Barack Obama on Linkedin — The Unwisdom of Crowds

Posted by psabilla

September 14, 2007

I’m not really a person interested in politics, but I have to say that I like Barack Obama’ style. I don’t know much about his political beliefs or, really, any of the presidential candidates beliefs, but Obama’s style is pretty cool. He asked a question on Linkedin Answers and, so far, there are 1459 responses. This got my mind thinking: here we have a great example of crowd psychology — sometimes the Wisdom of Crowds is actually not that wise.

First, some context: I went on Linkedin today to accept an invitation from a friend and, on my homepage, was a question by Barack Obama addressed to small businesses and entrepreneurs: "How can the next President better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?" As of today, there are 1459 answers. WoW! Not only is Barack Obama a social network fanatic, but he is receiving some serious answers that, I hope, he actually reads and takes into consideration when or if he becomes the next President of the United States of America. But, what is the value of those responses?

One Word of Caution

The United States is a Republic, not a true democracy. The founding fathers were very nervous of a true democracy because they understood the failures of crowd wisdom. In their minds, the crowd wasn’t all that intelligent. In closing, we can benefit from the domocratization and the social web. It’s entertaining and participation can be useful. The social web is also very trendy and can result is a less intelligent web (including this blog).

Quantifying the "Dumbness" of a Crowd

One of the root causes of failure in projects is communication — either a lack thereof, miscommunication, or over-communication. Large teams are inherently vehicles for bad communication. This is basic combinatorics — for a given project, suppose there are persons A and B. In this scenario there is only 1 communication link. Add person C, now we have 3 communication links, A-B, B-C, C-A. Add person D, then we have 6; Add person E, then we have 10 communication links. Inductively, as team size grows, the raw combinatoric communication link counts grows geometrically, not linearly. To demonstrate this, we use basic statistics of the form n-choose-r, where !, such as n!, is equivalent to n factorial, to arrive at the formula for how many pairs we can choose from n items:

shmula.com, combinatorics

For the number of pairs, we can reduce the above formula to the following:

shmula.com, combinatorics

Visually, as team size grows, the communication links grows non-linearly, but exponentially:

shmula.com, combinatorics

Conclusion

But, this is yet another example of the power of the internet in helping one person connect to the world, no matter the value of what is returned back. In either case, this is excellent quasi-junk-mail marketing and excellent word-of-mouth!