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"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson may have exaggerated a bit though independence has been too rare in social history. Increasingly we are coming to understand that indpendence of mind isn't so much an attribute of greatness as it is a simple social duty, the minimum contribution we each make to social wisdom. Consideration of social wisdom, the ability of a society to govern itself wisely, is an important topic now. It always has been but it's getting lots of pixels due to events. The failure to usefully anticipate and prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the failure to usefully analyze Iraq's WMD involvement, and the current election cycle have combined to make this a hot topic.
Lots of thinkers have been beavering away on this subject for a long time so there is a body of knowledge to draw on. Some are recent and backed by experiment, such as James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom Of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations that was a central part of the ealrier post All The Way. A TNR review of Surowiecki's book was referenced in that post, Mobbed Up by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has written on this and related subjects too and is well qualified to review Surowiecki. Both reference the work of Angela Hung and Charles Plott that did revealing experiments in group decision making.
It's tempting to blame the recent failures of decision making such as 9/11 and WMD intelligence on organizational structure - lack of central coordinating control to aggregate oddments of information - as the 9/11 commission seems to do, but this won't help so long as the incentives are wrong. Currently advancement is achieved by individual performance within such organizations and is measured by other members. It is important to get along with others which skews judgements toward going along with dominant views.
There are two ways to overcome the human social tendency to go along and get along. One is to eliminate serial expression of judgements so that the information cascade can't happen. When each member expresses individual judgement without having heard the judgements of others then aggregate wisdom increases. This isn't a complete answer since those independent judgements must be considered and reconciled to arrive at an action plan. The second way to improve performance is to reward individuals for group success rather than individual success since dissenters are then incented to speak out. When getting it right as a group is most important individuals can't play safe and just be agreeable to avoid being punished for rocking the boat.
Some have applied this type of analysis to the US primary election system that somehow elevated John Kerry, considered a mediocre candidate with no real chance of victory in early stages of the primary series, to nomination for his party. The results of early primaries and analysis by pundits skewed the results of later ones. Rather than each state making considered judgements of the candidates based on their several qualities they deferred to earlier judgements in a cascade. Supporters of other candidates are particularly chagrined by the cascade resulting from the view that Kerry, though deeply flawed, was the most electable candidate.
This is a more difficult system to improve since the primaries aren't only for candidate selection, they are the way for newcomers to become known, raise money and demonstrate qualities suited to the position they seek. Even if voting was deferred until the end after all states had been visited information cascade would still be a factor due to incessant polling. At the local level there's no way to structurally eliminate cascades since people network and seek to influence one another.
We can improve our system structures to make it possible for indepndent judgements to increase group wisdom but individuals must decide to value dissent for significant change to occur. More will have to understand and agree with the insight that independence of mind is good, a social duty in a sense, the way for each to do his part to contribute to group wisdom. It's more difficult, more work to think things through independently than just agreeing with others. It is a lot to ask and will never be universal. Not all have the time, energy or interest.
Perhaps the greatest impediment to improved social structures will be resistance from those dedicated to exploiting information cascades to achieve power and skew social behavior for gain. Activists of all stripes work to develop manipulative skills to cause cascades. They aren't interested in wisdom or good governance, they just want to make the sale, stampede the herd, win. They don't seek to inform, they seek to persuade. They don't value dissent, they demonize dissenters and try to marginalize them.
There's an interesting dynamic to societies afflicted with herd effect decision making, victimized by activists who knowingly manipulate populations to trigger information cascades and seize power. Not only do such societies make bad decisions and empower activists, they suffer continued and increasingly bad decision making since activist leaders are cut off from useful feedback by that same effect. Julian Sanchez writes about this in a brief Reason article We Want... Information.
The information cascade effect seen in the urn experiment provides a clue, and it's almost certain that the hierarchical structure of intelligence only exacerbated the effect. Readers of Robert Anton Wilson will be familiar with what he's called the SNAFU Principle: Because subordinates tend to tell superiors what they want to hear, the higher up any hierarchical ladder you go, the more distorted the picture becomes. The person with the most authority in the system will likely be the most ignorant—even when it isn't George W. Bush.Most herd effects in society are of small importance. They result in fads that reward products and there is a thriving industry seeking to trigger cascades for commercial gain. Viral marketing, stealth viral marketing, and advertising in general are less concerned with good decision making based on product qualities than they are in achieving the tipping point where their product becomes dominant whether it is the best or not.
But these are the same tactics and objectives used by activists seeking to dominate governance, and that is of much greater significance to society. Many see increases in the speed and scale of networks due to technological advance as a golden opportunity to trick societies into making bad decisions and are working feverishly to develop mechanisms to do so. They are true believers who feel no shame about deceit and would feel no guilt should they gain power by deceit and harm society so long as their fellow travelers prospered. The problem is that they won't. A dumb society herded into bad decisions, intoxicated by the swarm, rapidly deteriorates. The swarm suffers too though perhaps not first. History has shown this repeatedly though the lesson eludes true believers convinced that their beliefs will not end in grief as all the others have.
The stakes are increasing as human population and power increases. We have an opportunity to become better, wiser, but it will be a lot of work. A simple first step may be to cultivate the art of sales resistance, to reflexively resist persuasion and sales efforts of all sorts and ridicule activists for their obvious tastelessness and predatory behavior. There are signs, especially among youths, that this is already happening, a sort of immune reaction due to repeated exposure to hype during childhood. But the signals are mixed and it seems somewhat doubtful that a trend to sales resistance and a disdain for persuasion will become dominant when there is a concerted campaign by sales staffs and activists to thwart such a development. Perhaps the best hope for improved social wisdom is the faint chance that activists will become more clueful and realize that their behavior is destructive to society, that they truly need the wisdom of an independent, diverse and decentralized social mind to achieve their heart's desire though they risk disappointment when the wise society decides against them and refutes their desires. This is the real test of the wise independent mind, the ability to admit error and grow still wiser.
Related Links discovered during research.