Defying The Wisdom of The Crowd?

I mused about "The Wisdom of Crowds" in March, 2018. Today,  can we still rely on the wisdom of the crowd?

The "crowd" is supposed to be at the core of  how democracy works; or, why it should work. So, defying the wisdom of the "crowd" would seem the antithesis to the will or intention of the many.  Yet, why does modern democracy struggle in dealing with the concept?

I wrote then, "Not known as a special scientific principle but widely recognized, even accepted, is the idea that a "collective" in a large group of people is smarter than a single individual". 

As an example, I cited the TV game show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?".  Of the three lifelines the contestant was allowed to go for help, the audience was often more correct by a huge percentage than the experts or when the contestant had to pick from a 50-50 choice.  In other experiments where the "crowd" is asked  to guess solely with their "gut instincts", such as guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair or the number of jelly beans in a jar, say, at the shopping mall, the average of the guesses from the crowd is closest to within 1% of the actual answer .

This takes us to the social, cultural and political issues of today here in the U.S. and every nation where democracy is practiced. We will exclude dictatorships, including those where regularly held "elections" are a sham.  Venezuela definitely comes to mind while most political experts put huge question marks on China's "electoral" system and most recently, in nearly two decades now, on how Russia's election allowed for alternately switching positions of president and prime minister  between just two individuals who'd been running it since 2008. The wisdom of the "crowd" still exists but only in silence and quiet desperation.

Barely six months ago, here in the U.S.,  the "crowd" made its pick. Political pundits, talk show hosts, media mongers and opinion makers at barber shops and  beauty salons, TV and radio shows, and from every corner of society where opinions are traded freely and openly - proverbial watermarks of democracy - have much to say as to why the election turned the way it did.

Was it about the messages that either party stood for?  Was it how the messaging was done? Was it about the incumbent state of the nation that made the "crowd" choose a change in direction?  Was it about simple and easy to understand words versus vague or complicated references in slogans?

What is it then that gets the "crowd" to go one way or the other? Is the wisdom of the "voting crowd" a real phenomenon? 

We are familiar with the bell curve used by educators for performance distribution. It is also a good indicator of "normal distribution" when applied, in this case, to the "crowd" population in a country that is  now split down the middle of the political divide.  

Unlike in parliamentary systems, such as those in Europe, where there are more than two parties contesting the elections, where coalition between two or more parties determine their version of the "wisdom of the crowd", the U.S. is  split right down the middle between just two parties. Indeed, the U.S. has its own unique version of the "wisdom of the crowd". Let me explain. We can look at the curve as a picture of the left and the right of the political spectrum.

Near both side-ends of the curve are the extremist factions of the two party system - the far left and the far right. The bulge at the center is populated by moderates from both sides, liberals and conservatives, the left and the right who  make up the wisdom of the "voting crowd". 

The center is where the majority of the "crowd" from both parties belongs: the middle class,  the blue collar and skilled workers and non-college graduates, housewives and middle white collar workers.  

To the extreme left we have the intellectual elite, academia's highly over-educated, the upper-class of society and Hollywood glitterati.  To the extreme right, we may have a similar make up of the left except perhaps that they have a view of the isolationist   attitude of superiority from the point of view of their own perceived unspoiled world.  The far left and far right who are on the fringe of the "crowd" will never meet halfway towards each other for any meaningful coalition to counter-match those in the middle.

The "wisdom of the crowd" resides where views and opinions are modulated by common sense and normal valuation of fairness - from both sides of the political spectrum. In almost all past elections the middle went one way or the other but it had always adhered to the same aggregation of common sense and fairness. So, what happened last year?

In last year's election the middle,  by an overwhelming 70%, believed in controlling the border and curbing illegal immigration,  and they believed without equivocation the natural designation of just two sexes, that biological males should not compete in  girls and  women sports or that pronouns are not to be tampered with as to create unnecessary social turmoil, confusion and identity politics on top of worries on inflation and state of the economy. 

The losing party failed to recognize that by leaning to the loud voices of the far left,  the party's agenda ran deeper into  identity politics and cancel-culture. The losing party somehow believed that siding with the far left or the extreme ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and everything on the opposite side of those enumerated in the previous paragraph were a winning combination.  Their candidate actually believed that the government has an obligation to pay for sex change therapy and surgery of those incarcerated in prison including undocumented migrants.  There is no point to enumerate every issue involved to drive home the point.

The "wisdom of the crowd" prevailed because not taxing tips, overtime and social security made sense and an open border was glaringly misguided as a matter of policy. The election result made it clear and in no uncertain terms that extreme positions of either side are not allowed to dictate the middle  of the bell curve.  Is the shift a real phenomenon?  Can the other side recover?

One undeniable indicator of the shift is in  TV viewership where the "crowd" has apparently switched away from the legacy media to the one conservative network, in recent ratings data, after the latest revelation in the cover up to hide the mental and physical decline of the previous president.

After all that, the losing party will try to recover and win over the "crowd" which, as in previous election cycles during the last two centuries,  is a real possibility given a certain amount of time.  The question is always about how long it would take.

It is likely not anytime soon if the losing party decides to double down instead of retrenching from its leftmost wing of the party. Spending $20 million  on thirty different focus groups to find out how to reach young male voters is not it.  It will take a while after letting the extreme left dictate the conversation predicated by labels of "toxic masculinity" on one hand while on the other it is okay for biological men to compete against women athletes and share the same locker rooms.  It will take a while to completely get away, if at all, from multiple gender  and freewheeling pronouns nonsense.  They need to accept that an open border policy is not acceptable to the "crowd". The biggest stumbling block is getting rid of their old guard (the octogenarian lawmakers) with new leadership.  Unfortunately, for now, the young Turks in the party are from the most vocal dyed-in-the-wool fringe characters from the extreme left end of the party. 

The losing party will spend a good amount of time in the wilderness for a while.

The bottom line for the country is to have a well balanced representation from both parties to populate the center bulge of the normal distribution curve with moderates from each side.

Thank goodness for the "wisdom of the crowd" we may yet hold on to our individual freedom. Common sense may yet re-emerge to predominance and may the "wisdom of the crowd" restore order over the chaos of extreme political correctness. May common sense triumph over ideology.

(Below is the link to "Wisdom of Crowds") 

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-wisdom-of-crowds.html