Second Chance for Crowdsourcing

As I received some well deserved critics from my course mates for not being constructive about the crowdsourcing in my earlier post I decided to read some more on the subject to become more adapt to the concept and that led me to a wonderful book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Prof. Alex Pentland.

The book turned out to be a very interesting reading material and though I got to it by searching for crowdsourcing materials it covered a lot more. The aim of Pentland's study is to reveal and distinguish the biological honest signals in human communication and to study the effects of subconscious signals to the outcome and the effectiveness of the communication, resulting in so called “reality mining”, giving off the true intent of the communication parties and the means used to achieve them.

The book also has some very good explanations why the crowdsourcing does not appear to be so effective, calling the prime obstacles that crowdsourcing or any other collaborative tool meets the idiots and the gossip.
The idiots in Prof. Pentland’s book represents the phenomena that not the best but most prominent idea gets the most of support and the gossip means that this idea gets repeated again and again by subtle groups that try to sound smart by mimicking the already approved idea. In turn the book also claims that individual are not necessarily better as humans do not make rational, logical decisions and tend to be social in thinking anyway so my opinion is that if one wants to call follow a leader a crowdsourcing then it’s ok, as long as we acknowledge and harvest it accordingly.

Misusing the social media- TV series should come with a warning sign- do not try this at home

Just finished watching House M.D. season 6 episode 2 that got me thinking on the misuse of social media. I do understand that it is hip to write social media and virtual gaming to the script. Presumably the production dinosaurs believe that as long as the characters in the show use internet forums and try out VR gaming it helps to attract new viewers and to show that the producers are on top of the current social trends.
However as long as there is an incredible bunch of viewers with the mentality that everything on screen is pure gospel the scenes showing that proper medical advice comes from the internet forums instead of doctors should be used cautiously. The situation kind of reminded me of the incident where a shrink consulted her new age doctor friend telling her to send all the patients with the real illness to seek proper medical care.

Regarding House MD- probably a banner declining any legal responsibility for medical advice from the show at the end of every episode shouldn’t hurt.

Is 2+2 Four or as We Choose to Decide

When I was little there was a cartoon on TV, where a little donkey was teased by fellow animals for his ability to count to ten, as other animals were not so good with numbers and opinion leaders among them made others think that counting was not important. But as the children’s programs of that era had to be educational, the cartoon ends with the donkey’s ability to count saving them all, when the raft they all boarded was built only for ten. When everybody else argued and tried to find a constructive group solution, the little donkey became the affirmed leader who took the headcount and called the rest of the animals on the raft to order. Of course that cartoon was from Soviet times, when critical thinking ruled and children were simply told that ten is ten (comes after 9 and is followed by 11). However today the animals on the raft might not have been so lucky because the donkey would have taken the math course with social constructivism, where each student is right- the one that says that after nine comes seven and the one that says that ten is followed by thirteen and the final decision would have been found on the number based on the class consensus, irrelevant to the empirical facts .
Luckily it does not yet occur in most of our math classes but we have come awfully close to it in other classes, where we are encouraged to think that everybody is right and the community’s decision on it is supreme.
Each time we give up our individuality for the sake of the group we endanger ourselves to group think more common to the religious sects than to free academic thinking.
This post is based on the book by Irving Janis and Leon Mann: Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment.

Dan Mayton from Lewis-Clark State College has produced an educational slideshow that sums up the theory on group think.