The (non) wisdom of crowds

Some years ago I read an entertaining book by James Surowiecki entitled "The Wisdom of Crowds"[1]. The central thesis of the book is that the opinion of a large number of people, when averaged out, can compare favorably with the wisdom of the experts in any given field.

There are times when that absolutely works but equally - as the book acknowledges - there are times when it does not. Yes, you guessed it, I am going to say that IT is one of there areas. Actually, I am going to go further and suggest that in any technical field where a lot of complexity is hidden from non-specialists in the interests of product commoditization, crowds tend not to be not very wise at all.

Two examples will, I hope, serve to illustrate where I am coming from. Take digital cameras as an example. I know next to nothing about photography (something I am trying to remedy) but I do know that the more pixels you have in your digital camera the better. Right? At this point, fellow digital photography neophytes are most likely nodding whereas the much smaller number of digital photography aficionados are shaking their heads and mumbling phrases like "sensor size" and "ISO sensitivity equivalents". Without going into details which would take me out of my depth very rapidly, the best camera is not the one with the best pixel-per-dollar ratio. It is not that simple.

I know a lot more about computers than I know about digital cameras (not that that would be in any way difficult) so let us take an example from there. Everyone knows that when selecting a computer, the higher the clock speed of the CPU, the better the computer right? At this point any non-IT-technical readers of this column (if there are any) are most likely nodding their heads whilst all the rest of us are collectively shaking our heads and mumbling phrases like "memory latency" and "multiprocessing". Without going into details that are superfluous to requirements here, the best computer is not the one with the best clock speed-per-dollar ratio. It is not that simple.

Both of the above metrics - pixels per dollar (for cameras) and clock speed per dollar (for computers) - are, to specialists in the field, flat out wrong and misleading. So why do their respective markets continue to use them? They are used because markets need simple metrics to make comparisons between competing products/approaches/philosophies quickly.

They need to make comparisons because they need to make financial decisions without understanding the details. Thus the metrics need to be simple, based on a small number of variables: preferably one. Unfortunately it is a short hop from simple to simplistic.

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