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Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds

Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds
By Stephen Whitenstall |

Dor Gorbash
Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds

In a Telegram post of 9th July 2021 Dor Gorbash shared an article “Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds” published in https://www.pnas.org/ .

Well-informed individuals

On 27th September 2021, I commented : For me another key statement in this paper is “Studies have found that these divergent effects are moderated by placing well-informed individuals in prominent positions in the network structure”.

Which is what (I assume) you mean by introducing “systemic biases”. In short, there will always be a bias (equivalent to the prior in Bayes - one’s beliefs about a quantity) - but what is important is that the bias is well-informed.

In the context of CAs what might translate from this article is whether :

  1. well-informed CAs are prominent in the network,
  2. they have the confidence to comment,
  3. they are recognised as being “experts” (although this term raises some issues),
  4. the skills of the well-informed CA are dispersed (e.g. via School),
  5. the quality of the assessments a vCA (for example) has to deal with is sustainable (an overload of poor information will test even the well-informed),
  6. the diversity of viewpoints of CAs complements and is capable of recognising different approaches to return on intent and
  7. importantly the nature and scale of the task at hand (e.g. “Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity” - Toyokawa et al) - so quantity will indeed impact quality (at scale, a lesser capability to handle proposals that are unusual, innovative or require special knowledge).

One issue may be that there is a lack of focus, there is a lot of Social Psychology research (for example) but not so much specifically directed at the Blockchain context. As Dor highlighted, IOG research, to date, has been mainly concerned with game theory and security. So, the initiative will likely be with the community to incorporate relevant past research and to provide new contexts for research in distributed governance.

Follow-up post

In a follow-up post of 2nd October 2021 I commented :

My own QA experience was at scale on a global Telecoms contract, in an Investment Bank managing many separate systems (from Bloomberg terminals to Mainframes) and audit reporting to KPMG, IBM and the FSA (UK government) . This past experience is corporate and centralized - the distributed challenge in Catalyst complicates the assurance issue and demands an innovative approach.

Catalyst is still at a relatively small scale - but aims to serve large institutions. What is stark in my view is the lack of any assurance of a capability to assess. What has emerged is a culture of qualitive assessment with some nods to the quantitative. What has been approved by this community is contingent and circumstantial to this community. At scale proposers will want evidence of an assessment standard and capable assessors with a consistent track record (solid data). Anonymity may be a red herring in this context and trust takes on a different dimension. To maintain quality as quantity increases specialization and standards will be needed.

I should perhaps qualify what I said by suggesting that the next evolution in Catalyst assessment will likely need to be a segmentation of standards appropriate to a challenge. Each challenge having its own assessment standards. For example, to accommodate smaller scale community proposals - a more qualitative approach would be more appropriate.