WhenBusiness, A Passion for Small Business

Wisdom of Crowds

The premise of this site is based on a book called, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Some of you may have either come across it or just plainly heard that the if you get a diverse sizable enough crowd, you will be able to find the most correct answer in any given cognitive problem. It will typically be more thorough, and at a completeness level much higher than any expert. This idea has been around for a long time now, and is now the underpinnings to everything from statistical population sampling (polling), to restaurant and product reviews (yelp.com, epinions.com), to the ask the audience lifeline from the show “Who wants to be a Millionaire”.

Crowd Smarts

This is taken from a Q&A with the author of the book that highlight the largest reasons that the wisdom of crowds should be used much more.

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

Why are we not better off finding an expert to make all the hard decisions?

Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also, like all of us, have biases. It’s very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people, and almost never does that same person know more about a whole series of questions. The other problem in finding an expert is that it’s actually hard to identify true experts. In fact, if a group is smart enough to find a real expert, it’s more than smart enough not to need one.

Money Bacon

is a term we’ve been using for awhile, which is similar to signal vs noise, except in situations where there is more signal to decipher than noise. When you get too much varying points of signal, some of it excellent (money) and some of it Bacon (still wonderful, but obviously not good for you). Obviously too much of both is bad for you, but not too many people would turn away money or bacon. So we get into these types of Money Bacon scenarios when we are researching answers to our thoughts. Incomplete answers or half truths we find while doing research are the bacon. It’s yummy, and not noise, but it has potentially serious side effects. Answers found through crowds however, is Money, good quality material that puts your mind at ease. As I said earlier, too much of either can be a bad thing. The May 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association ran a series of experiments of varying levels of options, and found that too many options leads to undesirableness to continue searching and mind fatigue. Our minds are wonderful at deducing small amounts of options, but when we open up avenues of hundreds, or worse thousands of options at a correct answer, we get mind fatigue and our minds just can’t process that information succinctly. We end up with doubt, anxiety, and uneasy feeling that perhaps this one answer out of hundreds is the wrong one. So we keep searching.

The Problem Today, Search

The search engine is both a saving grace but also still not at the point where we need it to be. Answers are not immediately available for any type of question entered into that magic little box. So we int roduced tools to try to man age how we ask and search for questions on the internet.

I’m certain we’ve all had this scenario, one time or another. We have a very specific question that we type into Google, and get a series of blogs answering the question. They blog post offers an answer or some tips, and yes, it might be an answer, but is it the right answer? Sometimes, but typically not, and depending on the site you visit, there’s only half truths put in print, so your liable now for figuring out this puzzle piece together to ensure you have the right answer. Now your job is to laboriously go back and forth between search results and see differing opinions on the same question, but are they right? Who knows? Money Bacon!

Then there are traditional message boards, typically a top-down chronologically ordered or threaded conversation with sometimes a single response per page. This format does have many varying opinions all in one place, but then you have to hunt through sometimes 20 pages of material for the answer, or follow the full thread in order to understand what happened from pages 5 - 10. Sometimes you get the right answer, it is done in crowds after all, but seeking through 20 pages of content, off-topic blabber and “me too” posts is definitely a time waster. Let’s just say we got the first 10 iterations of the “message board” wrong for question and answers, and better for conversation, though not great.

How WhenBusiness.com Works

Some sites get it right, CNN Small Business Answers works sometimes, but good luck trying to get your questions answered, they only answer a select few every week. A few? Really!? Thanks CNN. Yahoo Answers sometimes does as well, but the amount of repetitive questions found is still difficult to deduce so many right answers.

We started WhenBusiness.com because we wanted to have the ability to notify a user that a question has already been answered as they’re typing a question. You have the ability to vote on questions that you would like to know the answer to as well, instead of writing a “me too” post.
This makes the most important questions rise to the top of the list. As well as the ability to vote on the the best answer, here the wisdom of crowds is essential. The best answer will always follow question. So if you want to see in order of correctness or completeness, the list of answers you can, with the most correct up top. If you think you can contribute to that answer, you can simply edit the answer, keeping in mind the intent of the originating author.

The Power of the Crowds

It’s amazing to have watched the entire growth of Wikipedia, while certainly there are many inaccuracies, the amount of correct information is indeed riveting. For a collection of complete strangers to say, here, create a page on mostly anything you want and make it right, it’s quite an accomplishment. Together, with the crowds, we can make WhenBusiness, a top option in answering small business questions for and by the crowd.

If you have a moment, I recommend this Ted Talk on “The Web, and Random Acts of Kindness” by Jonathan Zittrain.