in 2004 James Surowieckic A book written by him attracted a lot of attention with its title and theses. The Wisdom of the Crowd This book was also very popular. So what was the wisdom of these multitudes?

Instead of getting a little expert advice independent of each other Getting opinions from the masses can be healthier than the opinions of a small group of experts. In this way a result can be obtained that is closer to reality than to the estimate of a certain group of experts. At least that’s what confirms the wisdom of the crowd. Let’s illustrate this:

Can you estimate the weight of a calf at 1 kg?

One of the important days for the Islamic world recently. Eid-al-Adha’We celebrate. I went alone to a cow at the offering market “There are 300 kilos of meat from this animal” I can say it, but it’s not possible for me to estimate the weight of the animal or anything, because it’s not a subject that I understand. If you ask someone whose job is animal husbandry, you can look around the animal’s chest. estimating the weight of the cow As a general rule, it says 60% by weight. (I think I kind of understood, I’m not sure now.) Let’s say we have a few experts, but these experts think animals are salted and fattened, and yet this year’s animals aren’t eating much meat. The numbers for this group may be lower. If we stand by the cow and ask everyone’s opinion, the arithmetic mean we get is very close to reality it could be.

In fact, there is a very common example of this. Francis Galtoncoincides with a competition at a farmers festival in Plymouth, England. They are asked how many kilograms of boneless meat are produced from the ox that is placed on the podium in the competition. A top prize is also awarded to the farmer with the best guess. About 800 farmers write their predictions one by one on a piece of paper.

The boneless meat weight at ox slaughter is very close to the arithmetic mean of the estimates. In this method, in which the estimate of each farmer is weighted equally, the result is in the probability distribution. 1% close. Those who know statistics will agree that this prediction is quite successful. Galton also explained this situation, since the common mind of ordinary farmers is superior to the individual mind of an expert.

But is the public always right?

Crowds may have correctly guessed the amount of meat that can come out of a cattle, but multitudes may not always be right. The author of the book, Surowiecki, believes that certain conditions must be met for the wisdom of the crowd to be active. Right at the beginning of this one variation coming. So the wisdom of the crowd doesn’t work very well when asking a question to people who all agree.

A second point is: a centralized structure It is effective in achieving the right results of the collective mind. The famous Columbia Space Shuttle accident was delayed because the engineers’ common sense was not taken seriously by the upper echelon.

The third factor is: be independent in making decisions. At the core of democracy, everyone should be able to decide independently, but Honduras had become so dependent on banana production and the giants of the banana market that people had to vote according to their wishes. The word Banana Republic has already been said for this country.

The fourth and final decision is of course blr decision-making mechanism that is. The only way to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd without being asked for their opinion is to hear the ideas that go through people’s minds one by one. This is only in the X-Men movies something natural. However, getting the general opinion of the crowd on such forecasting issues gives a chance to get an accurate result.

We hardly see the wisdom of the crowd on social media.

Now we said above that people’s independent estimates are compiled and everyone has the same weight When we work in an environment, the crowd makes very accurate predictions and we added the conditions. So what happens if these conditions are not met? What we need to do to get the answer to this question is actually very simple: to social media To look.

See some content on social media “Who cares, why is this popular?” do you say this is so because of algorithms acting on the wisdom of the multitude. Let’s say you started following hamburger-related content on a social media platform, and then the algorithm started showing you hamburger content. everything so far normal.

Then a popular burger maker came along and made things that looked like burgers but weren’t. eat like a joke challenge He made something up. Here he made bread from sponge, cheese from plastic, put rubber pieces like meat, etc. This is suddenly nonsense challenge it got popular because that burger place is famous. You too are exposed to this content just because you liked burgers at the time. Just because the person who shared the first post is popular and getting interaction, people start liking this content more and creating it themselves.

Even worse, as humans, we tend to imitate the behavior of those around us. There are several social and psychological reasons for this, but there is no denying that we have a tendency. Mainly in small groups Made interactions cause an error in the evaluation of the data. This flaw makes worthless content valuable in the eyes of the algorithm and is constantly shared and flagged.

Let’s give more realistic examples.

Let’s say the hamburger example is a bit absurd, in fact we see these problems very often. When fake news is created, people suddenly start sharing it because there may be posts that fit their own views or the social environment in which they want to be accepted. If nothing else, people can accept things as true just because something is popular. redirected to facebook manipulate elections Remember your claims. At the time, Facebook was accused of constantly imposing a single image by putting like-minded people in an echo chamber.

That is, the wisdom of the crowd is weak even where people can see and interact with each other’s ideas. more stupid than wise can transform. After all, estimating cow weight is not the same as judging someone’s comment on a topic that you see as your mentor. Technology platforms are already looking for ways to prevent these manipulations.