If your friends jump off a bridge (day 228)

Jaron Lanier says that every advertisement is a failure of the hive mind.  He doesn't like the hive mind or advertising so I don't think either one wins in this statement.  It is interesting that so much faith has been put in the hive lately when we know that the hive slices both ways.  Crowds can topple walls and can loot stores.  Thinking as a unit does not equal wisdom.  It's just a stable state that could be any stable state.  There's no particular reason to assume it's the optimal solution.  And often we don't even know the question we're asking of the hive anyway.   When the hive speaks the assumption is that it's uttering the answer to something.  Once again Douglas Adams was prescient.

It's pretty clear that complex problems are probably left to good old analysis and experiment by domain experts.  Even the example of the NetFlix prize is not a good example of hive computation.  A gladiator style winner take all model is not optimal in terms of evolution of a solution.  It's an example of a crowd of smart and hungry researchers, that's all.   As far as I can tell we are far from anything resembling optimized hive computation.  In fact, research shows that we have great influence over each other when trying to reach consensus and local influences can prevail, preventing a convergence to the correct solution.  Still the idea of hive computation is so attractive that we want to believe it.  We want to believe that magically a crowd not only could but will come up with solutions to hard problems like global warming, and unstable economic systems.   Like Douglas Adams says, the simple existence of the human race expresses solutions all the time.   The problem is that as a species we're short-sighted and we want to be liked.  And I'm pretty sure the former doesn't get better at the crowd level.

I don't think we should entirely give up on hive computation at all.  I agree with Jaron that we should study it with a clear focus - what is it good for and how to we set it up for success.  Undoubtedly, there are certain problems that stated in a certain way might be ideal  for the hive but without a clear study we'll keep fumbling and believing a false god.

A song for this post.