AREN’T we a clever bunch? We must be smart for having mastered that walking malarkey. Take a busy Saturday on any high street. Tens of thousands of pedestrians move without the aid of pavement markings, traffic lights or a walkers’ rulebook. Yet we don’t collide with each other, nor moan about human congestion.
The flow of the crowd is smooth and efficient because each walker constantly makes tiny, almost unconscious, adjustments in pace, footfall and direction. We constantly read other people’s subtle signals about their intentions and, likewise, broadcast our intentions about where we intend to tread. (The system, however, does break down when confronted by Italian tourists and those space-hogging, supertanker-sized three-wheeler all-terrain buggies so beloved of the urban bourgeoisie.)
James Surowiecki, a New Yorker journalist, describes this spontaneous bipedal choreography as a kind of collective genius. In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, published this week, he makes a persuasive case for the intelligence of groups and “why the many are smarter than the few”.
The nub of his thesis is that the aggregate result of the decisions made by the likes of you, me, the village idiot (and even members of the RMT) tend to be superior to those made by just the brightest in the group. Bigger groups — if those in it have a diverse set of opinions and reach their own conclusions based on their own private information — also tend to beat the experts.
Surowiecki cites an experiment set up by the theoretical physicist Norman L. Johnson, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He built a maze and got students to see how many steps it took to find the exit. On the first attempt the average was 34.3 steps; on the second it was 12.8 steps. But Johnson also figured out what the majority of his guinea pigs did at each particular turning-point, then plotted a path through the maze based on the majority’s decision at each of these nodes. By this calculation the group’s route was nine steps, the same number achieved by the smartest individual. More amazingly, there was no way to escape the maze in fewer steps. The group had stumbled on the optimal solution.
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Surowiecki uses Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to reveal the wisdom of the crowd. In the US version of the programme, the most knowledgeable person that the contestant knew got a question right in the “phone a friend” option 65 per cent of the time. But in the “ask the audience” section of the show, that mass of people with nothing better to do than while away an evening in a studio picked the right answer 91 per cent of the time.
Classroom experiments and studio audiences are, however, pretty slim evidence. So Surowiecki uses Google to make his case. Not only does the search engine find in a flash the information you want, but usually the first or second highest-ranked links are the most useful. The core of the Google system is the PageRank algorithm, ie, Google asks the entire web to decide which page contains the most useful information. The crowd, if you like, gives the answer, not a panel of two-brained pointy-heads. Or take the marketplace. When you go to to a supermarket to buy orange juice, the likelihood is that it will be there. The orange grower, packager, wholesaler, grocer — a large number of people far away from each other — have made a series of decisions that allow you the consumer to buy a Del Monte drink.
The free-market economy works because millions of us make small calculations about what to make, sell, or buy, what price to sell at, what price to buy at. Nobody directs it, yet the magic of supply and demand makes us all wealthier; and certainly happier than the glum shoppers at the Gum stores of the old Soviet era.
Yet we doubt our commonsense judgment. We chase experts, thinking that men with PhDs in jargon must be better placed to solve problems. But they rarely are, because small groups of experts or technocrats tend to be overspecialised, too inward-looking, and not to have enough alternative supplies of information. The occupational hazard of experts is that they spend all their time with other experts and not enough peering at reality. Free the people and trust them to fumble their way, by happenstance or trial and error, to the best way of arranging life. As Ronald Reagan once said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”
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WELL SUPPORTED
BUT THANK GOODNESS that the State seizes great wodges of my money that I would otherwise fritter away on alcopops and gewgaws. That was my immediate thought when I read about SureStart in an Islington South newsletter (Issue 5, June 2004) lying on the doormat next to the pizza flyers.
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SureStart is one of those fancy new initiatives (you can tell that it’s a fancy new initiative because its title is one word with a capital letter in the middle) that is “making life better for children, parents and communities” (I know that because its newsletter says so).
Anyway, I was pleased for all the mums and dads and underprivileged fat boys and girls. I was encouraged to learn from the Early Excellence Co-ordinator for Islington South SureStart that “we have a Family Support Team including: an Outreach Worker, Stay and Play Co-ordinator, Childminding Network Co-ordinator, Community Child Psychologist, Speech and Language Therapist, Outreach Teacher, Movement Playleader and (my favourite) Vision Inclusion Worker.” It’s tempting to mock — at least you know that the next time a feral-child swears at you his diction will be better — but I won’t, because SureStart is doing good things.
Look at the beaming picture in the brochure and read the caption: “Parents and tutors celebrating completion of the latest ‘Confidence on Committees Course’.” And, lest we forget, without SureStart, the Family Support Team would not be able to support families in accessing the services of support groups.
How on earth did parents ever cope (and children know how to play) without this flurry of accessing, supporting, goal-planning, co-ordinating, networking, outreaching, assessing and training?
But, more importantly, is there a taxpayers’ outreach group that can support me as I access the services of a Tax-Exclusion Worker?
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robbie.millen@thetimes.co.uk