Swatting at the Swarm, Part III: Making an Asch of Us All

Unhappily for us all, we are surrounded by corporate accomplices willing to influence our hearts and minds. I gave you a taste of this in Part II. In at least three of the four examples I provided we find a strong fiduciary incentive to warrant the noted shenanigans, obvious reasons why the participants would go to such misinformation extremes. Toyota wanted to squelch as much of the criticism of its cars as it could. The Canadian recording industry stands to gain millions, perhaps billions, if it can in the future prevent even fair use infringements on its copyrights. Never mind the ideological victory it would prove; dismantling the social safety net might prove an enormous boon to private health care providers simply by impeding government efforts to reduce the current cost of health care (which is, compared to the rest of the world, a tad expensive).

In Part I, I said early on that I wanted to focus primarily on how this swarm swatting, this manipulation of the crowd for fun and/or profit, deflects from our society's ability to make rational decisions regarding the economy. I'll stick to that aspect of society not to simply discount other, perhaps more pressing avenues of public controversy, but because the economy has, as bleaknemesis notes, a relatively weak moral component. Struck by Part I of this series, he said two weeks ago in an email:

I am thinking though that the ox situation and your own rent adjustment story may only work under certain conditions to validate the crowd wisdom and that under other conditions a less than wise outcome may occur. For this I am thinking of Nazi Germany or segregationist South US. Now I am aware that I might be  trying to impose our current moral standards on the past which may not be fair. Actually as I was writing this and reading it over it occurred to me that maybe the reason the ox story works as an example for crowd wisdom is that there is no moral component to the weight guessing. Kind of the same with the rent story for the most part.

Mr. Nemesis, from all the reading I've done on this topic, you are absolutely correct on all points. Furthermore, you also mentioned a book I had either never heard of (or, more likely had forgotten about), James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. I got the book from the library, and oh, boy, am I glad I did. Along with Steven Johnson's Emergence (which I've gushed about before), Wisdom proves one of the best synopses of crowd wisdom I've ever read. In fact, in the end notes Surowiecki mentions Emergence and notes how his direction with Wisdom differed from Johnson's:

There are obvious resonances between Johnson's book and my own, although in his model local influence is important and generally beneficial, while I see independence as essential and see influence as, on the whole, inimical to good cognitive judgments. On the other hand, local influence is clearly a good thing when it comes to coordination problems. More to the point, Emergence is only tangentially concerned with decision making, and is more interested in, as the title suggests, self-organization and the emergence of order.

(James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday, 2004, p. 282.)

( We should discuss what he means by independence. )