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Post by francesx on Apr 26, 2016 3:38:16 GMT
I am missing the point here. Why do we want crowds to do decision-making for us? Making decisions on your own is scary as it is; why would we want to let a crowd of strangers make a decision for us? Would they be directly affected by it or not, and do they know about that when they take a decision?
In addition, I am glad to see examples from the answers above when crowds have been wrong in taking decisions (a lot of our world's history for it). Also, agree with Julian's point, where would independence and individuality goes if crowd decision making takes over the world?
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Post by bttaylor on Apr 26, 2016 3:56:18 GMT
To address, Judith's counter-examples, I think the point missing with 'group think' is independence. If you have people guess the jelly beans without saying what their guess is, the average guess will be more accurate. You could probably bias that experiment by having people announce their guess aloud. If you start with people who guess wildly high, you'd probably skew the results.
This makes me wonder how our ongoing primary elections are biased by questions of 'electability'. It seems like the media presenting polls and separating state voting dates creates dependencies in the process. I wonder how things might change if primaries were voted all on the same day. Would the votes be more independent, ergo 'better'?
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vish
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Post by vish on Apr 26, 2016 4:14:47 GMT
An example for one of the applications where the crowd's help to make a decision in everyday tasks is the updated Pittsburgh transit app. The new update has participatory sensing design. That is, whenever the GPS tracker for the bus is not working, the app lets the users to message their query under the route number. This enables the other riders to respond the one who asked the question with an update and help them to plan their travel better.
John Zimmerman, Anthony Tomasic, Charles Garrod, Daisy Yoo, Chaya Hiruncharoenvate, Rafae Aziz, Nikhil Ravi Thiruvengadam, Yun Huang, and Aaron Steinfeld. 2011. Field trial of Tiramisu: crowd-sourcing bus arrival times to spur co-design. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1677-1686. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1979187
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Post by rushil on Apr 26, 2016 5:45:28 GMT
3. Conversely, imagine a decision in which you would absolutely NOT want the crowd’s input. Why? To be honest, nothing. I rarely ever ask multiple people for opinion. I think that everyone's opinions are so vastly dictated by their own experiences that they don't really apply to anything that is "subjective". Also, a "trigger" can make a person relate to different experiences and bring different kind of advice, which might even conflict with each other! This is somewhat what jseering described within Reddit. On the other hand, if the answer is objective, you don't really need a "crowd". A single person (or smart agent) is good enough to answer those questions. Thus, I don't see the rationale behind using crowd's input in my daily life. Would it be cool? Maybe. Would it be useful? No. |
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Post by anhong on Apr 26, 2016 5:56:59 GMT
1. Imagine when in your daily life you would want the crowd’s help to make a decision. Describe the problem and then design an intervention using the wisdom of the crowd. Consider who (or what data source) makes up that crowd and what motivates them to weigh in on your decision.
We do this a lot. We ask questions on Facebook and get answers from other people. However, a big difference is that the "crowd" in this case is not making the decisions independently. Instead, they are building on each other's work and prove their added opinions. In Jeff's crowd programming course, we tried to predict the number of beans in a jar with two approaches: people predict independently, and one after another. We found that they are similarly accurate. However, independent decisions always has higher variance across users. I think the result is related to the background of the crowd, for a group of novices, the later (collaboratively) might yield better result. For a group of experts, based on the previous study of estimating weight of an ox, they provided better results aggregated from independent answers.
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Post by xuwang on Apr 26, 2016 9:26:50 GMT
I think i’ll let the crowd make decisions for me for not very important decisions, for example, when i’m deciding which flight tickets to buy, or which restaurant to go to, maybe the crowd could gather more information about which is the optimal choice than I could do. (It’s like integrating the customer ratings and reviews on e-commerce site) But for more important and personal decisions, for example when I’m deciding between graduate programs, or making decisions about relationships, I won’t rely on the crowd, because I think they won’t know my need and preferences.
i think relating to the infotopia paper, which mentions that when people make decisions in groups, it’s more likely that the biases will persist.I think whether the crowd could make wise decisions is related to whether each individual is making decisions independently, or they are influencing each other.
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Qian
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Post by Qian on Apr 26, 2016 10:31:17 GMT
If you want to see an example of bad crowd cognition, just try asking reddit for dating advice. Not only will advice vary tremendously across different subreddits (and the same person might give a different response to the same post in a different subreddit), but initial responses will shape the discussion. I wonder if reddit dating advice would be better if opinions were aggregated from individuals without their seeing each other's opinions. These sorts of examples work when opinions of the crowd are distributed relatively normally around the "ideal," but they don't work when there's an inbuilt bias where the average person is inclined to have a shifted opinion (more or less by definition). The internets are full of "you won't believe this one simple fact!" and quite often people are surprised by that one simple fact. 's example made me laugh XDD. The reddit comments can be sharper and more straight forward than friend advices, which is exactly the positive effect of "diverse, individual, decentralized" discussion. Yet at the same time, we know these comments are less reliable than friends'. The individual of the crowd knows the circumstances no more than what the posts say; different crowd / subreddit would offer very different answers (Although the article implies one of them would be correct, but which one??); and also the crowd carries little to no responsibilities to the actions entailed. These are the downsides of diversity, individuality and de-centralization of the crowds. As julian mentioned, the 2008 recession and economic failures are great examples of "the fail of crowds". Can diversity, individuality and de-centralization really prevent such failure happening in other crowd high-consequence decision-making tasks? |
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