Follow the crowd

Photo by Seth Weisfeld on Unsplash

“Don’t follow the crowd, walk your own path”

- Einstein

In their media interviews after a match, the Munster rugby team nearly always mention the power and energy of the crowd.  The crowd kicked the ball over the barrier. The crowd helped them win the match. 

The dynamism of crowds, their hypnotic effects are undisputed. There is a huge power within crowds, and when this is harnessed, there can be an enormously positive result. But like everything, there is always a darker side to crowds.

Let’s take a look at the following …

The wisdom of the crowd

Most of us rely on Google every day to source information on the most diverse of topics. We use it for everything. And yes, we must admit that the collective intelligence of the World Wide Web does a fairly good job. (Apart from the fact that it saves so much time!) The collective intelligence of a crowd can achieve great things as initiatives like the Good Judgment Project are proof of. The Good Judgment Project relies on 3,000 ordinary people to make probability estimates and forecasts about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics. 

Philip Tetlock in his book Expert Political Judgment suggests that the predictions of a large crowd are much better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information.  The wisdom of the crowd of different people with access to different information who pool their predictions often outperforms that of a single very smart person or even a small group of very smart people.

How? Through working together as a group. Just take the gambling market for instance, how readily future events and statistics can be predicted with pretty good accuracy. 

But do we want to base our value system on the wisdom of an unknown crowd? 

Integrity and trust

We make judgments and decisions every day. We make judgments about the reliability and trustworthiness of others' decisions. When working face to face, it is easier to make these assessments than online. We can read each other’s facial expressions and test their judgments. 

But at the heart of these interactions are the values of trust and integrity. Take for example platforms like TripAdvisor, for finding quality accommodation or Yelp to source a good restaurant. And so on… 

Do you know the reviewers behind the reviews on Tripadvisor or Yelp? No. But we trust them about certain things and they have not let us down. A certain number of reviews (200 reviews versus 2 or 3 carry more credibility).  Trust, honesty, and integrity lie at the heart of all human interactions for society to function well. 

Standing alone - the wisdom and power?

No one can deny that there is power and wisdom in the crowd. 

But there is also power and wisdom in standing alone and making decisions as an individual.  It lies in the art of knowing what we can learn from the crowd, and what we need to seek out and learn for ourselves. It lies in the wisdom of remaining independent in thought and judgment on things that matter, and also the ability to rely on the crowd when we need to. 

Not to allow the crowd to shape our views, and distort our interactions. To remain steadfast in our belief systems if they have been tested by ourselves, not by a crowd. As individuals, we are more important than a hotel room or a meal. 

The ‘ant’ metaphor

There is a certain wisdom in the modus operandi of ants. Ants operate in the context of a superintelligence when together. They are highly efficient in accessing food. They can guide traffic effortlessly and are splendidly organised in their work patterns. But ants can also get lost in the circular mill. They can go round and round, mindlessly following one another until eventually, they die.

So, perhaps the moral of the story is that the crowd works for our good when we share its objective and aim.  If we do not share its aim we cannot share its path and we can lose our very selves in the crowd.  

Like the ant, we can end up going around in circles. 

We have to think and act for ourselves. We go with the crowd when the crowd is going where we have also decided to go. We do follow where a crowd leads. That is too much trust to place in a crowd.  Choosing a meal or a hotel is a wholly different thing to choosing what kind of person I want to be or what values I hold true, values I choose to live by.   

Conclusion

I would like to finish with two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’

‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue…

If all men count with you, but none too much…

Yours is the earth and all that’s in it…

And which is more you’ll be a man my son.

Find that wisdom to walk with crowds, but also to know when you need to walk alone.