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Jul 09, 2006

Comments

1.

I was so delighted to discover Jaron Lanier's essay "Digital Maoism" a few weeks ago and was wondering why it wasn't getting more discussion. I figured it was because the technological elite governing a lot of this discussion didn't want to hear it. Yet it is so important, and he is such an admired and credible source for this technological elite that perhaps he will change some minds?

I think Terra Nova may be unconsciously signalling a position in this debate by editing out the very important FULL title of Jaron's essay, which is:
"DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Yes, Digital Maoism! And then further denigrating it by calling it a "rant" (though a "beautiful" one).

The "wisdom of crowds" is one of these Internet ideologies that has really gotten legs on the hard left, and departed so far from the correctives of its original author, that I felt I had to title my own blog entry about the misuse of this concept as "The Idiocy of Crowd-Controllers" "http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/06/one_of_the_thin.html"
about how the Lindens don't let you vote "no" on their celebrated "democratic voting tool".

There's nothing very rambling about Jaron's piece, and I think it's really worth quoting the nut graph here:

"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."

The ideological backlash to Jaron's refreshing call is already beginning with Clay Shirky:

http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/06/07/reactions_to_digital_maoism.php
Clay uses his critique mainly to try to puncture what he views as caricatures of collectivist ideology -- which in itself is downplaying their dangers. He is just picking on definitional issues and overlooks how the "hive mind" in fact so cunningly justifies its repressive and aggressive tendencies against the individual by touting the supposed endless individual freedoms implied by the "wiki."

Supposedly everybody gets to come up and put their piece in the mosaic. Clay discount this ideal as a caricature by pointing out Wikipedia's own real bureacratic editorial processes not unlike the pre-wiki era's processes.

Says Shirky,

"Indeed, though the public discussions of Wikipedia often focus on the ‘everyone can edit’ notion, the truth of the matter is that a small group of participants design and enforce editorial policy through mechanisms like the Talk pages, lock protection, article inclusion voting, mailing lists, and so on. Furthermore, proposed edits are highly dependant on individual reputation — anonymous additions or alterations are subjected to a higher degree of both scrutiny and control, while the reputation of known contributors is publicly discussed on the Talk pages."

So? We could debate whether this claim of the editorial hierarchical nature of Wikipedia is in fact true, but there's another problem. In fact, the evil of Wikipedia comes in precisely the aggressive use and citation of it by people unwilling to engage in critical thought and contrasting of sources or further reflection, who cut and paste Wikipedia or cite it as a source, or are unconsciously influenced by it, and *give it its credibility* by saying, "Oh, but all kinds of individuals were able to freely and creatively come up to it and edit it freely and collaboratively, everybody was given a chance, so it must reflect both individualism and the wisdom of crowds." That's why it's so insidious, frankly -- invocation of the myth of individual creativity which in fact is pressed into service to maintain an unaccountable and shadowy bureaucratic center. Give me an editorial board any day, with a "letters to the editor" section with rules, and an address, instead of that, thank you.

I am so happy Jaron's essays has appeared. I feel as if the fever is at last breaking on all this fervent idiocy surrounding "social software" and its applications. And it's being broken by someone who evidently *nobody* can complain is wearing a tinfoil hat!

2.

Prokofy:
I think Terra Nova may be unconsciously signalling a position in this debate by editing out the very important FULL title of Jaron's essay, which is:
"DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Yes, Digital Maoism! And then further denigrating it by calling it a "rant" (though a "beautiful" one).

-------

Well. Jaron refers to this text in the context of his previous "rants." I see a thoughtful and provocative piece - call it a rant or not. As for "DIGITAL MAOISM:" - no editorial conspiracy. I choose to clip it in order to streamline the opening paragraph. Presumably everyone sufficiently interested in the topic can and will chase the link - I do encourage it ;-)

3.

There is a general confusion about the difference between "the wisdom of crowds," democracy, the use of "social software," and collective effort. None of which has anything to do with the question posed on this post, which I'll get to after I'm done staying off the point like everyone else.

I'm amazed, Prokofy, that as someone who so often complains about the troubles caused by the "game gods," you seem to have so little respect for what can be accomplished by "the wisdom of crowds" and social software, when applied correctly. The Wikipedia, to begin with, is NOT about the wisdom of crowds. It is about collective effort and "open sourcing" of content creation; greater degrees of transparency and participation. There is a big, big difference. Yes, many people edit the damn thing as a whole, but that same principle applies to more traditional encylopediae, too. Most articles on Wikipedia are not created and edited by "crowds," per se, but by individuals, or small groups. The articles that cause the most itching -- and that often generate the loudest cries of "this thing sucks" -- are the ones where multiple, large groups are fighting over "which wisdom is the correct one." That, frankly, also points to the Wikipedia NOT being a good example of the wisdom of crowds; the more crowded a particular article/idea gets, the less likely we are to have agreed upon wisdom.

It's like just about any other squishy debate; it boils down to "good is good and bad is bad," and you have to define your terms better. Crowds are very bad at making quick, "genius" type decisions, for example, with limited information. Leaps of intuition and creative stuff. But they are really good at mitigating form and time factors; i.e., they can often figure out ways around things that individuals find impossible or incredibly daunting.

The question isn't "Is the Wikipedia the perfect encyclopedia with aboslutely 100% accurate information on everything in it." Because, of course, the answer to that question is, "No." The question is, "Does it do something useful that no other reference resource was doing?" And the answer to that is, "Yes." The trick is to make sure that people don't confuse one with the other. I've heard the founder of Wikipedia interviewed, and he made the point that college students shouldn't be using ANY encyclopedia as a primary reference in term papers at that level, and he finds it both amusing and somewhat odd that academics point to the Wikipedia as the problem when his project gets so cited. That's an educational issue, not a reference issue.

As to the SL voting thing... Yes, it is dumb not to be able to vote "No" on a proposal. That's a bad implementation of a voting system. But that example has nothing to do with "the wisdom of crowds." It's an example of simple "poll based" democracy, flawed as it is. Why ain't it about crowds? Because there is no "crowd requirement." You've got a choice to vote or not, yes? And not everyone does. If all SL residents were required, as part of the TOC, to cast a certain number of "vote points" both for (and against) various programs/proposals... then you might get closer to the wisdom of crowds thing. As it stands, it's a suggestion box with a ticker.

So much for staying off topic. On to the question actually posed.

4.

Q: How valuable are organizing crowd (emerging!) experiences to our online pleasures?

A: Very.

With the caveat that the single most important word in that sentence is "organizing." Whether the tools are provided to users to be self-organizing, or whether the publishers/builders do the organization themselves, some kind of organization in gaming social spaces is necessary in order for there to be increased development and progress. And by "progress," I mean "games I want to play more."

There are, for many people, deeply inherent pleasures in the guild structure, for example, that are not available in solo play. That is a gameplay social mechanism enabled partly by technology, partly by design, partly by sociological readiness. That's fantastic. The tools were there, the thought-processes were there, and now we guild. Coolio. We have the gaming equivalent of hunting buffalo in tribal societies.

In economic games/spaces, we have some social groups/branchings among players that might be the equivalent of small, local chain stores. Businesses that go beyond "me make / me sell" into "me hire / me market / me aggregate / me get affiliates." Again, that's a step up the social ladder that adds real value to the play experience for both those players, their customers and the publishers.

Bump the whole she-bang-a-bang up a notch on the quantitative scale and you start having more opportunities on both levels. We've talked about "government" before in this space. What is the minimum number of players/characters you need in a game working together before it stops being a "guild" and starts being a "municipality?" And what reasons are there for that change? Zoning of building types? Gold farming issues? RP enforcement? Protection and training of noobs? Advocating with the publishers?

Depending on what you want to do, a difference in scale can often create a difference in kind.

5.

>I choose to clip it in order to streamline the opening paragraph

Quite a clip! I'll have to remember to use that technique when I'm rushing to make notes on various books with long titles like, "State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin" or "Stalin: Breaker of Nations."

>There is a general confusion about the difference between "the wisdom of crowds," democracy, the use of "social software," and collective effort.

Oh, I don't think I'm confused about the distinctions among these different things, Andy, but sure, people blur those distinctions to suit them. Democracy isn't necessarily liberal; social software isn't necessarily liberal or democratic; wisdom of crowds might or might not be liberal or democratic (you might get a majority or an influential minority who are for the death penalty or abortion to sway legislation); and sure, collective effort is different than bureaucratic collectivism -- but it's important to cry foul as Jaron Lanier has done, when experts began to invoke the alleged authority of these systems, especially when they are a replacement for representative democracy.

I'm fine with that, and I don't think anybody's probing of these concepts has to get denigrated as "confusion".

>None of which has anything to do with the question posed on this post, which I'll get to after I'm done staying off the point like everyone else.

Andy, are you a wise crowd of one? You may determine I'm "off topic" but I hardly feel I am. I'm responding to the post, which admittedly was a skimpy one in its own right. It's just your subjective perception. I don't feel bound by it.

>I'm amazed, Prokofy, that as someone who so often complains about the troubles caused by the "game gods," you seem to have so little respect for what can be accomplished by "the wisdom of crowds" and social software, when applied correctly.

Yes, that's what they always say about communism. It's a great idea, but just nobody ever *applies it correctly*! We just need a committee of experts, smart people (surrounded by idiots) and let them organize it, especially if they are technically expert, eh?

What makes you determine that I have "little respect" for "the wisdom of crowds"? The "wisdom of crowds" in real life or in simulated life accomplishes the things that people think it does accomplish, sometimes, but it isn't for every situation. It's not a guru. It's not a necessary god, and it's not to be invoked in every situation -- and yet so often it is. You're rushing to stipulate "when applied correctly" -- and how do you know the "not applied correctly" is my main concern about it?

>The Wikipedia, to begin with, is NOT about the wisdom of crowds. It is about collective effort and "open sourcing" of content creation; greater degrees of transparency and participation. There is a big, big difference.

Says who? You? But it's not about this magical "collective effort," either, and even Clay Shirky in refuting Jaron Lanier says it's not about that. In fact, however, "collective effort applied correctly" *is* the wisdom of crowds -- it's the best effort/applied rightly that you want to tease out every time. But is it?

As for open sourcing, huh? You think a long electronic trail of a million interventions, forums, locked threads, historical discussions, disessions hiding behind every Wikipedia is transparency?? It's a forest you can't see for the trees.

What you're not seeing is the way Wikipedia rises to the top -- without merit, without checks and balances. It's whoever clicks the most, but also, whoever is determined. The Enclopedia Britannica is dead white guys, says Cory Doctorow, and Wikipedia is ostensibly this lively current discussion including a rainbow of lively experts and interested parties. All that's different is that it is done by emotions and the heart, that is, whoever has the most zeal to care about a topic, write about it, correct others, show up for the battles around it. It isn't necessarily the most knowledgeable and wise person on the topic. The Internet is very much a hot and emotional medium in that sense, unlike Television or print media usually is.

So often these days, you go to look up something, and waiting for you at the top of the Google heap is the Wikipedia entry. The two systems feed on each other, and both are suspect because they artificially elevate to 'authority' whoever gets clicks, and not even the popularity contest of clicks, but whoever is emotionally invested enough, and whoever cares enough to make a link, and whoever is influenced by other people who clicked, too. It's not a good medium in which to discover the truth.

>Yes, many people edit the damn thing as a whole, but that same principle applies to more traditional encylopediae, too. Most articles on Wikipedia are not created and edited by "crowds," per se, but by individuals, or small groups. The articles that cause the most itching -- and that often generate the loudest cries of "this thing sucks" -- are the ones where multiple, large groups are fighting over "which wisdom is the correct one."

I'm aware of all that, but it seems to me you're really stretching it when you say an Encyclopedia is "edited by many". Many people may be hired to write it, but it has an editorial board of a publishing house in ways that Wikipedia does not.

In fact as I've explained in my previous entry, the *necessary fiction* of the myth of the hive mind or the wise crowd or the gaggle of enthusiastic amateurs and the freedom of anybody to make a correction or a contribution is *what is invoked around Wikipedia* to give the entire dubious enterprise authority -- authority that isn't demonstrable, authority that doesn't have a way to prove itself in the real world, often.

That's just the problem of Wikipedia -- because it has no demonstrable, open, accountable editorial board with known credentials, any small faction, any Bolshevik revolutionary group, can seize on a meaning or a revelation or a factoid and pump it, and fight loudly for it. There's not necessarily any judgement, only the bland confidence of tekkies that correctness will rise to the top, that real authority will emerge somehow by mass wisdom, that the hard left or hard right will wash out in the middle. It's an illusion.

I'm well aware, too, from entries like on the Iranian president and his call to "wipe Israel from the face of the map" that all kinds of partisan groups come and vie with each other for the meaning, and all kinds of arguments are put forth, but this soupy medium also admits bad-faith exercises, like people endlessly parsing Persian and literary metaphors to the point that at the end of the long trail of Wikipedia exegesis, you'll wind up thinking the Iranian president wished the Jewish people to bloom like a flower in the desert, and it was all just "a way of speaking". There's no one to cry foul at the absurd lengths to which people's argumentation goes.

>That, frankly, also points to the Wikipedia NOT being a good example of the wisdom of crowds; the more crowded a particular article/idea gets, the less likely we are to have agreed upon wisdom.

Wikipedia, migrating over to Google, being used everywhere in thought-reducing Powerpoint, being pasted into blogs and memed in AIM -- well, that's quite a big infection and quite a big problem for critical thought. And the crowded pages and hyperlinks and discussions that lie behind the entry aren't often accessed.

James Surowiecki in fact had various qualifications for his own expansion of this existing theory, which included things like having a certain amount of "likemindedness" preceding the solution of a problem by the wisdom of a crowd.

Just contrast for yourself the experience you have reading the compressed, and in fact controversial in places, Wikipedia entry for this concept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

And the amazon.com reviews
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385503865/103-4263970-6827801?v=glance&n=283155

I often use amazon.com as a corrective for Wikipedia precisely because it not only has reviews from established magazines with editorial boards and *judgement* and responsibility, but thoughtful essays from individuals who sign their names and often give their affiliations.

>It's like just about any other squishy debate; it boils down to "good is good and bad is bad," and you have to define your terms better. Crowds are very bad at making quick, "genius" type decisions, for example, with limited information. Leaps of intuition and creative stuff. But they are really good at mitigating form and time factors; i.e., they can often figure out ways around things that individuals find impossible or incredibly daunting.

I know all that. So? That doesn't detract from the grave problems of hive mind/wisdom of crowds/social software is being invoked hither and yon, to excuse a multitide of authoritarian and even totalitarian sins.
The worse problem of the wisdom of crowds is that the crowd itself is not the wise force that has, like that old Alcoholics Anonymous saying phrases it, "the wisdom to know the difference" about when it's wisdom applies, and when it doesn't.

>The question isn't "Is the Wikipedia the perfect encyclopedia with aboslutely 100% accurate information on everything in it." Because, of course, the answer to that question is, "No." The question is, "Does it do something useful that no other reference resource was doing?" And the answer to that is, "Yes." The trick is to make sure that people don't confuse one with the other. I've heard the founder of Wikipedia interviewed, and he made the point that college students shouldn't be using ANY encyclopedia as a primary reference in term papers at that level, and he finds it both amusing and somewhat odd that academics point to the Wikipedia as the problem when his project gets so cited. That's an educational issue, not a reference issue.

Hardly. When he, with Google's viral power, has migrated to the top of every search query, it's not an educational problem, it's a mass media and mind control problem. This fellow is a devotee of Ayn Rand, remember.

Nobody has Encyclopedia Britannica or Funk & Wagnalls at home. They might not even have back issues of something like National Geographic let alone any authoritarive books, period. They are online, cutting and pasting. I fail to see what the great service Wikipedia does other than to perform a dogpile search for you and serve you up something that looks like a term paper mill would give you if you paid $250 to have somebody write your term paper. You saved yourself staying up all night and you'll get a passing school, but it was cheating, it was lazy, and you are the stupider for it.

>As to the SL voting thing... Yes, it is dumb not to be able to vote "No" on a proposal. That's a bad implementation of a voting system. But that example has nothing to do with "the wisdom of crowds."

Well, let me try to explain that better then, because it has *everything* to do with the wisdom of crowds, and the lack of "no" isn't just bad implementation, it's a conscious, social engineering choice.

Let's say you have an issue like "let's remove laggy telehubs and avatar-grabbing malls with expensive rents and replace them with infohubs, and let everybody just point-to-point teleport to wherever they want, without being forced through the telehub area to force commerce and socialization. Won't this be great?" There are advantages and disadvantages, as we have come to see, and yet what happens is that one "smart mob" (actually, as it happens, a very authoritarian group), puts up a proposal, gets lots of people to flash mob votes to it, people see it's popular and wish to get on the right side of history, and it just snowballs and snowballs. No one can vote no. No interest group harmed by this decision can vote no. They can only put up a counterproposal that will never be contrasted to that original proposal, which necessarily will only gather 40 votes to the original, now-popular proposal's 2500 or whatever.

In the technical model of bypassing representative government to have "direct democracy" (you can't get more wisdom-of-crowdy than that!), anyone can vote for this proposal, or, since they can't vote not, are forced to make *another* proposal, so that the challenge them merely becomes making a more *technically proficient* proposal. Voting "no" is rejected by the technicians, because that's not constructive, and dosen't help you solve a problem like "what kind of transportation and commercial hubs should we have".

So through social engineering, and invoking hive mind, they push and pull you up the ladder of what they, as the small bureaucratic elite wanted anyway: p2p. And they do this by ensuring that there's a system in place where you can't vote "no" to protest against a snowballing wise crowd coming up and clicking, and you can't get heard with a counter proposal, so only if your proposal had something particularly more brilliant about solving the same transportation issue could it maybe get votes changed or added. 10 proposals go up, and are kept atomized, no one can join blocs of votes, and the dogpile with the 600 votes wins -- the fix was in at the get-go, really. I find this system not only lame or flawed, but intrinsically evil due to its social engineering factor and dismissal of the right to say no, and stop the snowball.

>It's an example of simple "poll based" democracy, flawed as it is. Why ain't it about crowds? Because there is no "crowd requirement." You've got a choice to vote or not, yes? And not everyone does. If all SL residents were required, as part of the TOC, to cast a certain number of "vote points" both for (and against) various programs/proposals... then you might get closer to the wisdom of crowds thing. As it stands, it's a suggestion box with a ticker.

No, evidently I haven't given you enough information about this. It isn't just checking off a box that the game gods put up, yes, we love your idea. It's checking off boxes *your fellow residents put up*. The proposals all come from residents. Anyone can put one up. Thousands have been posetd. Anyone can vote, and they have 10 votes to apply even several times to show extra special support for a given issue (I marvel that the old joke about "vote early and often" is actually taken *literally* by these social engineers.)

So the wisdom of crowds is this: there is a social problem -- how can we get rid of lag and still have public transportation? And this group, that individual, this mob, comes up to the problem, and posts their proposals and their votes. And the "wisdom" is supposed to rise to the top.

Trust me, I wouldn't have studied this in the first place if I hadn't seen Cory Linden *call it the wisdom of crowds*. This is what *they call it*. And that's why we have to worry, and counter it, in my view.

>So much for staying off topic. On to the question actually posed.

*rolls eyes*

6.

Lanier seems to focus on the misperceptions of what Wikipedia is -- I had some thoughts about that a while ago posted here. And here's something kind of related.

My dominant response to this is largely a shrug, I'm afraid. This is an internicene sniping match among the prominent Web 2.0 futurists -- Lanier makes a very fuzzy thrust at enthusiasm for mass empowerment and that's followed by a very fuzzy parry by the enthusiastic.

Kind of ironic, isn't it, btw, that in response to his attack on the hivemind, we get a bevy of replies from cyberculture luminiaries that are called upon to defend the wisdom of the masses?

7.

@Prokofy:

Firstly, lest you think I am a fanboi of the wisdom of crowds at all times, let me be clear; I am not. Didn't say I was. And I think that there are clearly areas in which Wikipedia needs to be improved. But I am always amazed when people call for, essentially, its destruction. When it is termed "a bad thing entirely."

You say: "There's not necessarily any judgement, only the bland confidence of tekkies that correctness will rise to the top, that real authority will emerge somehow by mass wisdom, that the hard left or hard right will wash out in the middle. It's an illusion."

As opposed to a bland confidence that expertise will rise to the top? That real authority will emerge somehow from beauracratic processes and marketing/business strategies? That the cloisters of academe and the towers of commerce will provide all the answers?

Neither answer is correct.

The Wikipedia is less than six years old. Last time I checked, it had just bumped over the 1 million article mark in English and had something like 3 million articles in other languages. Volume does not equal quality, I agree; I state this only to make the point that there are a lot of people out there interested in contributing. Not just reading. That is astounding to me. If you had predicted those numbers 6 years ago, I'd have called you high on crack.

Hey, Our Gang Kids! For fun, in our spare time... Let's edit an online encyclopedia entry on infrared light! Yea!

There is, apparently, a vast interest in contribution. While some of it may be, especially in areas of politics, religion and culture, "at risk" from editorial goofiness... c'mon... 4 million or so articles? The reason the numbers are so high on Google is because *people like this stuff.* Not just the reading, but the linking and the writing and the editing. We trust we more than we trust they.

And here's the crux of the nub of the rub as far as I'm concerned: the likelihood of mischief or error in an article to pose real threat goes down as they chance for an error goes up. Why? Because the causes of error and mischief are rarely linked with issues that are true "information threats." Especially to the population at large.

The George W. Bush article isn't as right as the right wants it or as left as the left does. Or maybe it's waaaay toooo right, period. Question: so what? As you say, some kid gets a couple facts quickly and easily that he might have had to dig for, and maybe even a couple of facts that are skewed or even (gasp) wrong.

But are the odds -- do you think -- greater or less that he'd get those facts righter or wronger or skeweder in a pub that was edited by a review board? I guess it depends on the board, eh? If his dad hands him a copy of the "New York Times," he gets one show. If mom gives him "The Nation," he gets another. Put enough of them together and you get...

Oh, yeah. Something like the Wikipedia.

Hopefully, good teachers and librarians get people to understand the difference between primary and secondary reference. Hopefully they learn to use multiple sources. Hopefully they learn to balance different arguments and reach a conclusion based on rationality and logic. That didn't happen before the Wikipedia, though, so I'm not thinking it's a-gonna now.

Also... now that you've explained the voting issue from SL in more detail (thanks for taking the time), I see that it is a "wisdom of crowds" issue. What I don't see, at this point, is how it's unfair or why you think it didn't work, except for the fact that you didn't specifically get what you wanted. If you had the chance to propose an alternate solution to a publicly posed problem, and had access to the same styles of vote getting, publicity, user marketing, PR, etc... then the "wisdom of crowds" worked.

I still agree with you that not having a "no" vote is probably a bad idea; it can put the brakes on some really stupid stuff. But I hadn't realized that you could essentially promote a radically dissimilar solution to any proposal, which is, to a great extent, a modified veto.

If the idea (and correct me if I'm wrong) is to pose solutions to recognized problems, then the removal of veto is a method to "force progress." In some of the editorial processes I'm involved in, we have an "assumed approval" for pieces that are on a fast-track to go out. You send someone a draft and let them know that there is only a certain amount of time within which they can make changes, and that if we don't hear back, their acceptance of the draft as-is is assumed. This is a known (transparent) part of the process. People can delegate their editorial authority if they are out-of-office, or abdicate it. Their call. We do this for two reasons, mainly. First, to speed up stuff that can't wait while we call the 17 people on the review list. If they care, they'll respond. Second, to forestall the, "I didn't explicitly approve it and I don't like it now that it's printed," whine. You want in? You got a window.

It sounds to me (and, again, I may not have all the facts, so I'm trying to tread lightly here) as if this "no recourse to no" situation was set up to prevent blanket shut-downs of changes to issues in need of change. If there is an observed, recognized problem, and a call goes out for suggestions, and every single one of them gets shot down by more "no" votes than "yes" votes... that could be bad. It means that you have people who are more interested in gainsaying their neighbors than providing helpful suggestions, perhaps. I'm not saying this is the case, but it could be. After 3, 5, 7, 19, 206 ideas for how to solve the problem get posted, and all get slightly more "no" votes than "yes" votes -- maybe because of a socially engineered voting block similar to the ones you decry -- at what point to the developer/game-gods just cry, "Screw the lot of you! We're going to do what we were going to do in the first place!"

Which is what you claim they're doing anyways.

The crowd ain't always wise. I never said it was. But for the first time in history, we're able to tap into some crowd wisddom in ways -- some of which are very game-y and VW-y -- that have never been tried before. Shutting them down because they feel itchy after only a few years... I'd rather see what happens for a bit longer. I generally trust the "huddled masses" more than the elites. I'm a John Adams kinda guy.

8.

Good God.

First, permit me to introduce a concept: Argumentum ad populum. It's a fallacy. Wikipedia it. Also known as Appeal to the Majority. Very quickly, it essentially debunks the idea of Wisdom of the Crowds as useful in truth determination.

Wisdom of the Crowds has no place in the determination of objective truth. It is subjective, like democracy, which is a search for the best policy, not the truth.

Anyone who thinks the WotC philosophy can do anything more than function exactly the same as democracy is flat out wrong.

Second, to push back on topic, re: MMORPGs.

I would opine that the central reason MMOs aspire to be Massive is firstly the revenue stream. Generally speaking, there still does not exist a MMORPG that wouldn't work at levels scaled down. Take one server, maybe two or three zones, and just bring the whole thing down in size to a hundred players or less. The mechanics generally stay the same. Those that don't are almost certainly compensations, not features.

I could be wrong about that, I admit; my experience is minimal at best. What is it in an MMORPG that really couldn't be done at a smaller level?

That's the designer perspective. From a player's perspective, that's part of the charm. They derive a lot of Alone Together effects from the number of people. There is one other effect, though.

Long Tail results in Bigger Cities. Why? Because lots of people means a larger diversity of interests. So it's easier to find people like you in a place with more people; it's just statistically more likely.

You might notice, incidentally, that Wisdom of the Crowds mandates a Diversity of Opinion. However, the second condition is Independence, which is ironically less likely to exist, considering the way people tap centralized resources as knowledge bases, and especially the fact that MMORPGs are shaped into communities, which are notorious for thinking alike.

9.

I don't think it's useful to keep having this debate about Wikipedia because it's like cloth vs. disposable, people get fiercely attached to their own tribe and perceptions and you can't budge them. Yes, I definitely want a bland old white guys' editorial judgement, even if they're dead, instead of chance live half-educated but zealous mediocrities who have no name, no demonstable credentials, and from which we have no recourse.

It sounds to me that you are completely buying the Linden line on the "wisdom of crowds" voting system and perhaps more than a fanboi of WoC than you'll admit.

Again, I can only try to supply you with more feedback. Forcing progress by making everybody "be positive" and "make constructive proposals" is like being stuck in one of those horribly politically correct, brain-dead, child-centric classes with idiotic teachers that think it's ok to let Johnny spell any way he damn pleases so as not to interrupt the creative flow in Johnny's essays. Everyone is constantly forced to smile, to be positive, to be constructive. Except...all around, are awful things that cry out for criticism, that people are supposed to ignore.

See, you've already seemingly prejudged some aggressuve flashmob made up of a sub and his dommes (which is what it was for the p2p proposal)as being "progress," and that people voting "no" would therefore be "against progress" because instead of being dutifully socially-engineered into going along and making "constructive proposals," or making *alternative* proposals which the system sets you up to do, you simply voice "no".

But the alternative proposals route is a chimera. There are endless other alternatives, but whoever framed the debate first and fastest and loudest and with the most land or money or Linden friends or whatever (the very same factors that makes everyone decry representative democracy) gets up their proposal and their alts and friends crank it up to 607 before morning and then your 43 is washed out on your alternative proposal.

What voting "no" lets you do -- and why it MUST be allowed -- is try to get the game gods to realize that there is a sizeable body of opinion that doesn't want this feature, thinks it is rushed without attention to circumstances, is even harmed by it. So that if the game devs see that the 607 has a hearty 403 by morning, they think, hmm....what have we here...we have TWO wise crowds...hmmm....

People can find it easier to say no than to sweat to make an alternative or counter-proposal, because getting votes to that alternative can be very hard -- they have to fight the tide of yes that the aggressive flash-mob created first, they have to find something that still essentially gives the game gods what they want (that's what the accepted, approved proposals are usually about, making the voting a figleaf of the game devs' signals to their friends) -- and tries to draw away voters to address mitigations of the bad things that make people oppose a proposal.

"No" is easier to deliver, and it's an important feedback loop for the game gods to ask themselves: why? What must we mitigate not to harm some people in order to please the majority? What unforseen circumstances are people fearing? If the game gods just get to do what they want all the time, with their loyal coterie putting up fake props that they flash mob making it appear the masses agree, we don't have a world. And please don't tell me it's their servers and they can do what they want, when our tier is paying their expenses.

All propositions in the U.S. at voting statements have YES or NO. I can't imagine running a society where you get a proposal like, "Resolved: the City of New York should balance its budget and end the deficit through additional cigarette taxes," and not be able to vote NO, but only be able to helplessly watch, as perhaps some wealthy but minority voting bloc struggles to create the alternative to the machine: "Resolved, the city of New York should balance its budget and end the deficit but through turning off wrenched fire hydrants in the summer."

>It means that you have people who are more interested in gainsaying their neighbors than providing helpful suggestions, perhaps.

What's wrong with that? I'm not sure it would happen that way, but sometimes, people sense that a proposition isnt' at all what it seems (and it wasn't in this case I've cited of the p2p!) and that they just don't wish to accord power to whatever grouping got up the prop to keep their Linden pipelines fixed.

>I'm not saying this is the case, but it could be. After 3, 5, 7, 19, 206 ideas for how to solve the problem get posted, and all get slightly more "no" votes than "yes" votes -- maybe because of a socially engineered voting block similar to the ones you decry -- at what point to the developer/game-gods just cry, "Screw the lot of you! We're going to do what we were going to do in the first place!"

Well, they can do that, it's their code, and their servers, whatever expenses they cover, but do they wish to rule with legitimacy or not?

I don't trust the huddled masses merely because they are a fiction we aren't really accessing. They are a ruse, a shield held up by the bolshevik-type committee that invokes them and then does what they want through coercion and social-engineering.

I heard once of a fellow who really made waves in There by doing a very simple thing. He put up voting stations about pretty simple issues. Sometimes it was just reputational issues. I wasn't in There and didn't follow it, perhaps those who were in There can provide us chapter and verse, but apparently, by making it possible for "the people" to vote directly, without the filtration of resmods, forums royals, liaisons, game gods, etc. he was able to get the cat out of the bag, it was hard to go on claiming that some people or groups or issues were legitimate when they were demonstrable in fact NOT popular.


10.

Well, there are different ways "crowds" can act, also.

It's a bit oversimplistic to say that crowds are either "wise" or "stupid". When people act as a mob, they're usually pretty stupid. When they trans-act, as in a futures market, they're usually pretty wise.

With a good, strong voting system, they might be able to fall more on the "wise" side of the spectrum, but the structural mechanism of the system is going to have a lot to do with how wise the crowd turns out to be.

11.

As an introvert, I remember D&D as a week of preparation by reading the books and building a (character or adventure, depending), and anticipating actually meeting and talking with people. The games themselves were often slightly disappointing.

If you're saying that the appeal of multiplayer is more in anticipation of interaction than in actuality, I will agree with you.

I'm afraid I don't see a strong connection to the Lanier article, which is about individual vs. collective decision-making.

I believe collective decision-making is a small part of the multiplayer experience.

12.

Wisdom of the Crowds has no place in the determination of objective truth. It is subjective, like democracy, which is a search for the best policy, not the truth.

Technically, Surowiecki's conception of "wisdom of crowds" is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. It can be summarized as

"given a large enough and varied population offering up their best estimates of quantity or probability, the average of all responses will be more accurate than any given individual response."

But this is of very narrow application -- the examples are of things like guessing weight, market predictions, oddsmaking, and so on. The output of each individual must be in a form that can be averaged mathematically.

Using it for subjective things, such as opinions on politics, is a mistake.

Wikipedia does not operate by wisdom of crowds. It operates by compromise and consensus, which is a very old mechanism (whereas the wisdom of crowds phenomenon is of realtively recent vintage).

13.

The problem I've long had with the popular concept of a "wisdom of crowds" is, as Agatha said, the difference between mobs and markets: individual accountability.

Solving some social/group problem works better when individuals and their specific stakes in that problem are known. In that sense, a group may appear "wise," but it's not the fact that it's a group of people that makes it so -- it's that the people who constitute that group are accountable for their decisions and know it. When operating in a group, it's accountability that motivates people to work for the common good as well as personal gain rather than acting purely for their own gain.

Conversely, it's anonymity in a crowd that leads to social pathologies, whether we're talking about mobs torching cars or used as cover to steal TVs, or getting yelled at, gestured at, or shot at on the highway, or ninja-looting and other forms of griefing. You don't know me and you'll never see me again... so why should I care about you?

It seems to me that if designers of mass systems really wanted to promote positive group behaviors, they'd be looking for ways to incentivize personal accountability.

--Bart

14.

>Wikipedia does not operate by wisdom of crowds. It operates by compromise and consensus, which is a very old mechanism (whereas the wisdom of crowds phenomenon is of realtively recent vintage).

I find it faintly humorous that one of the things the hugely unauthoriative and misleading Wikipedia inspires people to do is to make definitive pronouncements on what it is or isn't. It's a very emotional thing.

It does *too* operate by wisdom of crowds. The idea of the wisdom of crowds, unless I've completely missed the boat here, is that anyone, expert, or concerned citizen, or good-faith reader, can come up to a wiki, or this wiki, and add something they feel relevant. Oh, sure, there are lists, and in-groups, and deleters and intrigues, and process, but in principle, as I know because I've done it, you can come to an entry and correct. That's the operating position, and that's what distinguishes it from Encyclopedia Britannica, whose pages you cannot edit or even make proposals about in any kind of real-time, meaningful way.

To discover the problems with Wikipedia, just take any subject you know something about, and read about it in Wiki, and then find some other source you know is knowledgeable, and really compare the texts carefully.

Let's take a topic, like Shamil Basayev, Chechen terrorist who was said to be killed today. The current Wikipedia on Basayev is poorly done, lacking in major facts from his biography, and having the look and feel of something botted up from a lot of automatic fetch-its, or created by committee, with possibly, who knows, some undertow underneath all the hypertexts with fierce pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin intrigues.

There are so many things wrong with this entry that I could write a magazine article on it -- the manipulative little Reuters-like phrase in his bio of "self-described terrorist" -- as if a person who publicly takes responsibility for, and is documented as, mass-murdering innocent civilians in attacks involving things like booby-traps and theater raids and taking school-kids hostage, isn't a terrorist.
Wikipedia likes to be politically correct, however.

Next, they can't resist sticking in something completely culturally insignifant: "and high-school valedictorian" like they were one of the tabs -- although "high-school valedictorian" isn't even a cultural or educational category in Russia of any kind of significance as it is in the U.S.

But, just looking at the face of it, you see they have what the knowledgeable reader could pick out as a tell-tale clue:

>Spent the next two years in the Soviet military serving as a firefighter

You can see this was in 1982 and ff. during the height of the Andropovshchina.

You'd then have to pour over the rest of the text hoping for more, but being disappointed, precisely because it reads like bot-aggregates and cut-and-paste (so much of Wikipedia is often just a cut-and-paste from other sites, not even with credit always).

You'd then find the bit about Abkhazia, that Basayev fought on the side of the separatists -- wierd that, if it plays into the hands of the Russians, eh?:
"It has been rumored that the volunteers were trained and supplied by some part of the Russian army (alternatively the GRU, or the VDV troops stationed there as peacekeepers), although no evidence to support these allegations has been found."

Then read "Moscow News", which is a fairly independent site, but by no means free of bias.
http://www.mosnews.com/mn-files/basaev.shtml

They'll include right up front the salient phrase "allegedly trained by military intelligence" (also you can find the bits in Moscow News profile in their archives that Wikipediastis no doubt cribbed as it reads word for word).

Wikipedia leaves out "allegedly trained by military intelligence" although every single thing in the biography points to it, that he was an elaborate agent provocateur, possibly who then broke away.

Here's what Wikipedia puts on this very salient biographical fact: "It has been rumored that the volunteers were trained and supplied by some part of the Russian army (alternatively the GRU, or the VDV troops stationed there as peacekeepers), although no evidence to support these allegations has been found."

So what they've done is faked editorial judgement, substiting the merging and cutting of points of view on the hard left or hard right around this particular figure and his related issues, and wound up, under colour of being "neutral," merely playing into the Kremlin line.

The most important thing taught to me by people like the journalists at the New York Times is that you must present the facts from all sides, the opinions of the five Ws, and *let the reader judge for himself*. Wikipedia is porridge, served up to prevent the reader from having to judge, and also making it *seem* as if all kinds of people, Soviet experts, Chechen experts were allowed to come up to this grand enterprise, contribute to it -- yes, that's wisdom of crowds! -- and what emerges is then "the truth" or "a reasonable presentation of the story given the diverse points of view".

But it's not. And it doesn't help you get at the truth because it doesn't make you aware of multiplicity of views and sources, it *serves up the bland porridge* and gains authority -- and then having created bland porridge as a standard, slips in exotically tendentious links or quotes or other mishaps scattered about, without any commentary.

Reading the external links and the sources, I can see that the usual "hidden agenda" or "high emotion" factor is at play: people known to have real axes to grind on this issue have bestirred themselves to go get their links or posts put up on Wikipedia and thus to get it "authenticated". These people are the types that a conscious, credentialed, knowledgeable editorial board would not permit into the process because they are not credible sources to start with. Yet on Wikipedia, they are Link Kings.

I don't see this at all being about "consensus". Consensus on something like a facts page has to be about presenting the story fairly and objectively from differing sides so that *the reader can judge for himself*. I don't want Wikipedia's judgement; it has none. That's its problem, and it winds up then feeding many sectarian agendas as a result.

As for the "old mechanism" stuff and the wisdom of crowds being of recent vintage, I'm not buying it. Ever since time immemorial, even without being connected, people came along a forest path, saw it was washed out, and looked around and so that those befoer them put up a bridge or board around the pond.

15.

I agree with Raph, both on WoC and Wikipedia.

On the WoC, I'd go even further to note that 'diversity' needs to specified over some appropriate domains. Diversity with respect to one's answer to the question, 'Where were you born?', is rarely going to be enough.

It's also not enough that the 'recognized' problem (aside: yikes, what an invitation to a infinite regress) be one where respondents can give a quantitative output. ANY proposition (whether you or someone else want to call it subjective or objective) can be turned into a question that asks for quantitative input: just tack on 'what probability would you assign to the proposition that _p_?'

In fact, other than the very narrow contexts Raph cites the theories not very clear HOW we are supposed to know just when or how WoC works.

Two enourmous virtues of personal knowledge are:

1. It succumbs to dialectic. We can interrogate a proponent for reason, rationale, evidence to justify their claims or positions as true.

2. It succumbs to accountability. Individuals can be identified with the positions, claims, policies they advance.

You cannot meet those criteria as effectively with a crowd-derived position as individuals, particularly when no one in the crowd even believes the proposition is true.

I think this is a big part of the point Prokofy and Michael were raising.

My own 2 cents is that appealing to WoC as an _epistemic_ engine (even for 'objective' truths) is as laughable as appealing to a magic 8-ball. It's also horribly misnamed.

16.

Prokofy: Why don't you fix it?

17.

Ian, because to participate in this illegitimate process is to legitimize it. I just try to work around Wikipedia, urge people to find other sources and to triangulate.

18.

With a good, strong voting system, they might be able to fall more on the "wise"
side of the spectrum, but the structural mechanism of the system is going to have
a lot to do with how wise the crowd turns out to be.

The problem I've long had with the popular concept of a "wisdom of crowds"
is, as Agatha said, the difference between mobs and markets: individual accountability.

---

Consider an extreme voting system that biased its decisions to the wisest: a meritocracy.
Would that still be a crowd?

I believe collective decision-making is a small part of the multiplayer experience.

---

Depends if one has the view that the crowd in the MMOG is equivalent to the "internet"
(in the sense used by Jaron in the example above): is it an "entity that has something
to say."

For example, what is play, what is *fair* play, how should one present yourself
(conversation style, optimal character configuration etc) to others to fit in, who
gets rewarded with reputation and groups. Sure, a Cultural statement. But
some cultures are more collectivist than others.

19.

Michael>
Generally speaking, there still does not exist a MMORPG that wouldn't work at levels scaled down. Take one server, maybe two or three zones, and just bring the whole thing down in size to a hundred players or less.
---------------------


Here is a thought experiment.

Imagine a most clever shard.

A shard where servers sprung up underfoot like toadstools as you roamed around: creating the illusion of an MMOG-sized place. Imagine too a smart bit of technology by which players were zapped around as part of the tapestry of a seamless illusion of mixing it up with each other all the time. Furthermore, perhaps, using a clever LOD scheme - some of those avatars further away might even be NPCs running around - contributing to your busy imagination.

How many avatars would you need to see to continue to believe you were in an MMOG? How many players would you actually need to be able to chat to to be convinced?

20.

Prokofy: Are you being ironic? Hard to tell...

P: "I find it faintly humorous that one of the things the hugely unauthoriative and misleading Wikipedia inspires people to do is to make definitive pronouncements on what it is or isn't..."

Then:

P: "It does *too* operate by wisdom of crowds."

Sounds pretty definitive...

Anyway. Earlier you said you weren't confused about what the WoC was. Now you say, "Unless I've completely missed the boat here..."

I tried to point out earlier, and now Raph has, that the WoC is a "group mind for the solving of particular problems" issue, not a "bunch of people wrangling over contested issues" issue.

See:

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/excerpt.html

for a very quick overview of the book itself.

The individual members of the "wise crowd" have no idea if they are wrong or right, or how wrong or right they are. It's the final, essentially "average" -- although some examples use more complex math than averaging -- results we're talking about. And systems like the Wikipedia, and like MMOs/VWs aren't based on folks taking a stab at one particular answer to a very particular question, but on many "answer behaviors" strung together. There are crowds, yes. There may or may not be wisdom, yes. But the term is getting blamped around to mean and not mean everything from "democracy" to "hive mind" and it's not any of those things. "Intelligence Aggregation" would have been a much safer term, but would probably have sold a lot fewer books.

The questions answered in a WoC scenario (as the term is meant by James Surowiecki, the author) MUST have an actual answer. One that can be pointed to as a fact; not one that can be argued over as a good-better-best choice. Shortest distance, beans in the jar, etc.

You raist many good issues about the Wikipedia, most of which I agree with qualitatively, just not quantitatively; i.e., I don't think it's as bad as you do. It's a tool with some valid uses.

It does one thing, though, beyond any argument -- remind the "old white men," the experts, the pundits and the professional editors and writers (like me), that the audience is REAL. And it helps "size" the audience and its attention and emotional focus. Those things are good to know.

Recall that the original OED was researched and edited by amateurs under the direction of the dons. With proper guidance, after an initial period of chaos, perhaps, the Wikipedia might grow into something more than it is.

21.

>How many players would you actually need to be able to chat to to be convinced?

Um...17? Sounds like a nice way to make a game on a shoestring tho.

While we're on the subject of voting and the idiocies of crowd-controlling, I have to note the brave attempt of Jessica Elytis to try to propose reforms to this highly-flawed voting system here:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=119611

and the Torley Linden response:

"One reason why you can allocate more than a single vote to a proposal at present is to indicate where your personal priorities and commitments are. For example, giving all 10 to something instead of spreading 2 votes amongst 5 proposals may be a good indicator you *really* care about an issue. It's about prioritization and focus.

#2 is interesting because it connects to what we want to do in the way of better inworld announcements and an improved MotD tool.

"Nay" voting wasn't done because of concerns it'd be used to grief the system; using your scenario, a group of people could target proposals they don't like and strike them down en masse by voting no. I do understand, however, the absence of an opinion isn't the same as saying "HELL NO!"


So...we can't vote no because groups of people might flash mob and "target proposals they don't like," but when groups of people flash mob and target proposals they DO like, that's ok. Huh?

Of course, the one time when people tried to use the YES positive system as a note of protest was when hundreds of votes were quickly gathered in favour of a proposal to dump the no-CC registration system recently installed at SL. The Lindens swiftly responded by "accepting" the proposal (the option for where proposals go) and saying it was "in development" as in 'being coded'. However, that was just a ruse to get it done with, because they weren't rolling back the decision disliked by many residents; they were merely going to institute a system of displaying verified or non-verified status.

So people flew at it again, trying to put up a proposal again, and this one got answered as "no doable" lol.

22.

Um, I read that long ago, re-read it, and re-read it some more, champ. Please.

Yes, I'm being ironic a bit because it's merely a school-yard game of "I'm right, you're wrong".

The individual members of the "wise crowd" have no idea if they are wrong or right, or how wrong or right they are. It's the final, essentially "average" -- although some examples use more complex math than averaging -- results we're talking about.

>the audience is REAL

The encyclopedia companies knew this, too. That's why they sold their product door to door and got their product in every household. It's a pretty awesome responsibility, being an encyclopedia company.

There's no way Wikipedia can grow into anything more responsible. It can only grow more tentacles, become more shadowy, and more Bolshevik in invoking the end (aggregate wisdom, wisdom of crowds, openness, participation) to justify the means (closed lists, bureaucratic processes, sectarian). This is such an old story, I don't see why more people don't see it.

Yuh, I know. They come up, give it their best shot, think they are right, but can't know, and the aggregate is used to deliver the "wisdome".

My point -- which is made by others here, too -- is that the process of editing by committee on matters of philosophy, or politics or *cough* games, isn't as neat a trick as figuring out how many pennies are in the job or whether it's quicker to Chicago, or by bus.

That's when the aggregate gets to be dumb and undifferentiated and harmful.

23.

I think the following quote from Soriwiecki is illustrative of what's gone wrong here. It's from a Q and A posted on Random House's own site.

"I think the most important lesson is not to rely on the wisdom of one or two experts or leaders when making difficult decisions. That doesn't mean that expertise is irrelevant, or that we don't need smart people. It just means that together all of us know more than any one of us does."

The problem with this is several-fold:

1. Even if everything Surowiecki claims about WoC were true,
the conclusion above does NOT follow.

2. His own notion of collective judgment holds no water.
According to his own theory, the collective judgment is no
'collective'at all; nor is it a judgment.
In it's barest terms its nothing more than a feature of
distributions over people's subjective probabilities about
certain classes of problem (I mean subjective
probabilities' in the way philosophers of science and
probability like, Suppes use it)

3. As a result, all WoC really shows is that individual human
brains are so smart in some domains that if you poll enough
of them (and don't let them interact meaningfully), you
will find a distribution of answers whose
'average' falls remarkably near the optimal answer (which
in the case of guessing means 'the' answer).

4. So, it really has nothing to do with either 'wisdom' or
even 'aggreagate intelligence'. Wisdom implies knowledge,
which WoC can't provide even under it's own favored
circumstances, since it doesn't purport to provide
truth. In other words, it's a theory about subjective
probabilities and human cognition. It has nothing to do
with some kind of knowledge that arises from crowds.
It's not an epistemological theory at all. (Aggregate
intelligence is also inadequate, since their is no
aggregation at all in Sorewiecki's account. Aggregation
implies something like addition, accretion, etc. But,
again, the phenomenon Soriwiecki is trying to capture is
not at all about summing intelligence--whatever that would
be--rather, in his own theory, it's about the statistical
distribution of individual answers.

Bottom line, while WoC is a woefully inadequate name for a very interesting facet of human cognition, it does little of the heavy lifting either it's proponents or detractors have assumed it does.

And the more I think about the more I believe that it is 99.9% likely that Surowiecki's WoC has nothing at all to say about virtual worlds as hypercomputers or supraintelligent machines.

Of course, you could always run a poll on the subject... ;p


24.

And yes I managed to spell Surowiecki different every time I tried to write it.

25.

Nate proposed a thought experiment:

How many avatars would you need to see to continue to believe you were in an MMOG? How many players would you actually need to be able to chat to to be convinced?

I'm a bad case study, because (1) my brain is very categorical, and I could tell you a swath of trivia about hundreds of people I've never met. None famous. And, (2) I've never really gotten into anything running more than 600 average concurrent (personal anecdotal statistic), so I don't know what it "feels like" to be in a MMOG. Last, (3) I am an introvert, and even small numbers of strangers can feel like a crowd. Upon entering a crowd, real or virtual, it is a habit to splice and analyze to lessen my dislike.

So I'd have to ask someone else. But to actually treat your experiment directly...

Several months ago, I decided to drop in on God Wars II because I'd heard it had a room-less movement system. (That's an arguable technical detail which is irrelvant.) At times, there were twelve people. If I must answer the question directly, then there you go. A round dozen. (GW2 has no NPCs, unless you cound mobs, which I don't; nor is it an RPG.) Or zero. I elaborate:

I've experienced the same game (Dragonrealms by Simutronics) from the perspective of both a newbie and an oldbie, and I remember them both vividly, so I can cognize the difference very well. The feel of being in a massive place existed in both GW2 and DR. The players didn't change that, for me; my ability to be oriented did. (Example: Travelling to Therenborough, the northernmost city, was once an awe-inspiring adventure. Now it's a 20 minute trip; less, if I use specialized travel.)

Let me try to turn the experiment back upon you. Conceive of the MMORPG, if you will, in terms of its mechanics. I won't even ask that you separate "world" from "game". Use Skotos' idea of a Stage, if you like. Then ask: which of these mechanics actually require a thousand concurrent? Which of them require several million social or political or economic actors? Would the experience really change, if it were smaller, and there were less people?

At a certain breaking point, of course it will, because you'll know everyone. That's why I specified, loosely, a hundred. Because the human brain can't usually take a hundred new connections so easily, so there's bound to be a collection of strangers. I have yet to hear an argument that any of these grandiose MMORPGs (still generally speaking) are not in fact Diku derivatives. I don't even mean a sound argument; I mean that it's so blatantly obvious that no one even tries to argue otherwise.

I'm wildly off-topic, here, and rambling... but yes, I am reiterating a whine about lack of innovation, blah, blah. It's the same game at a couple dozen as it is a couple million.

26.

Fyi -

A couple of other conversations around the net continuing this one:

Raph writes:


You can summarize the core phenomenon as “given a large enough and varied population offering up their best estimates of quantity or probability, the average of all responses will be more accurate than any given individual response.”

The jelly bean jar counting works because aggregation averages out individual extremes. Quantizing ignorance is still ignorance. Consider the case where most of the folks in the jelly bean counting case can't see the jar but are guessing.


The basic example of Wisdom of Crowds is “get 100 people to guess how many beans are in a jar. Nobody will be right, but the average of their guesses will be right.” It is important that the 100 people not be experts, specialists, or all completely ignorant either — you want a diverse group on every axis you can manage.

Consider a broad-spectrum reputation scheme. Why would I want the general population picking my friends, rather, I would want people who are like me doing the selecting.

Related to Jaron's point about the crowd shouldn't ask the questions it then answers, e.g. everyone voting for a "swell guy who I Joe J Public liked" versus "somebody who seems a good fit for Amanda Q Smith."


Tony Walsh on Clickable Culture wrote:


I see Lanier's statement about "people pretending something better than themselves exists in the computer" as applicable to virtual worlds, too... virtual worlds just aren't a substitute for the real one... To bring it back to my understanding of Lanier's line of thinking, putting too much weight in the output of collectively-curated online spaces isn't such a hot idea.

27.

Bill Patry's comments:

http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2006/08/wikipedia-and-digital-maoism.html

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