You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Page B

suddenly jump into an overexcited state when too many rapid changes coincide in such a way that they don’t cancel one another out.
    For instance, stock markets might adopt automatic trading shutoffs, which are triggered by overly abrupt shifts in price or trading volume. (In Chapter 6 I will tell how Silicon Valley ideologues recently played a role in convincing Wall Street that it could do without some of these checks on the crowd, with disastrous consequences.)
    Wikipedia had to slap a crude low-pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as “President George W. Bush.” There’s now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else’s text fragments. I suspect that these kinds of adjustments will eventually evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the internet arrived.
    The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives can yield brilliant results given enough time—but sometimes there isn’t enough time. A problem like global warming might automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it. (Insurance rates, for instance, would climb.) Alas, in this case there doesn’t appear to be enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.
    Another example of the slow hive problem: there was a lot of technology developed—but very slowly—in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how to be empirical, before we knew how to have a peer-reviewed technical literature and an education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to determine the value of inventions.
    What is crucial about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, notjust pure openness and concessions to the collective. This is an idea that will be examined in Chapter 10 .
An Odd Lack of Curiosity
    The “wisdom of crowds” effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool. Unfortunately, simplistic free market ideologues and noospherians tend to reinforce one another’s unjustified sentimentalities about their chosen tools.
    Since the internet makes crowds more accessible, it would be beneficial to have a wide-ranging, clear set of rules explaining when the wisdom of crowds is likely to produce meaningful results. Surowiecki proposes four principles in his book, framed from the perspective of the interior dynamics of the crowd. He suggests there should be limits on the ability of members of the crowd to see how others are about to decide on a question, in order to preserve independence and avoid mob behavior. Among other safeguards, I would add that a crowd should never be allowed to frame its own questions, and its answers should never be more complicated than a single number or multiple choice answer.
    More recently, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has argued that applications of statistics, such as crowd wisdom schemes, should be divided into four quadrants. He defines the dangerous “Fourth Quadrant” as comprising problems that have both complex outcomes and unknown distributions of outcomes. He suggests making that quadrant taboo for crowds.
    Maybe if you combined all our approaches you’d get a practical set of rules for avoiding crowd failures. Then again, maybe we are all on the wrong track. The problem is that there’s been inadequate focus on the testing of such ideas.
    There’s an odd lack of curiosity about the limits of crowd wisdom. This is an indication of the faith-based motivations behind such schemes. Numerous projects have looked at how to improve specific markets and other crowd wisdom systems, but too few projects have framed the question in more general terms or