...helping clients in complex environments make better decisions, faster.

CALL NOW: 404.898.9096

info@decisionclarityconsulting.com

Posts Tagged ‘Wisdom of Crowds’

To analyze does not necessarily mean to produce useful information

From Reviewing the Movies: Audiences vs. Critics by Catherine Rampell.

It is a fair and interesting question or set of questions.  Do audiences and critics assess movies in different ways?  If so, in what ways do they differ?  Which views, audience or critics, provide a better forecast of future performance?  These questions apply to art, sports, books, etc. There are answers to some of these questions.  The general informed public and specialists do tend to review things differently.  General informed public tend to factor in more context and larger macro considerations than do specialists.  General informed public tend to be better forecasters than are specialists.  Nate Silver covers a lot of this in his The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t
What is notable is that Rampell asks a legitimate question and has an idea on how to answer the question.  Her error is to use information that is available (Rotten Tomatoes Database) rather than information that is needed.  There is a fairly detailed critique of her analysis in the comments.  The article serves as an example of Selection Bias (the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples) and Information Bias (the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action), and possible Mere Exposure Bias (the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them).

 

Almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world.

From Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle East by Walter Russell Mead.  Read the whole thing.

The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians. In the end, almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world. Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and even Russia will some day become democratic societies with market economies softened by welfare states and social safety nets. As a nation, we believe that democracy is both morally better and more practical than other forms of government, and that a regulated market economy offers the only long term path to national prosperity. As democracy and capitalism spread their wonder-working wings across the world, peace will descend on suffering humanity and history as we’ve known it will be at an end.

[snip]

It seems misanthropic to doubt that a particular country isn’t on the road to freedom and prosperity, and it also seems like heresy against our national creed. That tendency is reinforced among our policy elite and chattering classes. The “experts” ought to know better and be more skeptical, but they are often more naive and more dogmatic than the American people at large. It is often the best educated and connected who are most confident, for example, that political science maxims work better than historical knowledge and reflection when it comes to analyzing events and predicting developments. When democratic peace theory or some other beautiful intellectual system (backed with regressions and statistically significant correlations in all their austere beauty) adds its weight to the national political religion, a reasonable faith can morph into blind zeal. Bad things often follow.

What Americans often miss is that while democratic liberal capitalism may be where humanity is heading, not everybody is going to get there tomorrow. This is not simply because some leaders selfishly seek their own power or because evil ideologies take root in unhappy lands. It is also because while liberal capitalist democracy may well be the best way to order human societies from an abstract point of view, not every human society is ready and able to do walk that road now. Some aren’t ready because like Haiti they face such crippling problems that having a government, any government, that effectively enforces the law and provides basic services across the country is beyond their grasp. Some aren’t ready because religious or ethnic tensions would rip a particular country apart and cause civil war. Some aren’t ready because the gap between the values, social structures and culture of a particular society make various aspects of liberal capitalism either distasteful or impractical. In many places, the fact that liberal democratic capitalism is historically associated with western imperialism and arrogance has poisoned the well. People simply do not believe that this foreign system will work for them, and they blame many of the problems they face on the countries in Europe and North America who so loudly proclaim the superiority of a system they feel has victimized them.

[snip]

Americans need to face an unpleasant fact: while American values may be the answer long term to the Middle East’s problems, they are largely irrelevant to much that is happening there now. We are not going to stop terrorism, at least not in the short or middle term, by building prosperous democratic societies in the Middle East. We can’t fix Pakistan, we can’t fix Egypt, we can’t fix Iraq, we can’t fix Saudi Arabia and we can’t fix Syria. Not even the people who live in those countries can fix them at this point; what has gone wrong is so deeply rooted and so multifaceted that nothing anybody can do will turn them into good candidates for membership in the European Union anytime soon. If we could turn Pakistan into Denmark, the terrorists there would probably settle down—but that isn’t going to happen on any policy-relevant timetable. We must deal with terrorism (and our other interests in the region) in a world in which the basic conditions that breed terrorists aren’t going away.

Decision Clarity Consulting has no affiliation with the Scheier Group, owner of the DECISION CLARITY®, and the Scheier Group does not sponsor, endorse, or control any material on this site. Decision Clarity Consulting, in accordance with an agreement with Scheier Group, performs no work with non-profit or government entities.