Why Democracy Works

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Clarissa

January 14, 2016

There was a country fair in Plymouth back in 1906 where one of the contests consisted of people trying to guess the weight of a huge ox. They wrote their guesses on pieces of paper together with their names and addresses, hoping to get the prize for the best guess. 800 people participated in the contest.

After the contest ended, statistician Francis Galton took the tickets and analyzed them. He discovered that the average of all these guesses was almost exactly the correct weight of the ox. These 800 strangers guessed correctly!

This phenomenon has been verified many times since then and has been given the name “the wisdom of crowds.” Groups of people arrive at correct decisions collectively that they don’t make individually. In other words, groups know things together that individual members don’t.

HOWEVER!

The number one condition for this law to work is for each member of the group to have his or her own independent source of knowledge. Everybody needs to see that ox with their own eyes and not, for instance, hear about it on Putin’s lying TV or whatever.

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10 responses to “Why Democracy Works”

valter07

January 14, 2016

Can you name any country where in your opinion the voters are obtaining information and voting independently of each other?
And guesstimating a (morally neutral) observable and political decisions are apples and not even oranges, but apples and… gefilte fish. 🙂

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 14, 2016
  
  In all democratic countries information is abundant and easy to come by. If people are not choosing to seek it out, that’s another story.
  
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  1. valter07
    
    January 14, 2016
    
    Even from purely mathematical viewpoint (ask your resident statistician 🙂 ) – the mathematical conclusions you described are only valid in the case of independent measurements. Not measurements that could potentially be independent if people wanted them to be.
    
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  2. valter07
    
    January 14, 2016
    
    So far the anti-Putin information is accessible in Russia, if one wants. Most people don’t want it. Exactly the same way as most Americans do not want to see any anti-American information or any information that makes them uncomfortable (i.e. the information that does not fit with their pre-existing ideas). Same for any other country.
    Russia finally learned the lesson – forbid something too rigidly, and you create the forbidden fruit effect. Do not forbid opposing opinions – and people will ostracize opposition out of their own free will. Simply because every people like to be told how great they are. And market economy makes this self-regulation even more powerful. If people dislike what they are shown by some TV station – they will not watch it. And the station will lose advertisement money.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 14, 2016
      
      Where is it accessible? Online? Most people don’t have Internet. Habitual users of the Internet in Russia are 15%, or something of the kind.
      
      As for TV stations, most Russians have access to 2, sometimes to just 1. How can they choose not to watch?
      
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      1. valter07
        
        January 15, 2016
        
        1-2 channels? Russia is not North Korea yet. But I must admit that I do not know if any opposition channel is widely accessible in Russia, outside of major urban centers.
        One could, however, look at large urban areas, where internet and opposition TV or radio are more accessible. Still, majority does not want to access them, majority wants to hear how great it is.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        January 15, 2016
        
        Dozhd’ is only accessible through a subscription. I can’t imagine anybody in Irkutsk, Kaluga or any of the rural areas having any interest in paying for it.
        
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Barbara

January 14, 2016

A long time ago, I read that whole book. Even then, when I thought about politics much less than I do now, when I wasn’t as well informed as I now, I was underwhelmed.

Valter said a lot of what I was going to. I think this story illustrates much more why markets work as well as they do. There is in the end, only one real weight, in the end there is a rather narrow range of prices for any one item (courtesy of the invisible hand).

Politics and democracy have to do with reaching compromises about competing values. Do we build a dam to produce electricity that will spur economic development, or do we leave the river as it is for the sake of the environment? Both are important. There is no one right answer.

And history has plenty of examples of “the crowd” making awful decisions. Still, as the old saying goes, democracy is the worse form of government except for all the others. So there is some “crowd wisdom” at work.

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lamestllama

January 14, 2016

The question I would like answered is what is the minimum number of voters I need using the system described above to get an arbitarily accurate answer to this question? it is obvious 1 or 2 voters is not enough to always give accurate results so what if we desire an abitary accuracy say within 10%, 5% or 1% what number of voters do I need to reach a desired level of accuracy?

This is the fundamental question which must be answered before you can use this ridiculous method for anything important because without an answer you have no idea of the accuracy of the result you obtain.

But this leads to a paradox because if the method is valid then it should be able to answer the question yet we have no idea to the accuracy of the answer it gives without first knowing the answer.

The conclusion is that there are questions which this method can not provide sufficiently accurate answers to.

I think you would be better of asking an expert rather than getting the mob to vote on matters of mathematics at least. In the case of an animal’s weight I would trust the guy with the calibrated scales over any size mob you care to nominate.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 14, 2016
  
  People are so humorless these days that it’s scary. Tomorrow I’ll try to post a photo of a fluffy kitten to see if that provokes rage as well.
  
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