IS1825 Multimedia Development for Internet ApplicationsLecture 08: The Wisdom of Crowds and CrowdsourcingRob Gleasure

R.Gleasure@ucc.iehttp://corvus2.ucc.ie/phd/rgleasure/index.html

IS1825

This session The Wisdom of Crowds Crowdsourcing

A Game (Yay!)

How many metres do you think it is from the front entrance of this building to the security hut at the bottom of the drive?

You should guess in distance ‘as the crow flies’, i.e. if you could take a straight line from one to the other

Remember, you’re guessing from building entrance to building entrance

Don’t confer, it ruins the fun (and it’s anonymous anyway)

Some History

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a very successful and established statistician and psychologist

He was a strong believe in the genetic predisposition for greatness, his most famous work being Hereditary Greatness (he also coined the phrase ‘nature vs. nurture’)

Much of his work focused on eugenics (breeding out the characteristics of people he deemed less valuable)

Image from http://apuntesdedemografia.com/polpob/1043-2/francis-galton/

One Day…

In 1906 Galton was at a fair when he came upon a contest asking individuals to guess the weight of the meat on an ox

Galton saw the data from the guesses as an opportunity to demonstrate the futility of democracy, as he believed that experts (e.g. butchers) would get very close, while the public would be miles off

The mean median guess was 1,207 and the mean was 1,197lb

The correct number was 1,198

The crowd as a whole were closer than any individual experts

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki (2004) used Galton’s story as a jumping off point to coin the term ‘wisdom of crowds’

The wisdom of crowds does not describe a collective interdependent form of cognition, instead it describes the aggregation and consolidation of cognition by independently-minded individuals

This allows individual biases and skewed personal experiences to be averaged out

The Wisdom of Crowds

Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom

1. Crowd cognition Experts, non-experts, and individuals with varying experiences

may use different biases and reference points to solve some mental problem

Statistically, this means that they are each prone to different errors

Taken together, these errors average and cancel out one another

The Wisdom of Crowds

Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom

2. Crowd coordination Individuals in a crowd typically use less thorough analysis than

they might if solving a problem individually, e.g. if you were solely and personally responsible for selecting your TDs, you would probably spend more time thinking about it than you do now

This means individual behaviour is faster, more dynamic, and more responsive

Less need for upfront planning and top-down control

The Wisdom of Crowds

Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom

3. Crowd cooperation Individuals are more free to establish trust when there is no

hierarchy dictating them terms Individuals can self-organise to interact with those whom they

feel most connection Emergent standards and repeated processes fill the void when

structure is absent, e.g. 4Chan

Wise Crowds vs Groupthink

Surowiecki also notes that not all crowds are wise, irrationality snowballs in some crowds, e.g. stock market bubbles

Wise crowds have 4 characteristics

1. Diversity of Opinion Creativity demands diversity, if an individual is not viewing the

problem in a way that is somehow different their contribution is minimal

2. Independence of Opinion Diversity is stiffed if individuals feel pressured to conform or

experts create a culture of graded respect

Wise Crowds vs Groupthink (continued)3.Decentralisation

People with specialised skills or knowledge are allowed to draw on those skills or knowledge

Diversity becomes decreasingly useful if certain portions of the crowd are ignored

4.Aggregation Information cascades result if decisions are made in sequence,

as individuals gravitate towards existing opinions Intelligence needs to be gathered privately, then combined

Signs of Groupthink

A move towards groupthink from crowd wisdom usually manifest several warning signs Little discussion of alternatives Little discussion of risk Little information search Little discussion of contingency The same people dominate discussions

Crowdsourcing

“Crowdsourcing” is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by a designated agent (such as an employee or a contractor) and outsourcing it by making an open call to an undefined but large group of people (Howe 2008)

This phenomena is attributed to four developments in recent history A renaissance of amateurism The open source software movement (we’ll talk about this next

session) Increasing availability of production tools Rise of communities around specific interests

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is being applied to roughly four different areas Collective Intelligence (e.g. prediction, large-scale problem-

solving, brainstorming) Production of mass creative works Filtering and organising of information Crowdfunding

Our Distance-Guessing Game

Are we a wise crowd? Independence Decentralisation Aggregation Diversity Numbers…

Google maps says the distance was…

Readings

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few. London: Abacus.

Dalton’s description of his ‘Vox Populi’ findings in Nature http://wisdomofcrowds.blogspot.ie/2009/12/vox-populi-sir-francis-

galton.html Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is

driving the future of business. Random House.