The American Freedom Network

Crowdsourcing and Wisdom of the Crowd

Self-organizing systems interest me. I stumbled upon the Smartmobs blog here. The Wisdom of Crowds references an astonishingly eye-opening book about self-organization, especially in the Obama era, which is dominated by a belief in the superiority of centralized decision-making systems, such as socialized medicine and government ownership of banks and other financial institutions.

We know that such socialist systems actually break down under the enormous strain of fast-paced technological change. The information load generated by the modern American economy heaps upon them a finite but incomprehensible number of decision points. Imagine one pin hidden somewhere in one of millions of haystacks. That’s the kind of information load I’m talking about.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop Marxists, such as Soros or Obama, from working as hard as possible to establish such systems.

Here’s an outtake from the blog:

According to Wikipedians, crowdsourcing is “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.” Basically, you’re taking a task and outsourcing it to a crowd; hence crowdsourcing. Examples include Google’s Image Labeler, which takes the task of labeling images, and outsources it to anyone who wants to play a simple game, and Threadless T’s, which outsources the task of designing t-shirts to its users by letting them submit designs and vote on them (shameless plug for my submissions here). Amazon even hosts a marketplace specifically dedicated to crowdsourcing simple tasks which computers are unable to do, called the Mechanical Turk, which has been used for applications ranging from searching satellite images for evidence of missing aviator Steve Fosset, to artist Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market, a collection of 10,000 sheep made by workers paid 2 cents to “draw a sheep facing to the left.”

The wisdom of crowds, on the other hand, is known to Wikipedians as James Surowiecki’s book by the same name, defined as a phenomenon where “the aggregation of information in groups, [results] in decisions that…are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.” The quintessential example is that of guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, where averaging the guesses of many people is more accurate than the guess of one expert individual, and the wisdom of crowds also manifests itself from sports betting to traditional opinion polls.