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Metaknowledge: Crowds aren’t as smart as we thought

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https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs...-of-crowds

EXCERPT: [...] Wisdom of crowds is an old concept. It goes back to Ancient Greek and, later, Enlightenment thinkers who argued that democracy is not just a nice idea, but a mathematically proven way to make good decisions. Even a citizenry of knaves collectively outperforms the shrewdest monarch, according to this proposition. What the knaves lack in personal knowledge, they make up for in diversity. In the 1990s, crowd wisdom became a pop-culture obsession, providing a rationale for wikis, crowdsourcing, prediction markets and popularity-based search algorithms.

That endorsement came with a big caveat, however: even proponents admitted that crowds are as apt to be witless as well as wise. The good democrats of Athens marched into a ruinous war with Sparta. French Revolutionary mobs killed the Enlightenment. In the years leading up to 2008, the herd of Wall Street forgot the most basic principles of risk management. [...]

Dražen Prelec, a behavioural economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is working on a way to smarten up the hive mind. One reason that crowds mess up, he notes, is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. [...] For instance, in the 1920s and ’30s, physicists intensely debated how to interpret quantum mechanics, and for decades thereafter textbooks recorded the dispute as a lopsided battle between Albert Einstein, fighting a lonely rearguard action against the new theory, and everyone else. In fact, ‘everyone else’ was recycling the same arguments made by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, while Einstein was backed up by Erwin Schrödinger. What looked like one versus many was really two on two. Very little fresh knowledge entered the discussion until the 1960s. Even today, Bohr and Heisenberg’s view (the so-called Copenhagen interpretation) is considered the standard one, a privileged status it never deserved.

Prelec started from the premise that some people’s judgments deserve greater weight than others. By no longer averaging everyone’s judgments equally, you can avoid overcounting redundant or otherwise extraneous information. [...]

The solution, Prelec suggests, is to weight answers not by confidence but by metaknowledge: knowledge about knowledge. Metaknowledge means you are aware of what you know or don’t know, and of where your level of knowledge stands in relation to other people’s. That’s a useful measure of your value to the crowd, because knowledge and metaknowledge usually go together. ‘Expertise implies not only knowledge of a subject matter but knowledge of how knowledge of that subject matter is produced,’ says Aaron Bentley, a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center who studies social cognition.

Whereas you might have no independent way to verify people’s knowledge, you can confirm their metaknowledge. [...] The response represents their knowledge, the prediction their metaknowledge. After you have collected everyone’s responses, you can compare their metaknowledge predictions to the group’s averaged knowledge. That provides a concrete measure: people who provided the most accurate predictions – who displayed the most self-awareness and most accurate perception of others – are the ones to trust. Metaknowledge functions as a powerful bullshit detector. It can separate crowd members who actually know something from those who are guessing wildly or just parroting what everyone else says....
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