it is the standard belief by governments "by the people" that everyone will be a narc for the govt - this is basically the belief that everyone is as [rule]-abiding as they are MAKE SURE TO INDICATE AT THE BEGINNING HOW A LARGE GROUP CAN BE A CLUB, GANG, CORPORATION, CHURCH, OR NATION NOTE: DOVETAILS WITH MGMT PAGES - i.e., do this edit pile alongside mgmt pages Any large group is essentially like a government - most of them are essentially [dictatorships](political systems) - the [power] they wield is WAY less than a formal government, but they have that power nonetheless - the only way anyone can fight that [power] is with an outside, alternative power (e.g., a government bureau, lawyers, etc.) Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. When our imperfect judgements are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent. We assume that the key to solving problems or making good decisions is finding that one right person who will have the answer. The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd instead. Chances are, it knows. (Crowd includes the geniuses as well as everyone else.) The best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible. Wisdom of crowds works on problems where there's a true answer, or when some choices are better than other in some Platonic sense. The reason this works is that people are operating on private info, which may be bad or fragmented. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber. The more influence a group's members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that the group's decisions will be wise ones. We could become individually smarter but collectively dumber. Following the group is a reasonable strategy, but if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart. The opinions are diverse -- not consensus but disagreements. In general, the bigger the crowd the better. If you run 10 different jelly-bean-counting experiments, it's likely that each time one or two students will outperform the group. But they will not be the same students each time. Over 10 experiments, the group's performance will almost certainly be the best possible. The simplest way to get reliably good answers is just to ask the group each time. The 4 conditions that characterize wise crowds: 1. Diversity of opinion 2. Independence 3. Decentralization 4. Aggregation Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less to the table. They spend too much time exploiting, and not enough time exploring. - THEY EVENTUALLY BECOME [BAD SYSTEMS] WHEN THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO EXPLORE A large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker". The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom wil be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are. Seer-sucker theory : No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers. If a group is so unintelligent that it will flounder without the right expert, it's not clear why the group would be intelligent enough to recognize an expert when it found him. The smartest groups are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. You do not need consensus in order to tap into the wisdom of a crowd. The search for consensus encourages tepid lowest-common-denominator solutions which offend no one rather than exciting everyone. Even those companies that tried to make the decision-making process more democratic thought democracy meant endless discussion rather than a wider distribution of decision-making power. Attempting to run an entire company by command and control is a futile task. It's too costly in terms of time and requires far too much information that top executives should not be bothering with. Individual irrationality can add up to collective rationality. People want to save, and do not need a massive push to do so. What they do need is a way to make saving easier and spending harder. One way of doing this is to make enrollment in retirement plans automatic, rather than asking people to sign up for them. If people have to take action to opt out of a retirement plan rather than having to take action to opt in, they are significantly more likely to stay in the plan and more likely to save. Inertia is a powerful tool. - THIS IS NOT TRUE: SOME PEOPLE DO NOT THINK OF EVER SAVING, I.E., THE TIME PARADOX IS PRESENT A mob in the middle of a riot appears to be a single organism, acting with one mind. The more information a group has, the better its collective judgement will be, so you want as many people with good information in a group as possible. The Wisdom of Crowds is not an argument against experts, but against our excessive faith in the single individual decision maker. If a group is smart enough to know whether an individual is a genuine decision-making prodigy, then the group is smart enough to not need that individual. (Scientists:) The quest for recognition ensures a steady infusion of diverse thought, since no one becomes famous for restating what's already known. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked, but they are listened to. Group decisions are not inherently inefficient. This suggests that deliberation can be valuable when done well, even if after a certain point its marginal benefits are outweighed by the costs. There is no point in making small groups part of a leadership structure if you do not give the group a method of aggregating the opinions of its members. If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has : namely, collective wisdom. Get enough people together - be it in a bar or a chat room - and a mysterious dynamic kicks in. People either accentuate their differences and polarize into opposing camps, or they downplay their differences alogether in order to reach a consensus. Both phenmoena have the same net effect: The diversity within the crowd is diminished. There are other conditions that must be met for diversity to trump ability - First, it must be a pickle of a problem - Secondly, the crowd must have some qualifications to solve the problem at hand. There must be a method of aggregating and processing each individual's contribution. - Finally, participants must be drawn from a large enough pool to guarantee a diverse array of approaches, and the ability to express their individuality - Their "local knowledge" - must not be impaired. The group is smarter than its smartest individual. The mistakes cancel one another out, and correct answers, like cream, rise to the surface. You can't issue directives to a community, you can only offer suggestions. If people follow you , great. If not, you follow the community. The definition of "citizenship" defines affiliation with a large entity, and works similarly to "membership" - the idea is that there are certain [benefits](power) bestowed, but they come with certain [responsibilities] - the entire exclusion/inclusion of the mechanism is driven by the person [consenting](contracts) to those responsibilities - these groups, however, eventually devolve as the responsibilities aren't as well-defined, which makes the group stand for less and less - the eventual [decomposition of the organization](bad systems) comes as their original [values] become unimportant - the speed of this decomposition is proportional to its [middle class]: the upper class are concerned with [power], and the lower class are concerned with survival Presuming the group isn't a [bad system], there are common characteristics of new members to that group: 1. learning the [language] of that group, meaning they'll always be [seen](image) as an outsider 2. they have some sort of [skill](power types) to prove themselves 3. aggregately, they came from a diverse range of places elsewhere, meaning a different [culture] bleeding into the group 4. they [desire](purpose) to assimilate into that group 5. they're reinforcing the group's central [culture] If you want to organize the work of even dozens of people, you have to manage them. As organizations grow into the hundreds or thousands, you also have to manage the managers. Simply to exist at that size, an organization has to take on the costs of all that management. None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. - THIS IS BECAUSE THEY EXISTED BEFORE THE SOCIAL CHANGES THAT CAME LATER, SO THEY'RE ONLY THERE FROM UTILITY+MOMENTUM The music industry is still reeling from the discovery that the reproduction and distribution of music, previously a valuable service, is now something their customers can do for themselves. Group action gives society its particular characters, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. For any given organization, the important questions are "When will the change happen?" and "What will change?" The only two answers we can rule out are never and nothing. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. - THIS IS WHY THEY ALL BECOME [BAD SYSTEMS] What happens to tasks that aren't worth the cost of managerial oversight? Things like the aggregated amateur documentation of the London bombings were simply outside of the realm of possibility. That collection now exists because people have always desired to share, and the obstacles that prevented sharing on a global scale are now gone. These things are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way. The loosely affiliated group can accomplish something more effectively than the institution can. Thing of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are: * - sharing * - cooperation * - collective action. Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants. Many sharing platforms like Flikr operate in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, allowing for the maximum freedom of the individual to participate while creating the fewest complications of group life. Cooperating is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behavior to sync with people who are changing their behavior to sync with you. Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity - you know who you are cooperating with. One simple form of cooperation is conversation. When people are in one another's company, they like to talk. Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. The litmus test for is simple : no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many. Collective action is the hardest kind of group effort, requiring a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members. Tragedy of the commons : where individuals have an incentive to damage the collective good. While each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome. This is why taxes are never voluntary - people would opt out of paying for road maintenance. For a group to take collective action, it must have some shared vision strong enough to bind the group together, despite periodic decisions that will inevitably displease at least some members. For this reason collective action is harder to arrange than information sharing or collaborative creation. In the current spread of social tools, real examples of collective action - where a group acts on behalf of, and with shared consequences for, all of its members - are still relatively rare. Imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Only 2% of users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. - THIS ONLY APPLIES WHEN THE AVERAGE PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO CONSENT WITH THEIR RESOURCES Most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it. Any measure of "average" participation becomes meaningless. There is a steep decline from a few wildly active participants to a large group of barely-active participants. - I DISAGREE: "ENGAGEMENT" IS STILL "PARTICIPATION" By definition, most participants are below average. On Wikipedia, where there is no representative user, the habits of mind that come from thinking about averages are not merely useless, they're harmful. Instead, you have to change your focus to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behavior of the collective. Once writers start getting more attention than they can return, they are forced into a width-versus-depth tradeoff. They can spend less time talking to everyone. (It's no accident we call these interactions shallow, and say that people who have them are strateched thin.) Alternatively, they can limit themselves to deeper interactions with a few people (in which case we call them cliquish or standoffish). At the extremes, they are forced to adopt both strategies, to limit both the number and the depth of interactions. A wedding reception is a localized version of this tradeoff. The bride and groom gather a room full of people they could talk to for hours, then talk to most of the guests for just a few minutes each so as not to be rude. The coming change in group effort is on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance. AOL's friendliness came from AOL's users, many of whom loved the service so much they worked as volunteer guides. Evidence that enough people care about an article, and that they have both the will and tools to quickly defend it, has proven enough to demoralize most vandals. Let the community do as much as they possibly can, but where they can't do the work on their own, add technological fixes. - [TECHNOLOGY], HOWEVER, ONLY MAGNIFIES [WILL](PURPOSE), IT NEVER CAN [FULLY REPLACE IT](TECHTRENDSSUCK) As the size of your network grows, your small-group pattern, where everyone connected to everyone, would first become impractical, then unbuildable. Let the small groups connect tightly, and then you connect the groups. But you can't really connect groups - you connect people within groups. Instead of one loose group of 25, you have 5 tight groups of 5. As long as a couple people in each small group know a couple people in other groups, you get the advantages of tight connection at the small scale and loose connection at the large scale. The network will be sparse, but efficient and robust. Tie several few-person networks together into a network of networks. It's not how many people you know - it's how many kinds. A service business does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another. Communal bike programs that have succeeded have placed restrictions on the use of the bicycles with things like locked sheds and ID cards for checking them in and out. (Given the opportunity to misbehave and little penalty for doing so, enough people's behavior becomes antisocial enough to wreck things for everyone.) No effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance. a large group is "soft"-defined by its leadership's [decisions] - in a coalition of large groups, the aggregate averages out across all the leadership, with the leadership having its own dominance hierarchy according to power [Hate on Display™ Hate Symbols Database](https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols) ## gangs gangs are essentially [youth](maturity)-formed organizations that implement a type of order that is absent from the rest of society - essentially, a lack of sufficient [parenting], specifically fathers, creates a tremendous [void](unknown) in a young person's life, and a gang forms the [meaning] they desperately need by giving that young person a set of [rules] to live by, and by giving a type of [family] (though certainly [criminal]) that they have at least some [hope](certainty) legitimately [loves] them - the tragedy is that there really is no love, and the organization is run by [power-mongering] and [evil] people, and they simply need ANYONE who will give at least some [human decency](humanity) to them - even worse, many of them are truly misguided enough that they see loving, normal people as either inferior (because they haven't had the same [experiences](understanding)) or an [antagonist](stories) to their [purposes] - the only rehabilitation comes from them realizing there's a legitimate [void](unknown) in their life after [attaining](results) at least some things, then someone in their life being present to give [guidance](understanding) of a better way to live these gangs use key signifiers for in-group [identity]: - a vetting process that's often very brutal or extremely difficult, often to test [aptitude](results) - conveyed [myths] that give a grander sense of [meaning], often in a [religious] context - hidden hand signals or gestures - matching clothing or accessories - specific [language] or forms of speech - specific information specific to their role in that group the irony of gangs is that they often DO render a valuable service - frequently, they'll serve where government can't serve (e.g., homeless shelters, schools, etc.) - the people at large are often willing to overlook the bad things because of the social good those gangs provide the only difference between a good group and a [bad system] has a lot to do with what the implementation points to: - if it provides a good service, irrespective of its illegality, it's good - if it's sending something that is BOTH [illegal] and [immoral], it's bad - if it's doing something that [claims](image) to be good but isn't helping anyone, it's bad the future of a bad group member comes to a few fates: 1. they stay in the group, solely devoted to that group, and are eventually exploited 2. if the group member finds a community OUTSIDE the organization, they'll hybridize that group with their other group 3. they try to become a force for good inside the organization, and often become a cautionary tale or martyr if they imply the group needs to [change] 4. they quietly leave the organization and [never integrate their shadow], and fade from any public attention 5. they become a force for good, OUTSIDE the organization, working against that organization - even sending someone to prison or some other institution doesn't fix it: it has to be a personal decision bad systems technically only lose political power because another system was sufficient enough to replace it - it's a [trend], but almost inevitable proportionally to how much people hate the bad system - in other words, spreading hate of the bad system (and ideally through [love] of a good thing the bad system is supposed to advocate) is the number one way to inspire the [trend] towards mindedness of a replacement MONOLITHIC OUTSIDER THEORY (MAY GO TO MY RULES) - every outsider of an organization imagines a group to be monolithic and huge, but the people inside has as much [in-fighting] and [power struggles] as anything else ## groups-large + humanity We are merely images of things, and not any essence - images of God, but still only reflections of something else The institution is an essence we can make, and that is why we need and {trust} it - however, we are not the institution even if we run it God designs institutions, even evil ones, to further His agenda