Stephen Downes

Dave Pollard revisits - and revises - his thoughts from twenty years ago on the wisdom of crowds. "Once we start to look at real crowds - large, disparate, disorganized, distracted, preoccupied, gullible, confused, and often uninformed, misinformed, and distraught groups of people - we cannot expect any wisdom, or indeed, any coordinated, intentional, rational actions." So how could James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds have seemed so right back then and so wrong today. I think part of the explanation lies in the distinction between groups and networks. Groups are not wise at all, but networks can be. And part of it lies in different ways of being 'wise'. We associate a lot of the trappings of cognitive science with wisdom - executive function, intentionality, purpose, etc. - and that's one type of wisdom, maybe, but not the sort of wisdom we would associate with networks, which instead excel at non-'cognitive' forms of wisdom: pattern recognition, self-organization, etc.