General Discussion

Emergent Stupidity

The phenomenon was first recorded by Francis Galton in 1906, and has subsequently been endlessly verified, often with much enthusiastic bloviating about the notion of the “wisdom of crowds”: take an unknown quantity (in Galton’s case it was the weight of an ox at a county fair), and ask people to estimate the correct answer. If you take an average of those estimates, you are far more likely to arrive at the correct answer than if you choose to stand by any individual guess. The average of a large number of estimates is likely to arrive at, or close to, the correct quantity. Estimates cluster around the true value in either direction, with highs and lows canceling one another out, leading to an average often remarkably close, or exactly at, the true quantity.

But it is important to realize the specific conditions under which collective intelligence proves accurate. The independence of those providing their judgements, or estimates, is essential. Estimates must be free from influence and coercion, and derived from a diversity of opinions. If you put people into a group where they discuss their estimates, some eloquent and/or aggressive ignoramus may well rationalize or harass their team into a radically off-quantity far removed from the average they would have arrived at if acting individually, and far removed from the actual quantity. This experiment in the wisdom of crowds also offers insight into collective stupidity.

In order to realize the power of collective wisdom, we need to support and maintain individual independence and viewpoint diversity. The wider the range of information and perspectives, the better. Groups are often hostile to this principle. While the path to collective wisdom is narrow, collective stupidity seems to be more common and natural. Sadly, collective stupidity also seems to be an emergent characteristic. That is to say that collective stupidity (irrational and counterproductive ideas and behaviors) seem capable of exceeding the individual stupidity of any single member of the group. Stupidity, as a group dynamic, can exceed the stupidity of the lowest common denominator.

Cipolla firmly believed “that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.” And I suspect he is right about that.

In other words, “one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or dealing with very small ones.” Their colour, size, wealth, IQ, class and fashion sense really don’t matter. Ratchet your way to the top of Silicon Valley’s techno-elite and you will be faced with the same percentage of stupid people in your life. As a consequence one clever scribe has even written a book titled Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid — credit no doubt due to Cipolla’s earlier treatise.

But here I think that even the great Cipolla has erred by blaming nature for so many mindless people. To be sure, nature can reliably scare up a lot of stupid people, but so can the engineering of technocrats. A lot of studies have documented that the technological world is making everyday life more monotonous, fragile and predictable. The thing about monocultures is they tend to be nurseries for making a lot of stupid people.