The Wisdom of the Biggest Crowd, the Internet

Decentralization, according to Surowiecki, is the best way to acquire the smartest information. “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (XIII) When provided with no overhead supervision and plenty of incentives, the total group knowledge of a large diverse group of people proves to be smarter than the smartest of their number. Instead of a top-down centralization system that focuses on hierarchy and answering to superiors, decentralization works with a form of anarchy where the individual, by knowing what's best for himself and aggregating that information with his peers, in turn knows what is best for the group as a whole. He calls this the Wisdom of Crowds and contests against other theorists that despite historical evidence proving that group thought and crowd thinking are detrimental and savage, collective wisdom is actually an untapped resource.

A decentralized approach to solving an issue can cover several different types of problems. Cognitive problems, which have a definitive answer, coordination problems, which require understanding and aggregation, and cooperation problem, which require people not letting their differences get in the way of achieving a common goal (even if they hate each other). All three types of problems are more easily resolved in a decentralized system as the individuals working to solve the problem operate in their own area of knowledge and expertise, ideally without overhead influence.

Decentralization requires a large enough body of diversity to make the information bell curve. It also requires a degree of autonomous thinking, where the ideas expressed by the individual reflect their local knowledge and are not influenced in any way by other individuals. But most importantly, the different between successful decentralization and the mess that is the U.S. intelligence community is that successful decentralization only works with a proper method of aggregation. If the expertise of the individual or even the small group can’t reach the collective knowledge of the whole, then it is useless and doesn't contribute to the wisdom of the crowd.

Successful examples of decentralization, such as the Linux program and Google, work because despite the lack of a central overhead figure, they have comprehensive ways of aggregating their total knowledge. In the case of Linux, it is by coders writing back to the system and providing many bug fixes. Google depends on the work of several smaller programmers and search engines and aggregates the information itself. Another successful example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia moderators aggregate the collective knowledge of the website users collected consciousness, though Surowiecki would argue that by having ‘specialists’ siphon the information on Wikipedia, we are still missing out on important wisdom. The smartest of the Wikipedia community are still not smarter than the group as a whole.

And yet the largest decentralized experiment in human history, the internet, doesn't have a clear aggregation method. It functions well on its own rules of anarchy and yet, is the most highly successful experiment in decentralization. Its sample population to draw resources from is as diverse as the human species can be as it is anyone who has ever owned a computer and contributed information to its vast network of servers and sites, the largest body of diversity conceivable. There's no pressure for the individual to be influenced by overhead influence, as there is typically no motivation to contribute information to the internet that isn't self-serving. We post on Facebook because we want the attention, we comment on Youtube videos because we want to be heard, and we get into arguments about the quality of Xena love triangles because we want to sound smarter than our peers. 

In aggregating this information, the closest we have to overhead control are search engines and even those are decentralized. Between Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and countless others decentralized search engines, who count on a decentralized system themselves, the collective knowledge of the internet is at our fingertips, the ultimate Wisdom of the Crowd, the human race. And just because the system doesn't work perfectly, doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. As long as it keeps going, it's fixing itself and getting better and smarter all the time, just as Surowiecki's analysis predicts it should.