Collective Stupidity (video 20:53)
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Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh Anything in particular strike you as interesting, or that you strongly agree or disagree with?
I think wisdom of crowds works best when there is some selection force in play to amplify the views of those that are best at guessing. For instance, prediction markets, where people who are bad at making predictions lose their money and stop betting, while those who are good at it throw more and more money at it.
But not everything is as easy as prediction markets to determine what is "good" contribution to be rewarded.
The biggest problem happens when they measure and reward the wrong thing, such as engagement instead of preference.
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I strongly agree with the general idea that sometimes crowds of people act incredibly stupid in their collective decisions or behavior.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh Are you saying that individuals are acting non-rationally, or that there is a "tragedy of the commons" situation? (collective irrationality) Those are very different things.
If it is indeed tragedy of the commons situations, that is a good bit of what social choice theory and applications tries to address.
https://economind.org/2013/12/18/individual-rationality-and-collective-irrationality/
Or maybe you mean stupid in a different way than non-rational.
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There is collective irrationality, or collective behavior that will produce a poor result for the individuals, if you consider starvation, disease, thirst, and early death poor results (which I do).
I think the video doesn't mention incentive structures and I think attention on incentive structures can be key to engineering social relations in such a way as to produce better collective behavior.
Choose-one plurality voting provides an incentive to vote for the lesser evil and no one else, which produces a poor outcome collectively when many people obey the incentive.
Laws that permit the formation of stock corporations in their current form provide to managers and directors an incentive to maximize book profits, no matter how poorly book profits correspond to real profit for the human race. People trained under this incentive then get to determine governmental policy, and in the course of doing that, they continue to obey their training.
