All Annotations of Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The editor and the crowd[Preview]

saved by4 people, first byIan Delaney on 2007-09-07, last byChris Hart on 2008-05-12

• In his book on Google, The Search, John Battelle makes a similar point using different terms. He says that the internet contains a "database of intentions." Every search we make, every link we click, every word we write, every moment we spend looking at a page - each is a little piece of data about ourselves that we leave behind.
• As we adapt to the internet, we may just learn to forget that an algorithm, no matter how elegantly conceived, is no substitute for a person, and that a crowd, no matter how full of "wisdom," is no substitute for an editor.
• But I do think we can learn something important here, something about "the crowd" and "the editor" and their respective roles - and maybe, at least by implication, something about the evolution of media, too.
• But there are other things that the crowd is quite good at. The crowd tends, for instance, to be much better than any of its members at predicting an uncertain future result that is influenced by many variables. That's why stock market indexes beat individual money managers over the long run.
• The crowd aggregates all individuals' knowledge about variables while balancing out their personal biases and idiosyncracies. It's not the "wisdom" of crowds that makes crowds useful, in other words; it's their fundamental mindlessness. What crowds are good for is producing average results that are not subject to the biases and other quirks of human minds.

• As we adapt to the internet, we may just learn to forget that an algorithm, no matter how elegantly conceived, is no substitute for a person, and that a crowd, no matter how full of "wisdom," is no substitute for an editor.

  
  
  

  But I hope we don't.

• Posted by nick at March 9, 2006