Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest vid on how to think about and avoid emergent stupidity in groups.
TLDR: Ways of avoiding it:
1. To utilize collective intelligence of group, must find format for group interactions in which every person is comfortable coming forward with their information and perspective.
2. Must find a way to prevent one person from being biased by another, to the extent possible.
3. Avoid our natural tendancy to focus on issues which come up more frequently, vs those which are more important. Quandrant tables which help identify which items are important/urgent, important/not urgent, not important/urgent, and not important/not urgent can be useful.
4. Reminding people that their opinion might be biased can help reduce the effect, at least in small groups.
5. In larger crowds like in social media, sometimes “just stepping back and thinking about what you’re doing” is helpful.
6. Beat the crowd by being part of a group. Studies have found that small groups perform better than individuals on tasks for which there is a right or wrong answer. Eg, not sure if an email/tweet/etc is legit or scam? Ask a few friends.
7. Biggest problems for groups in getting things right is having confident people. Confident people tend to make up their minds first, which causes an information cascade that sways the rest of the group. Problem is when they are wrong, they tend to amplify the errors.
8. Egocentric bias - we tend to overate our own opinions. Try to hold back on forming your own opinion.
9. Garbage in, garbage out. Try improve quality of your own opinions by carefully choosing your inputs. If everyone in group does this, more likely to avoid collective stupidity.
TLDR: Ways of avoiding it:
1. To utilize collective intelligence of group, must find format for group interactions in which every person is comfortable coming forward with their information and perspective.
2. Must find a way to prevent one person from being biased by another, to the extent possible.
3. Avoid our natural tendancy to focus on issues which come up more frequently, vs those which are more important. Quandrant tables which help identify which items are important/urgent, important/not urgent, not important/urgent, and not important/not urgent can be useful.
4. Reminding people that their opinion might be biased can help reduce the effect, at least in small groups.
5. In larger crowds like in social media, sometimes “just stepping back and thinking about what you’re doing” is helpful.
6. Beat the crowd by being part of a group. Studies have found that small groups perform better than individuals on tasks for which there is a right or wrong answer. Eg, not sure if an email/tweet/etc is legit or scam? Ask a few friends.
7. Biggest problems for groups in getting things right is having confident people. Confident people tend to make up their minds first, which causes an information cascade that sways the rest of the group. Problem is when they are wrong, they tend to amplify the errors.
8. Egocentric bias - we tend to overate our own opinions. Try to hold back on forming your own opinion.
9. Garbage in, garbage out. Try improve quality of your own opinions by carefully choosing your inputs. If everyone in group does this, more likely to avoid collective stupidity.