The Foolishness of Crowds (and certain erudite New York City professors)

At last weekend's Google/Stanford Legal Futures conference, there was a panel about Web 2.0 and American democracy that featured two erudite New York City based professors: Beth Simone Noveck from New York Law School and Jay Rosen from New York University's Journalism School. What is it, I wonder, about working in New York City that makes its distinguished professors so utterly divorced from the realities of the actual world? Perhaps the NYC bakers are putting mind-altering bagels into faculty brown bag lunches; or maybe there's something intoxicating about the water supply in Gotham that is muddying the minds of New York City's most learned faculty.

Whatever the reasons for this mishegas, the results are spectacularly bizarre -- even by the traditionally high standards of idealistic New York City intellectuals. Take specimen #1: Beth Simon Noveck, the Director of the Institute for Information, Law and Policy at New York Law School. Ms Noveck believes so strongly in something called "wiki-government" (ie: having unpaid, anonymous amateurs running of the American government) that she wrote an article entitled -- yes, you guessed it -- Wiki-Government for the Winter issue of the excellent new progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Now Beth is an extremely personable lady and a most distinguished expert and I don't really mean to be unkind (it's not my nature to insult people wiser than myself), but her Wiki-Government article was so misguided that I was forced to write my own response. It is entitled "The Foolishness of Crowds" and has just been published in the Spring issue of Democracy. Here's the first paragraph:

Without a trace of irony, Beth Simone Noveck, a law professor and thus paragon of the professional elite, favorably quotes the George Bernard Shaw adage that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity" ["Wiki-Government," Issue #7]. Does Shaw really mean to indict all professions? In addition to medical doctors (against whom Shaw ran his own vendetta), that must include civil engineers, librarians, architects, nuclear scientists, high-school teachers, and nanotechnologists. When it comes to politics, would Shaw include the professional bureaucrats who successfully engineered the New Deal programs? Is Shaw saying that self-interested professionals consciously conspire against "ordinary people"? Maybe, maybe not. But Noveck does indeed appear to be straight-faced in her concurrence, particularly since she adds that "nowhere is this more the case than in a democracy." READ ON

Like Beth Simone Noveck, Jay Rosen -- who wrote his dissertation under Neil Postman at NYU -- is a very learned expert on media; and, like Noveck, he also has some very silly ideas about the impact of media democratization on American politics. On the panel about democracy and Web 2.0 at Law Futures, Rosen argued that professional political operatives like Bob Shrum and Mark Penn are the problem with the US political system. So,  Rosen argued, let the pure amateurs (ie: the electorate) seize back power from the corrupt professionals. Rosen probably has a point here -- overpaid consultants like Penn and Shrum certainly aren't blameless, yet surely they are more of a consequence than a root cause of the problems with American representative democracy. But what really irritated me about Rosen's presentation was his appropriation of Hannah Arendt to his wiki-cause of pure democracy. However one reads Arendt, it is really hard to dig up anything in her work that indicates she would have been an enthusiast of the pure wiki-government of the masses. Indeed, her Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a 700 page polemic against mob rule, should be required (re)reading for wisdom-of-the-crowd utopians like Rosen and Noveck.

I''m afraid that Professors Noveck and Rosen -- two paragons of a profession which is, by definition, elitist --  have become inebriated with the anti-expert kool-aid of the Web 2.0 wiki revolution. The scary/hilarious thing is that these professors really are serious about replacing trained government professionals with the amateur crowd. I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry at the foolishness of these media mavens from New York City.

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

While I sympathize with your argument, Andrew (surprise!), I wish you had chosen a better example to begin your DEMOCRACY piece. The "success" of the New Deal remains an issue of heated debate. There is a lot of strength behind the argument that World War II did more to pull the United States out of the Great Depression than any of the New Deal programs did; but, at the same time, there is no denying that the New Deal programs did a lot for the general social welfare in a time of crisis. So, then as now, it all comes down to what you want to call "success!" By the way, if you never heard the story of Keynes' visit to Roosevelt, you can find it at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/03/beginning-week-with-bush-speak.html

[Dan]

Saw you at SIIA. Enjoyed your talk.

Maybe in due time, professors can be replaced by the masses as well.

Wiki-University anyone? Lot cheaper tuition I am sure!

[Nice try]

Noveck is a prof at New York Law School, not NYU. Some might call that an amateurish mistake.

[andrew]

Thanks. Changed the thing about Noveck teaching at NYU. That was a silly mistake -- even by my high standards

ak

[Joe]

Working as I do on the education and technology frontline in the UK, I can’t echo your views in this post strongly enough. I find myself constantly having to defend the high standards my own company has embedded in its values, against external “educationalists” who match precisely the “dishonest aristocracy of amateurs” you describe in your Foolishness of Crowds essay. I’ve worked alongside them closely and watched their rise in ascendancy over last decade with increasing despair, and in preparing a keynote recently for a teacher training college here in the UK, settled on an analogy I think explains their attitude and undoubted success in the field of education, pretty accurately.

If you asked Michelangelo was he interested in paintbrushes, my guess is he would probably have replied something like this. “In so much as I have to paint with them, yes. But I have a little chap who does all that for me. He can tell you why squirrel hair is much better than stoat and why he uses silk for the bindings instead of copper wire, in fact he will bore you to death with the details. He makes brilliant brushes. You should talk to him.”

Educational change in the UK is almost wholly driven by techno-zealots whose entire focus is on the rapid experimentation or familiarization with the technical functionality of any given piece of kit or software (often open source) because this focus allows them to establish themselves as experts. They fully appreciate that their continued survival depends on their ability to keep one step of the technological change, so they never realize anything other than new, purely functional skills. These educationalists are like Michelangelo’s paintbrush maker, fascinated by the technology but utterly disinterested in what it can produce. Consequently the impact they have on the formal education system is utilitarian in the extreme, to the point today where they are increasingly arguing that children brought up with technology, the appallingly misnamed “digital natives” to use Marc Prensky’s pernicious, anti-teacher catchphrase, are being disadvantaged by pen and paper exams. That indeed the entire exam system is out of kilter with their “needs” and we should be examining them in completely different, technologically appropriate ways. This is about the most educationally and culturally retrograde idea imaginable in an educational system reeling so badly from dumbing down, in some places it is barely still on its feet. It typifies the apologist thinking that seeks to explain away individual responsibility for learning and success, by substituting supposedly well-meaning, beneficent, state functionaries as the responsible individuals.

[Moulton]

Beth Simone Noveck has a blog site called Cairns Blog, where she opines on topics related to her research interests.

http://cairns.typepad.com/blog/

[Gregory Kohs]

I am curious why a challenge to Wikipedia has not been set up by now, that would invite authorship ONLY from authenticated PhD degree-holding academics and professionals. I know Citizendium attempts to move toward this goal, but it seems to be moving rather slowly -- largely (I think) because it's taken them a year to even decide on their licensing policy.

[zato]

The activities of the current Republican Christian Evangelical Government will get us to Armageddon quickly. A wiki-government might try to avoid nuclear war with the Mooslems, which would be unfortunate. So yes, wiki-government is a very bad idea.
(Just kidding)

[Cathy Fitzpatrick/Prokofy Neva]

I'm really glad to discover your blog. I was horrified by Noveck a few years ago, first reading her essays on groups.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2005/11/horrible_group_.html

I've answered you in more detail on your Amazon blog.

[tehnikalijus]

Open Source does not mean what you imply. Please reffer to http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

While the Wiki and Apache and ... are open source, YouTube has nothing to do with the open source, nor does any of citizen journalist sites.

And finally accusing OpenSource software for lack of professionalism is at best stupid. Open source software was built using techniques that allow me to read somebody's code and show my code to other without need to explain in detail what I was thinking. You will not find that sort of code in closed source project. Example? Check the windows source code after it was leaked http://www.google.com.au/search?q=microsoft+windows+source+leak

Open source has nothing to do with LeBon (yes i can see you finally read it). Open source is technocracy, where skill is important and not anything else. It is quite opposite to LeBon's crowds.

[Crystal Haidl]

And what about the DIY enthusiasts? Even if someone is a specialist, it's expected that he or she can cook up a concept from seedling thru digestion (and beyond). Lowly authors are expected to pay or create their own PR and what musicians could be considered capable these days without their own online machine. The path to success on one hand is to be an expected uber-mensch, or on the other hand a witless amatuer video star. Either way democracy seems to bend with the roman circus of tipping points.

[Linda Margaret]

While I don't think that wiki government is a good idea, I think that its still important to have a savvy public with the ability to access and react to information and knowledge online. Only through constant comparison and discussion can we separate the true experts from the charlatans. The internet teaches to question our sources. While I recognise the importance of policies and rules, any established hierarchy tends to want to reproduce itself. I'm for alternative suggestions, not anarchy. I still think the Internet produces this sort of thing more so than any other form of modern media.

[Michael "Bishop" Emery]

I wish I could add more here, but it looks as though the previous posters have covered things quite well. So all I have left to say is, WELL DONE.

Be well, and Live Unleashed!

Michael "Bishop" Emery www.alphaunleashed.com

[Nicole K. Guerra]

While there are obvious drawbacks to implementing social methods of knowledge production, I think your position may be over-broad. There is a very big middle ground that you may overlook by simply dismissing these ideas as techno-utopianism. And there are ways to control for the problems of trust inherent in these emerging social models.

It seems increasingly difficult to deny the value of such practices, apparent in countless successful OpenSource projects and business ventures that harness cooperative collaboration to foster innovation.

Furthermore, the argument linking expertise to information quality is tearing at the seams, especially in the contemporary context. Information has become so widely available and is produced at such an alarming rate and with increasingly interdisciplinary connections, that groups of individuals are much better equipped to vet and process it all and reach solutions through collaboration.

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