a word, and I've not had mod points in years. In fact for quite a while I wasn't even eligible to metamod.
I've no idea what my crime was; I do remember reading the great slashdot troll thread, but don't remember commenting on it. Perhaps I did, and that's what did it; perhaps a comment I made elsewhere just pissed off one of the admins. I've never cared enough to ask to be honest.