I would say that this has been known for quite some time in philosophy, but I guess it's good to have some real-life verification for it. This article on Belief Merging and Judgement Aggregation[0] is a good entry point for the field, for anybody that is interested.
Off-topic, but I love the logo at the upper-left corner of the plato.stanford.edu web pages.
Stanford has an amazing collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, including his iconic "The Thinker". If you have business or just visiting the Silicon Valley area, it's worth exploring the Stanford campus and its Rodin museum.
Am I correct that they asked the same people the same questions 3 times?
It's no surprise that the 3rd time the answers were the best. I'd expect this to happen even if there was no debate (if not to the same degree).
> Each participant was provided with pen and an answer sheet linked to their seat number. The event’s speaker (author M.S.) conducted the crowd from the stage (Fig. 1A). In the first stage of the experiment, the speaker asked eight questions (Supplementary Table 1) and gave participants 20 seconds to respond to each of them (stage i1, left panel in Fig. 1A). Then, participants were instructed to organize in to groups of five based on a numerical code in their
answer sheet (see Methods). The speaker repeated four of the eight questions and gave each group one minute to reach a consensus (stage c, middle panel in Fig. 1A
). Finally, the eight questions were presented again from stage and participants had 20 seconds to write down their individual estimate, which gave them a chance
to revise their opinions and change their minds (stage i2, right panel in Fig. 1A). Participants also reported their confidence in their individual responses in a scale from 0 to 10.
I can’t follow your reasoning.
How does asking you the exact same question twice improve your accuracy? If you don’t know how high the Eiffel Tower is, why would you know it the second time? Conversely, you likely created a mental anchor when giving an estimate the first time and would be hard pressed to provide an answer contradicting your first estimate - even if it might be more accurate.
There were no answers provided between asking the questions as far as I understand this excerpt.
In the group only 4/8 questions were asked and here a difference in accuracy can be made. Maybe you’re mixed with travelers who recently visited Paris, historians or people who due to other circumstances or pure luck provide more accurate estimates, effectively influencing the anchor of your first estimate.
Given more time I can remember something, or I can notice that the last question gives some hints or even unrelated associations that help to answer the first question.
I don't think "if you don't know the answer in 20 seconds you won't ever know it" is true.
As far as I understand it, these were not simple right/ wrong questions, but questions about estimating a continuous measure (height, age, percentages). I have no reason to believe that questions were related or would give hints. Such a correlation would destroy the power of the experiment.
As far as I understand it, this paper is not about "Do you know what is true or false in 20 seconds" but "what is a value you confidently estimate within 20 seconds". This is a field much studied in psychology and when you look into Kahnemann and associated research I would be surprised to find any scientific evidence that time improves your estimate. I'm not saying it's impossible, I am confident that - on average - it simply does not happen.
Kahnemann showed we're full of biases and this research shows that calibrating ourselves with others is a much higher predictor of improving accuracy of estimations than time.
Wow, that’s a terrible way of conducting an experiment. Having more than 20 seconds to reason through an estimation will produce a much better result if you are any kind of systematic thinker.
In 20 seconds for the Eiffel Tower I’ll just pull a number out of my ass. In 5 minutes I will think through the comparison charts it shows up next to on other high rises. I’ll remember the half scale one in Las Vegas and its relative height to the Bellagio across the strip (about the same) and that the Bellagio was about 40 stories. Given 40 stories at 13 feet per floor, you get 520 ft * 2 = 1040 ft for the Eiffel Tower.
> I don't think "if you don't know the answer in 20 seconds you won't ever know it" is true.
Exactly. And being placed on the spot with someone waiting for an answer makes me more forgetful. Once the pressure is off, I immediately think of many possibilities and can more accurately evaluate their likelihood.
Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.
That was how the US Senate originally operated. You would elect your state legislature (where your vote is much less diluted than at the federal level) and they would elect your Senator.
Early 20th century populism took that away. It also meant that the states now have no representation in the federal legislature, which led to an almost immediate federal takeover of basically everything.
That amendment really screwed democracy in the US. Not only does it remove room for debate, but it has IMHO been a major factoring in lessoning voter interest in the state legislature. This has far reaching consequences, such as making it harder to make new amendments and checks against gerrymandering.
Iowa has caucuses rather than primaries, and from what I hear from my family, that's essentially how the Democratic party caucuses work in Des Moines, Iowa. Rather than filing in and filling out a ballot, my father describes the process as going into a room, forming groups around candidates, and then trying to convince the uncommitted to support your candidate. It always sounded like a rip-roaring good time; now it's interesting to learn that this process might produce better results.
That would not be the same situation at all. In the case of general knowledge questions, obviously the small groups will do better because people who are uncertain and would have voted randomly will instead listen to whomever is confident. And everyone works together to pool knowledge.
In political voting the problem is not a lack of information- everyone has a strong opinion about everything already and putting them in small groups would just result in unproductive bickering.
Perhaps everyone has a strong opinion of headline candidates, like senators, presidents, governors and such. However, I think small group concensus would really improve the voting for everything else: state constitutional amendments, bonds, school board and other local administrative positions.
It seems like that would reward misinformation. You're saying that people could argue in their small group for a particular position that's not widely-known, but in most of those cases nobody will be there to argue against them, and they can say whatever they want. It would be better if people familiar with the issue voted and people unfamiliar with the issue left that blank on the ballot, instead of making it a lottery of whose supporters end up unopposed more often in small groups.
When I volunteered to run a caucus in a Nevada primary election, decks of playing cards were distributed for the purpose of breaking any ties. Luckily, we didn't reach that resort in my precinct.
Trial by jury gets one set of 10 (12, whatever), whereas the consensus model described would have n sets of 10.
I seriously doubt the wisdom of a crowd goes up when the total crowd size shrinks to 10. I suspect it plummets.
This does call into question the notion of a multiple-jury trial (maybe videoconferenced in, where the individual juries do not interact with each other). Based on this study's findings, it would appear that juries might get their verdicts wrong less frequently with this system.
Imagine if the first OJ trial or Trayvon Martin trial had been before multiple juries; would society have been better off if the results were less dependent on the biases of juries small enough to be cherry-picked?
In this case a jury is not really about everyone in it being wise, it’s about there being a better chance that an informed decision will take place due to those in the group discussing the decision before voting rather than just voting for whatever CNN recommends. With the current system you just have people doing whatever they are going to do without having to explain it to anyone else.
I've only read the summary but Philip Tetlock comes to this conclusion based on his work with "The Good Judgment Project" (described in his book "Superforecasting").
The GJP is a kind of experiment he's been running for a few years in an attempt to learn how to improve predictions.
From what I remember: overall, teams did better than individuals and wisdom of the crowds because they were able to feed off and combine each other's points of view and separate knowledge.
However! It's important for teams to not let groupthink dominate—individuals within teams needed to challenge each other.
Deliberative democracy is great. Put people in enriched decisionmaking environments for better outcomes, and then get greater democratic legitimacy from doing so than even some representatives? Win win.
This is the opposite of populism too: when we voted Brexit in the UK, it was an uncontrolled, information-scarce (and falsehood-rich) environment. A room where people were organised and where they asked for their own experts and talked to one another would never have delivered that result.
People in the uk voted brexit, because it was just after the uk us and france were dropping bombs in lybia and syria, arab spring they called it, the destruction of infrastructure created millions of refugees, the bbc amplyied the importance and strength of isis, and flashed images of thousands of the refugees in calais tripping over each other trying to illegally cross the channel into the uk. The good souls of england thought they were under attack, bless em.
You can make a case that democracy is a grand application of “wisdom of large crowd”. But if that can easily and consistently outperformed then do we have better political system than democracy? What are the consequences of this?
Democracy (as in, majoritocracy) is mainly a way to keep people from fighting each other (because they know they ll be outnumbered). Wisdom was not the primary goal (Aristotle and Plato considered it a terrible system - even most public offices were appointed by lot).
Something we don't do any more, for some reason, although it might be a good thing, is ostracism. There was a regular vote in ancient Athens on who should be ostracised - expelled from the city for 10 years.
Ostracism, Plutarch says[0], "was not usually inflicted on the poorer citizens, but on those of great houses, whose station exposed them to envy...every one was liable to it, whom his reputation, birth, or eloquence raised above the common level...ostracism was not the punishment of any criminal act, but was speciously said to be the mere depression and humiliation of excessive greatness and power; and was in fact a gentle relief and mitigation of envious feeling, which was thus allowed to vent itself in inflicting no intolerable injury, only a ten years' banishment. But after it came to be exercised upon base and villainous fellows, they desisted from it..."
Democracy isn't the best system at making decisions, nor was it ever supposed to be so. Its strong point was the capability of preventing certain kind of decisions from being made.
The main thing is that in most cases where large scale democracy applied, there doesn't likely exist the "best" objective outcome, so to speak. So it is not really about making the best choice.
That would be direct democracy. No "democracy" on Earth is actually a direct democracy, but a representative democracy, which seems more in line to what this study proposes, no? A small group of elected officials to "debate" issues.
And then every so often a referendum with only two polar-opposite options is presented to the electorate, reminding us why we have representative democracy instead of direct. I'm looking at you, Brexit... :)
If there were more such votes, especially in the EU with regard to policy - then Brexit would have never happened.
There is quite a fundamental 'scope creep' going on in the EU, combined with unpopular views among the elite, which is causes massive tension that would not be there otherwise.
A properly elected executive, more consensus WRT voters, and possibly more direct participation would be better not worse.
All of the EU's many crises are self-inflicted, it's in permanent 'put out the fire mode' - which is consistent with pre-revolutionary situations.
I'm not sure how well the paper applies to democracy.
> If there were more such votes, especially in the EU with regard to policy - then Brexit would have never happened.
Possibly. I think you're assuming people were interested enough in the EU to partake in such referenda, and that big influential campaigns would not have existed, and that had certain treated been voted down that people would still be content with the EU, and so on. And excluding other issues that possibly led to Brexit like nearly a decade of manufactured austerity.
That seems too much of a leap to conclude that Brexit wouldn't have happened.
Folks would vote en masse on clearly articulated issues, and if leaders took note of it, there'd be less calamity.
Right now the Executive doesn't really care what Europeans think, because they assume they know best, it's appallingly clear. It happens everywhere there aren't proper checks and balances.
FYI the treaty of Lisbon was shot down in a few referendums, and the leaders decided to go forward with some rather fundamental, 'constitutional' issues anyhow. As a result of failed referendums in some countries, they decided to skip referendums in the remaining countries because of the high likelihood of failure. Instead of truly reconsidering the legislation, they just went ahead and passed it. And now they are paying the price.
As someone else pointed out, the EU is boring infrastructure: people don't care about power and sewers until they stop working.
I'm not convinced that people intrinsically "care" about migration, rather that they have a set of material problems (employment, wages, housing, public services) and have been told to blame migration for them.
And to the extent that they do care, how can they care about the "flow" rate of migration, which is impossible to see except in statistics; what they care about is the "level". This is far scarier because that's how you get ethnic cleansing.
>I'm not convinced that people intrinsically "care" about migration
Lots of people do. For many people it genuinely is about maintaining the nations their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating. Nations, not states. Somalians can never be part of the German nation, no matter how long they have citizenship in the state called Germany. You can't spend decades telling white people how evil colonialism was, and then say "by the way you have to allow your native land to be colonized and if you say no you are an evil racist and we'll throw you in jail". People have a natural instinct for fairness.
Your idea of nations "their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating is historical fiction. A hundred generations is around 2500 years. Look at some maps of migrations in Europe over the last 2500 years, and the idea of people mostly staying put over that time frame is demolished.
Modern English is a West Germanic language, coming from the Germanic tribes that pushed aside the Celts, for example. The reason it doesn't sound more like Dutch and German being the Norman invasion and subsequent exchange with the French. Modern German on the other hand isn't closer to Dutch or Danish than it is because High German from the South has supplanted the Low German native to Northern Germany, parts of the Netherlands and Southern Denmark as political shifted in the last 100-200 years.
And from the UK at least, it is clear that the people who care most are the people who have the least experience with it.
>the idea of people mostly staying put over that time frame is demolished.
That idea was never put forward. Again, a nation is a people.
>It's about fear, where origin is a proxy.
It seems rather arrogant to tell other people what their beliefs are and what they are about. Would you tell Indians that they were evil racists for being "afraid" of the British invaders? That they just don't have enough experience, and you, being so much more wise and experienced know better than they do, and should be allowed to dictate to them who is allowed in their country?
> That idea was never put forward. Again, a nation is a people.
"A nation is a people" does not say anything. It's a totally empty phrase given that the notion of what makes up "a people" is totally fluid, and changes dramatically over time, as I pointed out. You won't find anyone in England who consider themselves Germans, for example, but most of them are descendants predominantly of Germanic tribes. And despite "British" as an identity is even more of a fabrication you'll find plenty of people who see no distinction between English and Scottish people, for example
And it changes rapidly: Even surveys of what nationality people in the UK consider themselves to have shows massive shifts over even the last 30-40 years. These things can not be measured meaningfully in "hundreds of generations" - they often change dramatically in as little of 1-2 generations.
The irony of what one finds in such surveys is that contrary to your earlier attempt to paint this as something lasting, families of recent immigrants to the UK tend to show much stronger feelings of national belonging than "ethnic British" people, and are largely accepted as British. Unsurprisingly given how much of the culture of many of these immigrants have become an integral part of British culture.
> It seems rather arrogant to tell other people what their beliefs are and what they are about.
Not when there is plenty of evidence.
> Would you tell Indians that they were evil racists for being "afraid" of the British invaders?
I wouldn't tell anyone they're racist for being afraid of people who are actually invading and taking their country. That you even try to equate this with immigration says enough.
> dictate to them who is allowed in their country?
You're the one assuming I am suggesting I should have a right to dictate to them. People are free to be xenophobes and bigots if they wish. That does not make them any less so, and I'm equally free to call them out on it.
> being so much more wise and experienced know better than they do
In terms of the UK for example, as I pointed out, it is not at all about my experience. It's about the fact that anti-immigration sentiments linked to opposition to the EU was strongest in the areas where people have the least personal experience with it, and in fact opposition to the EU in general was largest in areas with the least immigration. If they had actual experience of it, I'd have slightly more sympathy for their position, but most of this xenophobia is linked to lack of experience.
Living in London, as an immigrant, the vast majority of British people I meet are equally exasperated over the xenophobia in "Middle England", because most people here know immigrants, work with immigrants, or are in relationships with immigrants.
""A nation is a people" does not say anything. It's a totally empty phrase"
No, this is absurdly false.
If you visit different nations, you find different kinds of cultures.
This is obvious.
The very words 'culture' and 'ethnicity' exist in every language to describe such a thing.
That they are 'fluid', of course, does not deny their existence.
I understand that we want to be wary of ethnocentrism, and hyper-nationalism, but the denial that there is such a thing as ethnic groups that constitute 'people' who have a shared culture and history is just as repulsive.
"People are free to be xenophobes and bigots if they wish"
This is childish, anti-intellectual rhetoric.
The mere observance that there is such a thing as different groups of people on the planet does not constitute any, even remote form of negative connotation.
Finally - the position that 'those with less exposure to migrants in the UK voted for Brexit, ergo, ignorance' is not necessarily true. Those in highly cosmopolitan areas tend to identify less with the groups around them, whereas those in areas with lower rates of migration, are more likely to identify as part of an ethnic group to which they belong.
I live as a tiny English speaking minority in a fully Quebecois part of Quebec. I'm only one of a handful of people in my area that speaks English as a first language - moreover, the area is not multicultural at all: it's very much Quebecois. The coherence of this community is obvious and palpable to anyone. My family members (English) notice it immediately when they visit. In fact - we 'English Canadians' have a very globalized culture, much less affinity for one another to the point wherein the level of social cohesion among the Quebecois seems strange to us. Sadly - this also implies that it's 'harder to break into' this culture, and that they are less successful with integration.
Whatever the Quebecois are, for better or worse - they are absolutely 'a people' of some kind. Because it's so gloriously obvious to anyone without an ideological bone to pick, one might have to consider how one could possibly arrive at the conclusion that the sky is not blue when it obviously is? That's the interesting question.
A mere 10km drive from my home to the English speaking area yields obvious, quantifiable and measurable differences. A child would see the difference. That's literally what 'diversity' is.
There are nations of people in the world. It doesn't make some better than others and it doesn't deny our common humanity. Of course there are nary any 'hard boundaries' between cultures, and as you say - it's all fluid. But they still exist, and it absolutely must be part of the equation as we move forward, otherwise there'll be calamity.
It was attempts to align the borders of Germany the state with the German-speaking areas of Europe that got us into this mess, with the annexation of the Sudetenland.
The borders among 'German speaking people' have been nutbars since time immemorial, frankly the concept of a fairly federalized Germany is a very, very new thing in history.
> All of the EU's many crises are self-inflicted, it's in permanent 'put out the fire mode'
This is doubly true of the UK, no? Especially now with the self-inflicted decision to cut ourselves off and impose a registration/visa requirement on EU nationals which is going to result in a corresponding one on British nationals in the EU.
>There is quite a fundamental 'scope creep' going on in the EU
How can you scope creep from "ever closer union"? The scope was as big as it could get already. Now, that passage has been removed at the behest of Cameron, but I can't remember any statement constricting the scope, so now the scope is simply undefined, I guess.
'ever closer union clause' is not tantamount to arbitrary Federalization of powers. It's mostly a strategic view.
Change of power requires change in law, which happens every now in terms of treaties, the last of which, would have been roundly elected by the plebes went on to be put into motion anyhow.
Arbitrary scope creep is happening in some fronts, for example, when there is a decision to be made about gray areas of federal/nation overlap in the course, the EU Courts rule on it, and generally rule in their own favour (i.e. they have jurisdiction, not the nation state) which is ridiculous because the courts are supposed to rule on the law, not decided on their own jurisdiction.
If there is a political union, as many economists have indicated must happen in order for the Euro to survive - there will be a literal civil war. What you saw in France with the giletes ... imagine that about 20x bigger but in most countries. It will break down.
There needs to be reasonable reforms on a bunch of things.
The 'fundamental freedoms' are dogmatic and ideological, they need to be brought into question, or at least the interpretation of them, just as a start.
The entire EU political landscape has been turned upside down and yet still the EU is not reacting.
Switzerland is close to a direct democracy with a model based on: representative democracy by default but direct as soon and anytime the people feels the subject should be handled so. That system has proven very stable.
It has proven stable in the sense that it's still there, sure.
It has also proven prepared to continue oppressing substantial parts of the population for much longer than most of the rest of Europe (e.g. only giving suffrage to women on a federal level in the early 70's).
To me the Swiss system is a demonstration of the fundamental flaw of straight majority decisions.
Democracy is ultimately defined best not in terms of the expression of the wishes of a majority of the franchised, but how well protected the wishes of the minority and the disenfranchised are.
Most other places this has taken the form of e.g. bicameral systems and strong forms of legal oversight (to be fair the Swiss system was reformed substantially in constitutional reforms in the 90's), and other forms of expressly diluting the power of the majority to impose change.
Democracy is not a vehicle for correctness or efficiency.
It's entire point is to distribute political power to a wide powerbase with a constant churn.
This is to disable known pathologies of entrenched power bases and to discourage social stratification.
Since modern states don't have an entrenched hereditary aristocracy we don't really have a concept of what democracy shields us from, since we've not had to suffer from it - except when we do, we recognize it and shun it.
The social idea was that aristocracy had to be in power since they were the ones with the education. After public schooling became a things, suddenly just being able to read and write is not a distinguishing feature, and having an explicit hereditary elite became a socially untenable construct.
That's not to say that a human society is a fair playing field - but it's not as unjust as in past centuries.
Similarly to vacciness, when democracy works as intended you see only the "bad parts".
>Since modern states don't have an entrenched hereditary aristocracy
We absolutely do, but because we are bombarded with propaganda telling us they "earned it" by "working hard" and "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" we pretend it is just a co-incidence that the people born into the top 1% almost always remain there, and people born in the bottom 99% almost always remain there.
>After public schooling became a things, suddenly just being able to read and write is not a distinguishing feature
It never was. The aristocracy were educated specifically on economics, justice, etc. It wasn't simply a matter of being able to read.
Sure, I simplified a lot. The current western world order is still much more fair to the common folk than feudalism.
The education aspect was not as much about how much more educated the aristocracy was rather that the unwashed masses rose to their level, and it was not anymore sufficient to say that god has decreed duke X a distinguished gentleman and commoner Y a filthy peasant.
It is not easy to rise social ladders, but it's way easier with our figment of a fair society, rather than if we believed social status was a fixed quantity given by the creator of the universe.
The pithy armchair psychologist in me would claim modern society is much more facilitating towards a growth mindset than a feodal one.
>The current western world order is still much more fair to the common folk than feudalism.
That's the common perception, but there's little evidence that it is true. Modern peons have no more ability to control their governments than medieval peons did, we just have the illusion presented to us to keep us complacent. We work longer hours, have less nutritious and safe food, and have an epidemic of "mental illness" stemming from our lack of social bonds and community. But because we have medicine and electronic gadgets we declare ourselves to be much better off.
>The education aspect was not as much about how much more educated the aristocracy was
Well really that is exactly what aristocracy was, as originally conceived. Some places ended up with a corrupt form where it was rule by birth rather than rule by excellence (the literal definition of aristocracy), but mostly people just mistakenly refer to monarchies as aristocracies.
>but it's way easier with our figment of a fair society, rather than if we believed social status was a fixed quantity given by the creator of the universe.
Why? The modern myth that nobility was defined purely by birth is just that, a myth. If you believe that excellence is given by god, it does not also follow that you must believe god only gives excellence to the offspring of others he gave excellence. In reality it was seen as no different than with livestock. If a good specimen is born you make it part of your breeding stock, even if its parents were not.
> We work longer hours, have less nutritious and safe food, and have an epidemic of "mental illness" stemming from our lack of social bonds and community. But because we have medicine and electronic gadgets we declare ourselves to be much better off.
This smacks of rosy retrospective bias. Even if we have less nutritious food, which is debatable, we have an abundance of it, sufficient to feed us all and we don't suffer famines and shortages, or nutritional deficiencies.
We have an "epidemic" of mental illness because most of our day is no longer solely focused on scrounging for survival. Also, the mentally ill are no longer shunned as harshly and so they don't die of starvation. Perhaps community bonds have something to do with it, but that's also debatable.
>Even if we have less nutritious food, which is debatable
It really isn't, it has been measured. With increased atmospheric CO2, plants grow faster and end up with a much higher calorie:micronutrient ratio. We also consume vast quantities of industrial waste products now like "vegetable oil", HFCS and soybean by-products.
>we have an abundance of it, sufficient to feed us all and we don't suffer famines and shortages, or nutritional deficiencies.
Famine wasn't as common as you seem to think it was, unless you include impoverished states, in which case famine is killing more people now than it was back then. You can't just look at rich countries now compared to everyone centuries ago. You have to compare like to like. We suffer plenty of nutritional deficiencies, and we suffer huge amounts of diet caused diseases like "type 2 diabetes" and osteoporosis.
>We have an "epidemic" of mental illness because most of our day is no longer solely focused on scrounging for survival.
People were not scrounging for survival then either. They were producing significant surpluses of food, enough to feed massive armies. And while they worked hard in spring and fall, they essentially had summer and winter as vacation time. They had more holidays/vacation time than modern Americans do.
>Perhaps community bonds have something to do with it, but that's also debatable.
We literally have hundreds of thousands of people killing themselves entirely because they have no social bonds. Everything is debatable, but this debate in particular has overwhelming evidence in support of it being correct. As population density grows, social cohesion, trust and relationships all decline. We just didn't evolve to be friends with 5 million people.
> Famine wasn't as common as you seem to think it was, unless you include impoverished states, in which case famine is killing more people now than it was back then.
"More people" is an irrelevant metric, what matters is the percentage of people relative to the total. That's a meaningful measure of progress.
> We suffer plenty of nutritional deficiencies
Such as?
> and we suffer huge amounts of diet caused diseases like "type 2 diabetes" and osteoporosis.
The latter of which was either common back then also, or uncommon because they didn't live long enough to develop it. As for type II diabetes, it's a disease of abundance, which proves my point. You can't overeat if you don't have enough to eat.
> They were producing significant surpluses of food, enough to feed massive armies.
That often starved during campaigns.
> And while they worked hard in spring and fall, they essentially had summer and winter as vacation time. They had more holidays/vacation time than modern Americans do.
During which they had to ration food, developed nutritional deficiencies, and died of exposure. Some vacation. You're awfully selective about how you compare "like to like".
> We literally have hundreds of thousands of people killing themselves entirely because they have no social bonds.
Citation please.
Also, there is very little real data on historical suicide rates [1,2]. It consists mainly of conjecture from the writings of artists at the time, like Dante speaking about hell and suicide. So your claims that modern rates are higher are also pure conjecture.
It is not a naturalistic fallacy. The things I mentioned are harmful. Industrial waste may not be necessarily harmful, but it is also not necessarily food. We consume it because it is industrial waste, not because it is food. It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities, it did not even exist before the early 1900s.
>"More people" is an irrelevant metric, what matters is the percentage of people relative to the total. That's a meaningful measure of progress.
It is more as a percentage.
>Such as?
Do you think nutritional deficiencies don't exist any more? Common deficiencies include iron, B12, D, calcium, A, iodine, magnesium, zinc and folate. People now eat fewer vegetables, which contain fewer micronutrients, and we have almost completely removed organ meat from our diets altogether.
>The latter of which was either common back then also, or uncommon because they didn't live long enough to develop it.
Those are conflicting explanations. You can't dismiss a problem by throwing out random conflicting excuses. No, osteoporosis was not common then. "Type 2 diabetes" and heart disease both didn't even exist, and now are so widespread that they are top killers.
>As for type II diabetes, it's a disease of abundance, which proves my point.
No, it is a disease of consumption of toxic omega 6 polyunsaturated fats. Fat people existed in medieval times. They did not get "type 2 diabetes". And it still would not prove your point, as overeating is not the same as healthy. I said people ate healthier. People eating high calorie low nutrient food and getting morbidly obese now supports my point, it does not contradict it.
>That often starved during campaigns.
Only if you have an unusual definition of "often". And those incidents were due to being cut off from supplies. Another army preventing your food from getting to you is not an indication that you are unable to grow enough food and thus "everyone is spending all day trying to stave off starvation".
>During which they had to ration food, developed nutritional deficiencies, and died of exposure
Except none of those things. Those are the times they spent feasting. We still have several of the same traditional feasts, just renamed to pretend they are christian.
>So your claims that modern rates are higher are also pure conjecture.
Modern rates are higher than any other point in recorded history. We have poorer data from ancient times, but we do still have data. You even linked to some. And it indicates that suicide was rare, and when it did happen it was mainly out of shame or a sense of honor having done something wrong. There is no reason to assume suicide rates were higher in medieval times just because you want to believe the iron age was some horrific time. Again, the people who still live in the stone age today and are healthier and happier than us right now, and have essentially no modern "mental illnesses" like depression or social anxiety and no modern dietary diseases like "type 2 diabetes", even the ones with BMI scores in the "morbidly obese" category. Because they do not possess the technology to create petrochemical solvents necessary to extract toxic seed oils. We are just supposed to ignore that because they inconveniently point to modern society being harmful?
>Again, the people who still live in the stone age today and are healthier and happier than us right now,
That’s a senseless statement. Nobody lives in the Stone Age today. That’s a period of time.
If you’re referring to primitive tribes with no outside world contact, then you’ll need to provide evidence and definitions for healthier/happier. They have high infant mortality rates, they kill disabled children, they die from treatable illnesses, and they starve during bad years.
Of course they have mental illness, there is no evidence they are immune to Down syndrome, schizophrenia, or anything else. They are just much more likely to murder or ostracize people having too much difficulty fitting into the tribe.
>It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities
Ugh, you accidentally forgot to provide any evidence of its harm again. You just preceded it with another naturalistic fallacy that implied that it must be harmful because it’s industrial.
>Nobody lives in the Stone Age today. That’s a period of time.
Yes they do. It is a period of technological development. There is no singular timespan that makes up the stone age or bronze age or iron age, those periods are different depending on the people.
>If you’re referring to primitive tribes with no outside world contact
They have outside world contact, they simply choose to continue living the way they prefer instead of adopting modernity.
>then you’ll need to provide evidence and definitions for healthier/happier
The dictionary already does.
>They have high infant mortality rates, they kill disabled children, they die from treatable illnesses, and they starve during bad years.
The first three things are not healthy, and the last thing is false.
>Of course they have mental illness, there is no evidence they are immune to Down syndrome, schizophrenia, or anything else.
Please attempt to read what is being said rather than intentionally taking an obviously contrary definition so you have something to argue about. I am talking about the modern "mental illnesses", note the quotes, like depression and social anxiety which are epidemic in modernity, and do not exist in primitive cultures.
>Ugh, you accidentally forgot to provide any evidence of its harm again
Almost as if this is a discussion and not me publishing a scientific paper. You are welcome to look up the data linking omega 6 polyunsaturated fats to the modern disease epidemic.
>You just preceded it with another naturalistic fallacy that implied that it must be harmful because it’s industrial.
Simply repeating the fallacy fallacy is not going to accomplish anything.
> It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities, it did not even exist before the early 1900s.
Many things didn't exist before the 1900s, that still doesn't entail they are harmful. Furthermore, harm is dose-dependent. Water is harmful if you ingest too much. There is little evidence that these are harmful in appropriate doses. Again, most of the harm stems from abundance.
> [Famine is killing] more [people] as a percentage.
Citation?
> Do you think nutritional deficiencies don't exist any more? Common deficiencies include iron, B12, D, calcium, A, iodine, magnesium, zinc and folate.
Now where's the evidence that these deficiencies were not prevalent or worse throughout history, which is what you're actually claiming.
> You can't dismiss a problem by throwing out random conflicting excuses.
You mean like the baseless, uncited claims you're making? I've now provided far more citations demonstrating your claims are incorrect than you have. And the "excuses" aren't conflicting, they're exhaustive covering many possibilities, all of which undermine your narrative.
> "Type 2 diabetes" and heart disease both didn't even exist
As for type 2 diabetes, you have literally no basis to make that claim. There is plenty of historical data confirming the existence of diabetes throughout history, but it's not possible to reliably distinguish them given the data: https://www.healthline.com/health/history-type-1-diabetes#4
> No, it is a disease of consumption of toxic omega 6 polyunsaturated fats.
Citation?
> Fat people existed in medieval times. They did not get "type 2 diabetes".
Citation?
> And those incidents were due to being cut off from supplies
And from food spoiling.
> Another army preventing your food from getting to you is not an indication that you are unable to grow enough food and thus "everyone is spending all day trying to stave off starvation"
Good thing I never said that.
> Except none of those things. [Winter] are the times they spent feasting. We still have several of the same traditional feasts, just renamed to pretend they are christian.
Wrong: "The winter solstice was immensely important because the people were economically dependent on monitoring the progress of the seasons. Starvation was common during the first months of the winter, January to April (northern hemisphere) or July to October (southern hemisphere), also known as "the famine months". In temperate climates, the midwinter festival was the last feast celebration, before deep winter began. Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter, so it was almost the only time of year when a plentiful supply of fresh meat was available.[5] The majority of wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking at this time."
So basically the reason for the feasts is so they didn't have to waste precious food on keeping animals alive, because otherwise they'd all starve, like I said.
> Modern rates are higher than any other point in recorded history. We have poorer data from ancient times, but we do still have data. You even linked to some.
I linked to evidence that quite literally say we don't have enough historical data to infer the actual rates of suicide. So no, it doesn't at all indicate anything like what you claim.
> There is no reason to assume suicide rates were higher in medieval times just because you want to believe the iron age was some horrific time.
Except no one is making that claim. What I am saying is that your claim that modern rates are higher is baseless.
> Again, the people who still live in the stone age today and are healthier and happier than us right now and have essentially no modern "mental illnesses" like depression or social anxiety
You've fallen into the common trap of romanticizing the past. Some aspects of older cultures indeed are healthier, but your apparent inclination to claim that rates of happiness and health are far worse today than they ever were is completely baseless.
>Many things didn't exist before the 1900s, that still doesn't entail they are harmful.
Stop trying to reverse my statement because you think that will allow you to dismiss it. I said they are harmful, and they did not exist before the 1900s. Not they are harmful because they didn't exist before the 1900s. Their harm is known by the negative health effects of their consumption. Those negative health effects did not exist for people before the 1900s.
>Now where's the evidence that these deficiencies were not prevalent or worse throughout history, which is what you're actually claiming.
I see a pattern here where you state that common scientific knowledge is wrong unless I provide citations for it, then when I do you just ignore those citations and the entire subject and proceed to call some other common scientific knowledge wrong. You can use google too.
I am well aware that people post common misconceptions on their blogs. If I link to a blog post about how the earth is really flat will that make it so?
>Citation?
Again, this is not wikipedia. If you want to call someone a liar, do so. If you want to find out information, do so. You don't get to delete opinions you don't like if you spam "citation needed" enough in a conversation. The history of type 2 diabetes is easy to learn about, it did not exist until the early 1900s.
>And from food spoiling.
Which is obviously caused by being unable to produce enough food and requiring all adults to spend their entire lives toiling in the fields to avoid starvation, thus supporting your belief.
>So basically the reason for the feasts is so they didn't have to waste precious food on keeping animals alive, because otherwise they'd all starve
They didn't waste food, therefore they were all starving. Brilliant logic.
>I linked to evidence that quite literally say we don't have enough historical data to infer the actual rates of suicide
You linked to poor evidence for suicide rates. That is not the same as no evidence. This kind of tactic is just silly. "Oh, well the evidence that shows their suicide rate was much lower has limited sample sizes, so we should just assume that in reality they had much higher suicide rates".
>What I am saying is that your claim that modern rates are higher is baseless.
And yet you provided evidence to contradict your claim.
>Wrong
Neither of your links are even related to my statement, so going "DURRRR RONG!!11" seems a little odd.
>You've fallen into the common trap of romanticizing the past
That's possible. Or perhaps you've fallen into the much more common trap of romanticizing the present.
>but your apparent inclination to claim that rates of happiness and health are far worse today than they ever were is completely baseless.
Again, there's a big difference between "the evidence is not strong enough to know that with 100% certainty" which is the case and "completely baseless" which is what you wish.
> Stop trying to reverse my statement because you think that will allow you to dismiss it. I said they are harmful
And yet, you have provided no evidence of such. The evidence of harm is far from conclusive, and given the replication crisis, your stating these claims as facts is completely unjustified.
> Not they are harmful because they didn't exist before the 1900s.
What do you think the non-existence of these things prior to the 1900s proves exactly, that you keep bringing it up as if it's a relevant point? My points about the 1900s appear to be just as relevant to the discussion as your points.
> I see a pattern here where you state that common scientific knowledge is wrong unless I provide citations for it
I see a pattern where you keep claiming something is "common scientific knowledge" without any providing evidence of such a consensus.
> then when I do you just ignore those citations and the entire subject and proceed to call some other common scientific knowledge wrong. You can use google too.
When you do? When was that exactly? You've provided a single link to some articles that talk about CO2's effects on plant growth, completely ignoring the fact that I had already acknowledged that even if nutritional density were decreasing, the abundance is sufficient to feed the growing population.
Further, I'm not the one making dozens of unsubstantiated claims, you are. The burden of proof is on you here, not me to prove or disprove your claims, and yet I've gone out of my way to correct your misconceptions about history.
> I am well aware that people post common misconceptions on their blogs. If I link to a blog post about how the earth is really flat will that make it so?
Convenient that you ignore the paper that mentions the prevalence of osteoporosis is due to the aging population. Here's another one for you to deny: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24087808
> The history of type 2 diabetes is easy to learn about, it did not exist until the early 1900s.
Oh, do you mean it did not exist as a diagnosis? Because that seems like a fairly trivial point. If you literally mean that humans from history did not suffer from maladies that are a result of our biology, then that's a much stronger claim, so prove it.
> They didn't waste food, therefore they were all starving. Brilliant logic.
Nice how you just skip all the mentions of how common starvation was, and the actual justification for feasting in early winter.
> You linked to poor evidence for suicide rates. That is not the same as no evidence.
I asked for evidence. You have not provided any. Numerous sources I found all discuss how no robust evidence exists. Thus far, there is literally no reason to believe your claims, and considerable reason to disbelieve them.
> Neither of your links are even related to my statement, so going "DURRRR RONG!!11" seems a little odd.
You claimed that stone age hunter/gatherer societies were healthier. The first link I provided definitively proves otherwise.
You claimed that stone age hunter/gatherer societies didn't suffer from mental illness like depression. Historical documents discussing depressive symptoms are common. Are we to take this as evidence of some depression-like condition that's not depression? Are you seriously claiming that that's more believable?
> That's possible. Or perhaps you've fallen into the much more common trap of romanticizing the present.
Except I haven't made any such claims. At best, I've implied that there is no reason to think historical humans were much different in the maladies they suffered, except modern circumstances and abundance have clearly led to significantly lower infant and adult mortality. Which is actually well documented, commonly known fact, and runs contrary to what you have claimed.
> Again, there's a big difference between "the evidence is not strong enough to know that with 100% certainty" which is the case and "completely baseless" which is what you wish.
Since you've provided no evidence at all, and the evidence I've cited so far actually runs counter to what you claim, "baseless" is pretty accurate.
>The evidence of harm is far from conclusive, and given the replication crisis, your stating these claims as facts is completely unjustified.
Then say "I don't believe that" instead of trying to engage in silly arguments that have no possibility of productive outcomes.
>What do you think the non-existence of these things prior to the 1900s proves exactly
That people did not consume them prior to that time. As I very clearly stated, multiple times.
>completely ignoring the fact that I had already acknowledged that even if nutritional density were decreasing, the abundance is sufficient to feed the growing population.
That's a problem, not a solution. "We have to consume too many calories to get the same amount of vitamins and minerals they did" is not solved by saying "but we have lots of low quality food!". Obesity is not a solution to nutrient deficiencies.
>The burden of proof is on you here
There is no burden of proof. This is a discussion.
>Convenient that you ignore the paper that mentions the prevalence of osteoporosis is due to the aging population
Because it is of no relevance at all. The increase in osteoporosis in recent decades is in part due to the increased average age. That does not contradict the fact that osteoporosis rates in the 20th century are far higher than we have archeological evidence for in any other period.
>Oh, do you mean it did not exist as a diagnosis?
No, it did not exist. Diabetes was entirely and solely the disease we now call type 1 diabetes. That was the only diabetes. "Type 2 diabetes" has no relation to actual diabetes, has nothing to do with pancreatic malfunction, and did not exist prior to the 1920s.
>Nice how you just skip all the mentions of how common starvation was
Because that was not fact, it was opinion. I am well aware of the popular misconception, pointing to someone else repeating it does not add anything.
>and the actual justification for feasting in early winter.
That is not what it says. It claims people starve later in winter. Feasting before that would not change that outcome, and the quote you presented does not suggest it would.
>I asked for evidence. You have not provided any.
You did.
>Numerous sources I found all discuss how no robust evidence exists.
Again, stating that all available evidence points to A but is "not robust enough" therefore we should assume the opposite of A is absurd.
>The first link I provided definitively proves otherwise.
The first link does not look at a single hunter/gatherer society. It looks at minority indigenous populations living as second class citizens in modern countries. Amerindians living on reservations are not hunter/gatherers.
>You claimed that stone age hunter/gatherer societies didn't suffer from mental illness like depression. Historical documents discussing depressive symptoms are common.
No they are not, they are rare, not from hunter/gatherer societies, and they describe the condition as one of cities. Almost as if what I said about it being caused by human settlements exceeding the population humans evolved to handle is correct.
>Except I haven't made any such claims.
You have, repeatedly. You romanticize our disease rates, our abundant toxic waste which we can consume so much of and become morbidly obese and die, thus proving how great modern society is and how healthy we are.
>Which is actually well documented, commonly known fact, and runs contrary to what you have claimed.
No it is not. Average life expectancy has increased almost entirely due to antibiotics. Lots of people lived to their 80s, and did not suffer from the modern diseases we now pretend are just part of being old. Indirectly saying "but lots of people died of bacterial infections" does not mean we can simply pretend those infections were "type 2 diabetes".
>and the evidence I've cited so far
None? Linking to something irrelevant is not citing evidence.
I have not made any extraordinary claims, I have repeated the very standard scientific consensus, which is constantly repeated in the popular media. I do not presume that every piece of common knowledge is going to be considered an "extraordinary claim" by someone who hates search engines.
>Worrying about society overeating wasn’t even a thing in the US until the 50s.
So, our modern lifestyle is good because we've only been worried about it killing us since we've had it?
It is not common knowledge that a hunter gatherer lifestyle without medicine/food science/etc is better. It is not reported in popular media and it’s not backed by scientific research. It is an extraordinary claim.
>our modern lifestyle is good because we've only been worried about it killing us since we've had it?
Nope. It’s good because it’s provided us with abundance to the point where we are no longer struggling just to feed ourselves.
We have orders of magnitude safer food, fewer mentally ill than feudal folk. And we have medicine that works. Its disingenuous and incorrect to dismiss it so glibly.
I am not dismissing medicine. But the existence of medicine now does not mean life centuries ago was a horrifying existence struggling to survive as popular culture suggests. There are still primitive people now, whose existence is far closer to that subsistence stereotype than medieval Europeans were. They are overwhelmingly happy and healthy. They eat better than we do, are healthier than we are, and work less than we do. If they had modern medicine, it is hard to argue they wouldn't be better off than us in every way.
But they don’t have modern medicine, and they don’t have the means to deal with droughts, or other natural disasters. Indigenous tribes who have contact with society are overwhelmingly unhappy with some of the highest suicide rates in the world. The ones who don’t have contact don’t have their happiness measured in any meaningful or comparable way... because they don’t have contact.
Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food, they work way more than most Americans do. Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe.
People like the indigenous Kitava have no such problems. Because they are not living as an underclass minority in another culture. They have contact with modern people, but they choose to live traditionally.
>Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food
That would be every kind of environment...
>they work way more than most Americans do.
They do not. Again, see the Kitava. They barely have a concept of work.
>Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe
Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary act. Your cultural bias makes you assume this is some universal penance that must be paid in order to extract food from the soil. It is not.
>Yes, we've covered that haven't we? In the very post you just replied to, in order to add absolutely nothing to the discussion?
I’m pointing out that it’s a massive caveat. It’s like claiming they built a plane and other than it not being able to fly, it’s just as good as the ones we have. A society without modern medicine is significantly worse off.
>That would be any kind of environment
No, you should learn about the industrial scale farming that feeds most of the planet
>They barely have a concept of work
Oh? What happens when nobody wants to hunt then? Work is what members of a society do to keep it going. If they aren’t smart enough to recognize it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
>Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary...
Let me stop you there. Hunter gatherer approaches do not scale. Growing food is entirely necessary to prevent 50 and 100 year storms/droughts from causing mass suffering and starvation.
It’s not cultural bias. It’s foresight to plan for the future and actually feed everyone rather than killing babies and old people during hard times.
No they didn't. We have books on farming that are 2000 years old, people have read them even. Just because movies show dirty peasants hoeing fields doesn't mean that was reality.
If we're talking the middle ages in Europe, then 90% of folk farmed as serfs or peasants. When they weren't dead from frequent droughts or plagues. "No they didn't" isn't an argument.
The myth is that 90% were involved in food production in any way. Butchers and millers and brewers and bakers are part of that 90%, they were not doing anything in any fields. But that myth is based on England under Roman rule, where vast quantities of food were grown by slaves and shipped to Rome. After the fall of Rome, people returned to farming for the local population, and so needed fewer farmers. The period is even characterized by the three orders: those who fight, those who work and those who pray. These were societies that had enough food production that a major portion of the population could spend their time praying instead of doing anything productive. And the "those who work" includes carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, etc. not just farmers.
And that's not what is in dispute anyways. Hoeing fields is. Farmer does not equal hoeing fields. Tillage was done as little as necessary, and was done mainly using horses or oxen pulling plows and cultivators. A hoe was used seldom, and mainly in the vegetable garden. As I said, we have actual period texts on how to farm. All the way back to Rome, Greece and ancient China. None of them describe the modern hollywood portrayal of mentally handicapped peasants spending their lives hitting the ground with sticks.
We also have records of actual farm manors and how much labor each farmer was required to provide for the lord every year. They worked less than us, and had 8 weeks a year without work which they spent playing sports and games in the village green. We have skeletons that show they were taller than us, which indicates better nutrition. But because the late 1700s and early 1800s saw massive numbers of people move to cities and suffer terrible malnutrition and poverty, everyone just assumes things were even worse before that. All available evidence says otherwise. Things have always been bad in cities, especially due to disease, but rural life appears to have been pretty decent and was the majority of the population. Localized famines were rare enough to be major historical events mentioned all across Europe.
Would you please read the site guidelines and not post like this to HN? It's against the rules, no matter how wrong or provocative another comment may be.
More generally, please don't do flamewars or post in the flamewar style to this site.
>that the people born into the top 1% almost always remain there, and people born in the bottom 99% almost always remain there.
The former isn’t true for income and doesn’t remain true for wealth for more than a couple generations. The latter is of course true because... math. 99% of the people are always going to be in the bottom 99%.
When you talk about the 1 percent for income, you are capturing doctors, lawyers, professors, and small business owners with your angst. Many of those people absolutely earned their position by busting their ass. You don’t become a successful spinal surgeon by having daddy grease the wheels. You do it by taking on $400k in debt and spending most of your 20s in school.
You are woefully misinformed if you think wealth inequality has only been around for 100-150 years.
>statement isn't that 99% of people are in the bottom 99%, it is that it is the same people staying there.
That’s not true though. A non-negligible portion of the richest people are first generation. And again, of course most of the 99% will stay in the 99% because math. Even with a complete turnover in one year, 98% didn’t move.
>deliberately misleading corporate propaganda piece about income would be productive?
It’s not propaganda when it comes mostly from the people on the left using it to argue for higher income taxes. Higher income taxes are an attack on income inequality, not wealth inequality. You might think it’s propaganda, but it would behoove you to listen to people on the left to hear what they are proposing.
Democracy is more about limiting the negative than determining truth or wisdom or even executing on positive programs. It's a way of making sure ruling oligarchies can't completely ignore the condition or will of large numbers of people, or at least not for very long and not without some kind of consequence. It also offers a peaceful mechanism to replace ruling oligarchies that are corrupt or incompetent.
For example efficient government was absolutely not a goal of the founders of the United States. They wanted government to be slow, deliberative, and to have many interlocking systems of balanced power to prevent the rise of unchecked autocracy. It was designed to be intentionally inefficient and frustrating to those attempting to wield power within it.
I still think this was probably a good idea. Efficient government was a significant cause of death in the 20th century.
Democracy is not just an application of “wisdom of large crowd” it’s also about giving the power to effect back to those who are affected. A dictatorship is not preferably even if the specific dictator can be shown to make better decisions than a democracy.
Yes and no. The (new) knock on crowds is they are quickly and easily compromised by debate. That is, have to get everyone's opinion __before__ there's discussion.
I'm sure there are plenty of sources. I read about it in The Influential Mind.
Possibly the main benefit of democracy isn't that the crowd make wise voting decisions, it's that it makes politicians feel compelled to make wise decisions to save their careers.
We intuitively do know this and mankind has used different variations of this concept throughout human civilization. Sortition has been used for more than 2000 years to come up with fair representation of the population in governance [0]. A more contemporary example would be the jury system in the US. But, nice to have experimental results on this concept.
There's a big unanswered question about whether "debate" is quite so useful at improving accuracy of answers when it consists of an audience with strong priors listening to motivated reasoning rather than people deferring to the people who are most confident they have a decent grasp of the subject of a neutral trivia question. I think it's conceivable the opposite effect might occur if the experiment were be to repeated using polarising political issues, even if the questions themselves were fact-based (economic growth rates, crime rates, immigration figures, global temperature changes etc).
In the same experiment (but still unpublished) they actually find evidence that a similar CONSENSUS effect is observed in polarized issues with no clear "best" choice.
The most interesting bit to me is the fact that a rare middle position stakeholder, a "high confident gray", allows groups to reach consensus more often. This potentially has huge applications in system design of the processes of democracy imho
It seems likely to me that a couple of pithy arguments are unlikely to change a core belief, but is very likely to create some short-term pushback. If they do change a core belief then I think it will have stronger and longer-lasting impacts than the push-back. I also suspect there's a delay - arguments might take a while to sink in.
It reminds me of that assertion that the IQ of a crowd is the lowest IQ divided by the number of people in the crowd. Seems the study validate this with that smaller groups performs better
Except that the previous study refuted that idea: the average answer was better than individual answers, which is definitely not IQ_crowd = IQ_min / n.
This TED video tuned me into this research earlier in 2018, and while not rigorously tested, there are some even more interesting hypotheses that are being sussed out of the experiment:
The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgment. This centenarian finding, popularly known as the wisdom of crowds, has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to financial forecasting. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Here, we show that if a large crowd is structured in small independent groups, deliberation and social influence within groups improve the crowd's collective accuracy. We asked a live crowd (N=5180) to respond to general-knowledge questions (e.g., what is the height of the Eiffel Tower?). Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates. We found that averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals.
I wonder how much statistical independence has to play in this. e.g. the large crowd can be biased when they influence each other in a way that the small debates cannot. What happens when you have small independent debates versus large independent crowds?
We had poker planning introduced to my team and within two months or so we got to the point where most of the time we all get the same number or get something like 8-13-21.
I think attributing the accuracy to debates is a rather hasty conclusion. I would love to see an experiment where the individual participants rated their confidence from 1 to 10, and only the highest confidence answer in each group was taken. My hunch is this would perform just as well (if not better) than post-discussion.
Whenever I come across such ideas it makes me want to more deeply investigate the Communicative Rationality [1] of Jurgen Habermas. Despite modern trends towards a conservative stoicism (e.g. Jordan Peterson) I actually think Social Critical Theory feels to be moving in the more-correct direction. However, the current negative association with moral-relativism and postmodernism is a new McCarthyism. The bridge should be pragmatism but even that is too closely associated with socialism.
Too many isms but the ones that are scaring me most now are authoritarianism, fascism and totalitarianism. Ideas like communicative rationality feel to me like the most reasonable solutions.
[0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief-merging/