IMO, it's familiarity. As soon as the unknown is introduced group decision becomes more and more useless.
What makes group decisions go wrong and right
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#12Hypothesis to which I have given 30 seconds' thought: the problem with social media, is that the person who announces a provisional conclusion (like this one, I suppose) has now announced it to a large group, in a print medium that is hard to back away from later. It takes more mental effort to change your opinion on a widely disseminated, print statement than it does to just not repeat that verbal opinion you said to a couple people.
So, if the problem is that "if an individual learner never changes their mind based on new evidence, their chosen option could spread throughout the social network", then discussing in small groups in a format which leaves no record afterwards (at least until later stages of the decision) might help to avoid this problem. Maybe?
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#13> social learners seem to be more interested in group harmony than in making an informed judgement.
> It is not the social learners who are the problem here: Individual learners reluctant to change their minds are.
Or maybe it is the social learners, who don't care about being informed before making a decision?
Later they just spin it around to say as much.
Wasn't there a story on HN today about how the false-dichotomy (binary choice) isn't constructive? Oh, they hit on that too. eyeroll Feels like a pointless exercise.
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#14> results—theoretical at this point, tested mathematically and with computer simulations I was about to say "these results are extremely unlikely to be replicable" until I saw that phrase: there are no results. She had some models. This sort of thing is hard to devise an experiment for. I was once in a very complicated experiment designed to "prove" that group decision making was better : your group was at a house in…
Traffic jam? In the woods? Further: I could see how cell towers would be overloaded in the past, but these days everyone are internet connected 24/7, so there must be enough capacity for everyone.
There's a really simple test - try texting or calling somebody as clock strikes midnight on new year's.
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#15> results—theoretical at this point, tested mathematically and with computer simulations I was about to say "these results are extremely unlikely to be replicable" until I saw that phrase: there are no results. She had some models. This sort of thing is hard to devise an experiment for. I was once in a very complicated experiment designed to "prove" that group decision making was better : your group was at a house in…
Traffic jam? In the woods? Further: I could see how cell towers would be overloaded in the past, but these days everyone are internet connected 24/7, so there must be enough capacity for everyone.
Usually there are only one or two exit roads, so it's easy to get blocked (especially with emergency services coming in, falling trees, people leaving at the last minute because they ignored the repeated warnings etc.). If I recall correctly, there were quite a number of people who died in their vehicles in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus... -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bells_Line_of_Road_Bushfi... the road in that photo is one of two main roads through the mountains, when that's blocked, traffic all over the place is affected).
As for internet, assume it's going to go down quickly, if you had any initially (I'd be surprised if a battery powered radio tuned to the ABC wasn't on the list).
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traffic jam? In the woods? Further: I could see how cell towers would be overloaded in the past, but these days everyone are internet connected 24/7, so there must be enough capacity for everyone.
Usually there are only one or two exit roads, so it's easy to get blocked (especially with emergency services coming in, falling trees, people leaving at the last minute because they ignored the repeated warnings etc.). If I recall correctly, there were quite a number of people who died in their vehicles in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9…
What you said.
It doesn't take much traffic to overload one 2-lane road.
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traffic jam? In the woods? Further: I could see how cell towers would be overloaded in the past, but these days everyone are internet connected 24/7, so there must be enough capacity for everyone.
There's a really simple test - try texting or calling somebody as clock strikes midnight on new year's.
Does cellular internet go down at midnight?
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traffic jam? In the woods? Further: I could see how cell towers would be overloaded in the past, but these days everyone are internet connected 24/7, so there must be enough capacity for everyone.
There's a really simple test - try texting or calling somebody as clock strikes midnight on new year's.
If we're talking about a really rural area (which we are, probably), then their cell capacity might be sized by "what if ALL our subscribers texted at once?"
So if we assume that's N, it still might not handle 10N.
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#19A nice book I liked is "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki.
From what I remember, the gist is you want people to be coming up with solutions to a problem independently, and then you want them to voice their proposals independently (so as not to be stymied by others' ideas). And then you want to aggregate these solutions/proposals. The beneficial dynamic breaks down if people around the table share their ideas in order one after another.
https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/038...
Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right
#20> results—theoretical at this point, tested mathematically and with computer simulations I was about to say "these results are extremely unlikely to be replicable" until I saw that phrase: there are no results. She had some models. This sort of thing is hard to devise an experiment for. I was once in a very complicated experiment designed to "prove" that group decision making was better : your group was at a house in…
I find the "wisdom of crowds" vs. groupthink thing really interesting. Wisdom of crowds is definitely a thing but under fairly narrow conditions that I've never seen rigorously defined although I think people have some sense for it. When it works it tends to work really well (e.g. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predictio... ) but it's not very generalizable. ADDED: To your example, I'm guessing th…
Have you read "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki? The book is focused on just the question of what conditions seem to be beneficial/detrimental to sourcing the "wisdom" from crowds.