Candies in the jar: noone is right and everyone is right

It's a race: find the exact text of Bill Murray's "Caddyshack" riff about the Dalai Lama's golf bag. The punch line: "So I got that going for me, which is nice."

Note how many Web pages Google finds. Note how long the search took. What was Google doing? We take it for granted, but we found what we wanted in the first 10 entries (most of us). How did Google know what we would find most useful?

PageRank algorithm (first described in "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Here's how it works, in their words:

PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google assesses a page's importance by the votes it receives. But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "unimportant."

So, in that 0.12 seconds, Google is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list.

 

The premise: Any crowd -- a market, a corporation, an intelligence agency -- needs to find the right balance between the two imperatives: making individual knowledge globally and collectively useful, while still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local.

Linux
1991 Linus Torvalds, a Finnish hacker, creates his own version of Unix. Releases the source code to the public so everyone could see what he had done. He attached this note: "If your efforts are freely distributable, I'd like to hear from you, so I can add them to the system."

Of the first 10 to download Linux, five sent back bug fixes, code improvements and new features. Over time, this improvement process became institutionalized. Thousands of programmers working for free. Thousands of minor and major fixes and improvements. Linux continues to become ever more robust and reliable. Who owns Linux? Noone. Everyone. A marketplace. Democracy.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," Eric Raymond, open sourcer

Bottom-up, de-centralized, democratic system. Ants. eBay.

Microsoft Windows
Only Microsoft employees. Limited pool. Organizational chart (centralized). 9-5. Proprietary and, therefore, closed system. Diversity? Who is doing the hiring?

Top-down, centralized autocratic system. Human. Shopping mall.

Economics experiment:
Half buyers. Half sellers. Buy and sell. Let the market decide a price. Economic theory predicts that if you let buyers and sellers trade with each other, the bids and asks will quickly converge on a single price, which is the price where supply and demand meet. This is true even though it is not what any one person wants. This market maximizes the group's total gain. Even if one buyer or seller had perfect knowledge, that individual could have fared no better.

Zero-sum game:
Pair up. $10 to divide between you. One person (the proposer) decides on his own what the split should be (70-30, 50-50, whatever). Make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the responder. The responder can accept and take the share or reject and walk away with nothing.

across cultures, languages, even species (capuchin monkeys)

Disasters:

To take us to Friday and a conversation about democracy, a few questions.

Let's say open source, dumb networks, marketplaces are good for democracy. So what? What is democracy for? What can we expect it to accomplish? Why do we want it? A few possibilities:

Sources:
Emergence, Steven Johnson

The Wisdom of the Crowds, James Surowiecki

 

 

 

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