Wisdom of the Crowd? I Think Not

Have you seen the new CBS drama “Wisdom of the Crowd”? Well, here’s the official series synopsis from the network: it’s “a drama about a visionary tech innovator who creates a cutting-edge crowdsourcing app to solve his daughter's murder, and revolutionize crime solving in the process. Inspired by the notion that a million minds are better than one, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jeffrey Tanner, develops ‘Sophe,’ an online platform for publicly shared information he's certain will find his daughter's killer.”

Yeah, I know about the notion, but in case you don't, here’s the tale: In episode one, Tanner (Jeremy Piven) relates how, in 1906, a statistician asked every member of the crowd at a county fair how much a certain ox weighed, and – although no guess was correct – the “average” was within one percent of the ox’s actual weight. True story…

Of course, CBS’s version has nothing to do with guessing the weight of an ox or making any other sort of random stab at a factoid. Instead, it’s about how a social media application can be used as for ad hoc surveillance, enlisting the citizenry to do what the cops can’t (or, according to the scripts, won’t). Unfortunately, some creative type decided that calling the series “Wisdom of the Crowd” would pull in more eyeballs than “Crowdsourcing” or “Amateur NSA Surveillance.” Go figure.
When you come right down to it, however, the very notion that social media could be used in a setting like the ox-weight question is fallacious. The phenomenon works best in situations when 1) there’s an objective answer to the question, 2) the crowd is statistically diverse, and 3) all of the guesses are made anonymously and in secret. Point (3) is at the center of the fallacy inherent in this show’s plot: even if the “Sophe” (the name's clearly a nod to the Greek word sophos [σοφός], or wisdom) users were asked an objective question – e.g., “How tall is the suspect?” – anyone who’s spent any time on social media knows that the popularity of certain members will skew the “average" of all the answers. Ditto with strangers listening to everyone else's answers: you'll unconsciously (probably) try to curry favor with strong or attractive individuals by mirroring their guesses.

So no, a social media platform can’t be used to tap the alleged wisdom of a crowd, not without a lot more screening that appears to have gone into Sophe. And while we’re at it, the ox weight question? It wasn’t the “average” that was so accurate, it was the geometric mean… but I don’t expect most scriptwriters to know the difference.

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