Excellent article - should be required reading in management courses.
So, the CDC with years to prepare and millions of dollars funding it - was unprepared to manage a real pandemic.
It should be apparent that an organization is better off meeting criticism head on, in open debate - instead of suppressing it. They should have been prepared for this and established a policy to deal with it.
Consider the Tylenol poisoning. Burke's first order was "How do we protect the people?". The second was "How do we save the product?". It doesn't seem that the CDC ever studied this.
The CDC acted to "save the product". Now, the question is, can the CDC ever recover the trust of the public? To make matters even worse, their collusion with the teachers union is something many parents will remember.
That's just scary. I wrote this earlier - but then decided it didn't really fit with your article.
I'm convinced that the Wisdom of the Crowd is a powerful but overlooked concept. Perhaps because too often the wisdom of the crowd is just the ear piercing screech of an echo chamber.
Or, it could be that the conditions to create a wise crowd are difficult to meet.
1. Multiple agents, solving the same problem - independently.
2. A method for collecting and evaluating the solutions with an effective noise filter.
The open source development of Linux is a prime example of the Wisdom of the Crowd. The noise filter was subtle, but effective. Just writing code for submission required a fair level of expertise - and code that was submitted had to work.
Frankly, the problem with Twitter, even now - is there is no effective noise filter.
"Crowd behaviour is often associated with irrationality. Crowds form mobs and cults. They panic and the herd instinct is often wrong and easily swayed. At least that is the common perception. But scientist and polymath Francis Galton discovered that not all crowd behaviour was negative. Indeed he found that if you asked enough people the same question, they might come up with better answers than even the experts.
It was in 1906 that Galton made his discovery of what is known as the wisdom of crowds. He attended a farmers' fair in Plymouth where he was intrigued by a weight guessing contest. The goal was to guess the weight of an ox when it was butchered and dressed. Around 800 people entered the contest and wrote their guesses on tickets. The person who guessed closest to the butchered weight of the ox won a prize.
After the contest Galton took the tickets and ran a statistical analysis on them. He discovered that the average guess of all the entrants was remarkably close to the actual weight of the butchered ox. In fact it was under by only 1lb for an ox that weighed 1,198 lbs. This collective guess was not only better than the actual winner of the contest but also better than the guesses made by cattle experts at the fair. It seemed that democracy of thought could produce amazing results.
However, to benefit from the wisdom of crowds several conditions must be in place. First each individual member of the crowd must have their own independent source of information. Second they must make individual decisions and not be swayed by the decisions of those around them. And third, there must be a mechanism in place that can collate these diverse opinions."
I IMAGINE THIS WILL BE IN ANOTHER COLUMN OF MINE SHORTLY.
1. It is EASY to say - but hard to do. Academic papers should accomplish it - but evidently they don't always.
2.The noise filter is another challenge. Take a Tweet with 2,000 replies - there is probably some "wisdom" there - if you could dig thru ~1,000 garbage replies.
Powerful article, very well articulated. I concurr on the slippery slope and dangerous move that deplatforming and censoring contrarian expert opinions entail.
The thought of Dr. Jay Battacharya on the damage done to children hit too close to home. Virtual school for many children was a poor substitute to in person education.
There's also the concept of immunity gap: Because children were in virtual schools and in lockdown mode during the first couple years of the covid pandemic, many of them didn't acquire the seasonal immunities that are common on kids. It's no wonder that Flu, RSV, Influenza, Colds came ravaging in the Fall of 2023... Add to the mix that Covid is still around... Like Bastiat said "The seen and the unseen"
Yow. How apt to say that "Putting it in terms parallel to Socrates’s indictment, some have been banned for failing to acknowledge the science that the federal government acknowledges, for introducing new science, and for corrupting Americans." And the rattlesnake ...
If only today's persecutors could see themselves in yesterday's persecutors ...
Excellent article - should be required reading in management courses.
So, the CDC with years to prepare and millions of dollars funding it - was unprepared to manage a real pandemic.
It should be apparent that an organization is better off meeting criticism head on, in open debate - instead of suppressing it. They should have been prepared for this and established a policy to deal with it.
Consider the Tylenol poisoning. Burke's first order was "How do we protect the people?". The second was "How do we save the product?". It doesn't seem that the CDC ever studied this.
The CDC acted to "save the product". Now, the question is, can the CDC ever recover the trust of the public? To make matters even worse, their collusion with the teachers union is something many parents will remember.
Public health officials are not prepared for criticism because they have systematically isolated themselves from dissenting voices. The entire public health system is a gigantic, decentralized safe space: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/09/17/conservatives-and-public-health-a-warm-welcome-into-a-cold-climate/
That's just scary. I wrote this earlier - but then decided it didn't really fit with your article.
I'm convinced that the Wisdom of the Crowd is a powerful but overlooked concept. Perhaps because too often the wisdom of the crowd is just the ear piercing screech of an echo chamber.
Or, it could be that the conditions to create a wise crowd are difficult to meet.
1. Multiple agents, solving the same problem - independently.
2. A method for collecting and evaluating the solutions with an effective noise filter.
The open source development of Linux is a prime example of the Wisdom of the Crowd. The noise filter was subtle, but effective. Just writing code for submission required a fair level of expertise - and code that was submitted had to work.
Frankly, the problem with Twitter, even now - is there is no effective noise filter.
From this article: https://www.all-about-psychology.com/the-wisdom-of-crowds.html
"Crowd behaviour is often associated with irrationality. Crowds form mobs and cults. They panic and the herd instinct is often wrong and easily swayed. At least that is the common perception. But scientist and polymath Francis Galton discovered that not all crowd behaviour was negative. Indeed he found that if you asked enough people the same question, they might come up with better answers than even the experts.
It was in 1906 that Galton made his discovery of what is known as the wisdom of crowds. He attended a farmers' fair in Plymouth where he was intrigued by a weight guessing contest. The goal was to guess the weight of an ox when it was butchered and dressed. Around 800 people entered the contest and wrote their guesses on tickets. The person who guessed closest to the butchered weight of the ox won a prize.
After the contest Galton took the tickets and ran a statistical analysis on them. He discovered that the average guess of all the entrants was remarkably close to the actual weight of the butchered ox. In fact it was under by only 1lb for an ox that weighed 1,198 lbs. This collective guess was not only better than the actual winner of the contest but also better than the guesses made by cattle experts at the fair. It seemed that democracy of thought could produce amazing results.
However, to benefit from the wisdom of crowds several conditions must be in place. First each individual member of the crowd must have their own independent source of information. Second they must make individual decisions and not be swayed by the decisions of those around them. And third, there must be a mechanism in place that can collate these diverse opinions."
I IMAGINE THIS WILL BE IN ANOTHER COLUMN OF MINE SHORTLY.
The Surowiecki book https://a.co/d/etjbKqr - is a good source.
Two real problems
1. It is EASY to say - but hard to do. Academic papers should accomplish it - but evidently they don't always.
2.The noise filter is another challenge. Take a Tweet with 2,000 replies - there is probably some "wisdom" there - if you could dig thru ~1,000 garbage replies.
Powerful article, very well articulated. I concurr on the slippery slope and dangerous move that deplatforming and censoring contrarian expert opinions entail.
The thought of Dr. Jay Battacharya on the damage done to children hit too close to home. Virtual school for many children was a poor substitute to in person education.
There's also the concept of immunity gap: Because children were in virtual schools and in lockdown mode during the first couple years of the covid pandemic, many of them didn't acquire the seasonal immunities that are common on kids. It's no wonder that Flu, RSV, Influenza, Colds came ravaging in the Fall of 2023... Add to the mix that Covid is still around... Like Bastiat said "The seen and the unseen"
Great post, Jaime.
Yow. How apt to say that "Putting it in terms parallel to Socrates’s indictment, some have been banned for failing to acknowledge the science that the federal government acknowledges, for introducing new science, and for corrupting Americans." And the rattlesnake ...
If only today's persecutors could see themselves in yesterday's persecutors ...