Are Crowds Looking Better These Days?
Facebook is reported to be using crowdsourcing to keep Fake News in check. See https://headleaks.com/2016/12/facebook-tries-crowdsourcing-fact-checkers-to-fight-fake-news/
Trust in numbers. That’s what democracy is all about, right? In a representative democracy, crowds pick their representatives by majority rule. (I’m talking about the principle, not a debacle like the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.) Wisdom flows from the crowd. . . all of us persuaded of crowd wisdom are prepared to hand over most decisions to the crowd. Thus the popularity of ballot initiatives, such as the ones to legalize marijuana in several states in the 2016 election—let the voters decide, directly. Real democracy. Obtains the wisest results. If two heads are better than one, a million heads are better than. . . yours.
Or are they? There are a couple of things that call that into question crowd wisdom when applied to our real, complex, modern world.