The Wisdom of Crowds

“A person is smart. People are dumb.”, Tommy Lee Jones says in Men in Black. We’ve all experienced this. Your personal views about an issue might be nuanced. The message you liked about the issue, or the picture that got a bunch of hearts on Instagram is probably not as nuanced as your personal views.

It’s strange there’s not a name for this phenomenon beyond wisdom of the crowd. The act of having your intentions misrepresented or smushed into something bite sized for consumption by other people is something we face frequently. It’s the reason we post sappy LinkedIn messages, engage in boring conversations with people we’ve just met, and refuse to return bad vegetables to Trader Joe’s. We operate under the rules the crowd sets for us even if those rules are not something that align to our personal beliefs. This is of course different than law breaking, which we don’t do because there is a communal ethical standard or in the case of parking tickets, the inconvenience of fees or your car being towed. There is really only one disadvantage to not following the group: that you can possibly get excommunicated from the group.

You might alternatively find that the group agrees that a rule should be broken. Groups by their design are not rational. They attach themselves to charismatic narratives. The reason we post sappy LinkedIn posts is that we know those get the most engagement. The reason we engage in boring conversations is because it is polite. The reason we don’t return vegetables is because we picked them out. But turn each of these narratives over, and they clearly have holes in them. No one really enjoys the sappy LinkedIn posts. No one really enjoys the conversation. And those vegetables go in the bin and you lose your money. In each of these cases a self-defeating narrative has been created.

The wisdom of crowds is to lean towards charismatic narratives. This is not logical and not entirely representative of the members of that group. Groups are malleable from the inside if given more charismatic narratives. Often times, these risk excommunication but the upside is worthwhile.

I haven’t written in a while so this might be a bit choppy. If you liked it, let me know by liking or subscribing.