You are in a room full of people.
You are speaking to them on stage and have their full attention.
You tell them to pretend all the people in the world are in this room
You ask the people who believe they have ‘above average intelligence’ to raise their hand.
All the people in the entire room raise their hand.
The fact is, exactly half will be above and half will be below… we all assume we are the smart guys, the good guys, the people make things better…. we all believe we are adding positively to the collective intelligence.
But collective intelligence has a slight nuance. It only works when we let people with specialist knowledge fill in our own knowledge gaps and or take the lead in areas of expertise. If instead, we take the average viewpoint of the collective audience we usually end up with a pile of crap. Collective intelligence can only occur when we segregate and allocate information requirements, not when we aggregate. The latest proof of this is Youtube.com
Once upon a time youtube was a reliable source of cool and important videos. Circa 2005 the most viewed, most discussed for the day, week or month was an intelligent reflection what mattered. Now it’s a mish-mash of over produced pop songs, inane comedians, and soft porn. A sad failure of the digital ‘Wisdom of crowds’. Youtube is still incredibly valuable, it just takes a little more digging these days.
The point for entrepreneurs is this: The crowd is not always right. Taking all advice from the crowd on how to iterate your product, service or website could result in a very average product. Intelligent design is usually the work of intelligent people.
Hi Steve,
Great post on the dangers of following the crowd. There is value in sourcing ideas from the crowd, but ultimately entrepreneurs bear the responsibility of filtering and analyzing those suggestions and distilling them into something worthwhile.
I’m hoping to get your feedback.
My colleagues and I built a new search engine (www.panabee.com?p_id=3) we think could help journalists and bloggers.
You can search Google, Twitter, Technorati, TechMeme, Bing, Wikipedia, Kosmix, and other sites for any topic and speed up research.
For instance, this page lets you see Quantcast and Google News side-by-side (the real URL is too long): http://bit.ly/IMb2G
And this page compares Bing and Google Caffeine: http://bit.ly/55S73
Bloggers could also search Google Images, Flickr, and Yahoo! images at the same time.
Here’s the question:
1) In your opinion, could our site help either bloggers or journalists? (Yes/No/Unsure)
Thanks so much for your help!
– Clarence
P.S. Sorry for the comment, but I couldn’t find your email address.
Great point Steve. Reminds me of De Tocqueville’s discussions on the tyranny of the majority. Not much has changed since the 1800s.
Love the blog and getting your perspectives (non-American) on entrepreneurship.
hi steve,
loving your blog. don’t know if you’ve read Surowiecki’s wisdom of crowds, but he says that given the right system, it’s possible to aggregate answers to a question from many ppl. that answer will often be better than the answer of any single individual (or even a group of smart individuals).
the right system must have these characteristics:
1. Independence. ppl must act independently of others. youtube doesn’t really enforce this – you can see views, comments, ratings, etc before participating yourself.
2. Diversity. a group of smart + dumb ppl will provide a better answer than a group of smart ppl. youtube has this 🙂
3. Decentralization. ppl can draw on local knowledge to act.
4. Aggregation. must be a smart way to aggregate answers into a collective opinion.
wrt product development, the entrepreneur is #4 imho – you parse the feedback, learn about the problems your customers are having, and decide. the key point here is understanding the problem, not just applying a suggested feature from one user that might not actually be the best solution to the problem.
cheers,
kareem