Difference
Book: Scott E. Page. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.
Description
Jeff Howe:
"Looking for a diversion one winter evening in 1995, Caltech professor Scott E. Page built a computer model in which “artificial agents”—little computer programs that interact according to rules written into their computer code—tried to solve a difficult problem. Such computer simulations are helpful to economists because they provide a controlled environment in which to test how humans, that most unpredictable of species, interact in complex systems like financial markets.
Page ran his simulation using two groups of agents. One was meant to represent the best and the brightest possible solvers—we’ll call this the Mensa group. The other group was composed of agents with a wide variation of problem-solving ability—some of the agents were talented, but many were not. It was as if he’d stopped by the faculty lounge at a mid-tier university and culled out everyone wearing brown socks. To Page’s great surprise, the brown socks outperformed the Mensa agents. As a random collection of mathematicians could hardly be expected to outperform Mensa’s best minds, Page decided to fiddle with his simulation, changing the rules by which the agents interacted. He got the same result. Still incredulous, he rewrote the program in a different computer language. The brown socks still won, over and over and over again. Page wanted to know why.
What began as a study break blossomed into a decade-plus research project, culminating, in 2007, with a book entitled, “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.” By applying logical rigor and mathematical precision to collective intelligence, Page has created a theoretical framework to explain why groups often outperform experts. Why did the brown socks beat the Mensa agents so consistently? The brown socks weren’t as talented as the Mensa members, but they had something better: Diversity.
Page has developed what he calls the Diversity Trumps Ability theorem. At its heart is the observation that people of high ability are a homogenous group. They are often trained in the same institutions, tend to possess similar perspectives and apply similar problem-solving techniques, or heuristics. They are indeed better than the crowd at large, but at fewer things. And many problems don’t succumb to a single heuristic, or even to a set of similar ones. They require the brown socks, so to speak, to come along and try an approach that the “best minds” would never think to apply. “This theorem,” Page writes, “is no mere metaphor or cute empirical anecdote that may or may not be true ten years from now. It’s a logical truth.”
Understanding diversity is imperative to understanding collective intelligence, and collective intelligence is an essential ingredient in one of the primary categories of crowdsourcing—the attempt to harness many people’s knowledge in order to solve problems or predict future outcomes or help direct corporate strategy. Collective intelligence is the form of group cognition that we see at work in ant colonies that act like cells of a single organism. We also see it in the very human ritual of voting, in which millions of individual choices result in a single decision. Scholars from disciplines ranging from sociology to behavioral psychology to computer science have studied the phenomenon since the early years of the 20th century, but the emergence of the Internet has given new import to collective intelligence, for the simple reason that the Internet has done more than anything else in history to facilitate it." (http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-6-the-m.html)