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03 Dec 06

…My heart’s in Accra » Cass Sunstein’s “Infotopia”

www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog - Preview

blogs collective daily-me deliberation groupthink sunstein wiki wisdom-of-crowds

” As in a Hayekian marketplace, Wikipedians add small bits of knowledge, accumulating them towards a shared goal of accurate, neutral encyclopedia articles. Wikis don’t have price signals, though, which means there’s no way of ensuring authors put they money where their mouths are. If I support a blatantly false proposition in a prediction market, I lose money - in Wikipedia, I might lose status, or I might not - the consequences may be lower. Also, in wikis, the final author has a great deal more power than a single buyer in a market. These cautions aside, Sunstein is a fan.
But the ability of markets to get a diverse group of people to share information - which Sunstein feels deliberation too often fails at - is the gold standard Sunstein measures other Internet phenomena against
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- Sunstein reads Hayek through Condorcet to explain why prediction markets work so well. When people are putting money on the line - real, or imaginary - they’re more likely to be right than when they’re guessing at beans in a jar. In sufficiently flexible markets, a small number of well-informed actors can steer prices in the right direction (often making money in the process from the less well-informed). And because market participation is generally non-deliberative, the social factors Sunstein identifies as destructive to deliberation don’t come into play.
- If the deliberative process is broken due to ideological cocooning, this could be a serious problem for the future of the republic.
- In a group setting, people will often gravitate towards a strongly stated opinion, especially if their own opinions aren’t fully formed. An ideologically coherent group is likely to repeat a great deal of evidence for one side of an issue, giving more reinforcement for that viewpoint. People find it difficult to defy the will of a group, and may polarize to avoid interpersonal conflict.
- One would hope that deliberation could solve this problem - if a small number of people in a group are knowledgeable about a subject, perhaps they can convince the others of the accuracy of their claims and move the group to a result better than the mean of all their preconceptions. This turns out to be true for at least one set of problems: “eureka problems”, where the correctness of a solution is obvious to everyone once it’s been articulated.
- This phenomenon is well explained by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which suggests that a group of individuals - all of which have a better than even chance of making a correct decision - will have a greater chance of making the correct decision as the size of the group increases. In other words, if we’re pretty good at guessing the number of beans in a jar, lots of us working together are likely to be excellent at the same task.
- Sunstein is deeply suspicious of the optimistic claims made for deliberation, and cites a wealth of studies that demonstrate that deliberation, in many cases, leads to bad decisions and the reinforcement of extreme views.
- Specifically, he’s excited about the ways new online tools make it possible for groups of people to assemble information and accumulate knowledge.