Disinformation: A Useful Factoid
June 3, 2011
When can too much information be bad? When it comes to a group, so says Wired Science in “Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds.”
Newly-released research on crowd wisdom finds that “when test participants were told about their peers’ guesses,” test results when awry. It appears that “knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines collective wisdom.”
The results confirm one of James Surowiecki’s tenets behind crowd analytics from his 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” In it, he discusses four conditions necessary to promote the phenomenon, one of which is that each individual in the group should have private information.
The news that the information people receive influences their decision making is no revelation to advertisers and educators, who have relied on it for years. In theory, members of the group would come to valid conclusions based on good data. However, the crowd can just as easily be influenced by bad information, giving a new meaning to garbage in, garbage out.
Disinformation has another tool methinks.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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