January 2, 2010

The Wisdom of Crowds?

Posted in Conservatives, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 11:51 am by Paul Sagar

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt says he’s going to “develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges”. Marina Hyde thinks the Tories may have solved the problem of their lack of policies. But with what significance?

The wisdom of crowds phenomenon observes that if you get a lot of people together and ask them to guess something – the weight of a pig at a county fair, say – then the more people you have guessing, the more likely they are to collectively get it right if you average out all the individual answers. For every ridiculously far-out over-estimate, someone else under-estimates by the same margin. Eventually, the over- and under-valuations even each other out. The more people guessing, the closer the collective guess gets to a remarkable degree of accuracy.

This has more than a passing resemblance to Condorcet’s jury theorem. This observes that when making decisions by majority vote, if all individuals possess a greater than 50% chance of correctly identifying some principle or truth then adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. (In the mathematical limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases).

The problem with applying such theorems to the realm of politics is that they only have purchase if the crowd or jury is being asked to discover something objectively certain. Like the weight of a pig, say. Something that is indisputably true and there to be discovered by interested inquirers. And politics just doesn’t work like that.

Those with my kind of ethical outlook find the notion of asking ever greater numbers of people what to do in matters of political policy-making suspicious, because it seems to presuppose that there are right answers in this field. That political-ethical questions admit of independently valid answers, equivalent to objective weights or mathematical truths, say.

We suspect that ethical values are not given by God, discovered by intuition, or constructed by reason, but are personal projections of deeply held convictions and sentiments out onto the world we live in. As a consequence, politics is essentially conflict and struggle between clashing world-views. Large groups of people cannot discover the “correct” political policies, because the notion of “correct” politics is a chimera.

Yet one need not be an ethical or political sceptic in this sense to find the Tory gimmick suspect. Those who believe that ethical values have independent content and force over and above (and perhaps wholly independent of) personal sentiment are unlikely to be committed to the simplistic view that all virtues harmonize all of the time.

They will be perfectly aware that a fact about real-world politics is that sometimes difficult choices have to be made. Values come into conflict, and genuine sacrifice between incompatible goals will sometimes be required. This, after all, is the tragedy of political decision-making: sometimes some people just have to lose and it’s up to the political decision-maker to choose which. Appealing to large numbers of voters to reveal “correct” policy positions looks ludicrously naive in the face of tough political reality.

Tory apologists will now claim that this “wisdom of the crowds” rhetoric isn’t meant to be understood at this level of intellectual seriousness. That it’s just an attempt to get “fresh ideas” from outside of the “Westminster bubble”.

But is it? Leading politicians of all stripes are fond of giving the impression that they just want to do the best job they can in the name of the common good, taking the best ideas from wherever they might hail. But this simply can’t be true. If politicians really thought this, they would have become civil service bureaucrats.

Top politicians (it’s less clear with non-pole-climbing backbenchers) are politicians because they want to tell us what to do, because they see themselves as the leaders who must make the tough decisions. All politics is struggle and conflict; the sacrificing of some values and people in favour of those you prefer. No politician who has climbed to the top of the tree wants to gift power to the people they have worked so hard to get into a position of coercive authority over.

The Tory wisdom of crowds policy formulation: an incoherent, dishonest and cynical misrepresentation of political reality and Tory intentions. Change we can believe in? Business as usual.

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