Steve Kinney

If you think about it, the idea of social networking is incredible. An individual labels a page with tags they consider to be relevant. Whether these tags have anything to do with the page in question is completely subjective. However, if a thousand people all tag a page using their own individual judgment, the result is an incredibly accurate description of the site.

James Surowiecki writes about this same phenomenon in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki spins the tale of Francis Galton, a British scientist from the turn of the last century. Galton was a bit of a naysayer. He was also a bit full of himself. He believed that the crowd was inherently foolish. To prove this, he designed a test.

He strolled down to the local fair grounds and set up shop next to a “Guess the Weight” booth featuring a rather large pig. Galton diligently recorded the guesses. Some contestants overestimated the pig’s weight my a ridiculous amount; others did the same in the opposite direction. Galton noticed some of the guessers had a wealth of experience with pigs and were able to consider a number of factors that led them to very informed guesses. At the end of the day, he found something absolutely startling: the average of all of the guesses was better than the closest individual guess.

This scenario has been repeated a million times over. A large number of people, working with their own private knowledge, are able to make incredibly astute predictions that would elude even the most seasoned panel of experts. In The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki elaborates on this phenomenon. He even tells the tale of how the stock market was able to predict what went wrong in the Columbia shuttle crash before any of the experts were able to.

 I can’t help but think of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap, as I write this article. Homer-Dixon is an environmentalist who believes that we are creating global problems that are going to take an increasing amount of ingenuity to solve.One of the only ways we’re going to be able to keep up is shift the paradigm in which we solve problems. Rather than relying on experts to solve the world’s problem, which are growing in both number and intensity, we need to find a way to tap into the crowd for ingenuity.

Bringing this kind of thinking into our classrooms is an excellent way to accelerate the process.

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