The Value of Bias and Polarized Crowds

Though I've argued and shared some very similar ideas in the past, I was still surprised by an interview I ran across recently. It's Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds: A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles from Nautilus magazine. Brian Gallagher talks with James Evans and Misha Teplitskiy about some research they've conducted.

My excerpts are lengthy, so I'll intersperse them with other things throughout this post. To keep them clear, I'll make them blue.

Evans and Teplitskiy concluded that polarization doesn’t poison the wells of information. On the contrary, they showed politically diverse editor teams on Wikipedia put out better entries—articles with higher accuracy or completeness—than uniformly liberal or conservative or moderate teams. . . .

People talk about the importance of diversity. It’s not diversity in general; it’s diversity in specific. If you have these different ideologies, it’s associated with different filters on the world, different intakes of information, and so when it comes to constructing reference knowledge on an encyclopedic web page that’s supposed to thoroughly characterize an area, you do a much better job because you have a lot more information that’s attended to by this ideologically diverse group.

Editors working on a social issues page said, “We have to admit that the position that was echoed at the end of the argument was much stronger and balanced.” Did they begrudgingly come to that? They did, and that’s the key. If they too easily updated their opinion, then they wouldn’t have been motivated to find counter-factual and counter-data arguments that fuel that conversation. We found that more diversity is associated with longer conversations. If they were immediately willing to give up on these things, then it wouldn’t have produced the sustained competition that ended up generating the balance that they, themselves, came to appreciate.

A letter from the book Yours Sincerely, Giraffe, by Megumi Iwasa:

Dear Giraffe,

Thank you for your letter. You asked what I look like, but looking is a very odd thing.

At the moment I live on Whale Point, which is surrounded by sea, just like my home on Penguin Island. In the daytime, when the sun shines, the sea looks blue. But in the morning and the evening it looks completely different. And at night, it's different again.

And that's not all. No matter whether the sea looks blue or green or orange, when I scoop up a bucketful the water becomes transparent. Isn't that strange?

Perhaps it isn't looking that's strange, but the sea itself.

Or maybe it's the bucket.

But you asked what I look like. I think I am mostly black and white. Even when I climbed into a bucket, my feathers did not change. So I think that must be right.

Yours sincerely,
Penguin at Whale Point

P.S. I think you and I would get along. I'm looking forward to your next letter.

I recently became aware of an organization in my community working to create civil dialogue where a real exchange of ideas can take place.

American Public Square is a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to change the tone and quality of public discourse. We organize programs that feature expert panelists and audience members with opposing views talking to each other, civilly, about controversial topics. Though these discussions may not always change minds, everyone walks away with a better understanding of the other side, a key step toward respect, compromise, and resolution. Join the conversation!

Which pages on Wikipedia benefit most from political diversity?

Evans: Political pages. The second most are social issues pages, which have a substantial political content. Even science pages benefit because sciences resonate with different political ideologies. And there’s no question that the science articles that benefited the most were the science articles that are associated with political polarization. I would be surprised if we didn’t see that across the science pages associated with the environment, which include climate change, but likely a lot of other things, including biodiversity. Those are kinds of science articles that benefited the most from political polarization because they’re the ones, unsurprisingly, for which diverse political perspectives end up offering really different filtered information.

Misha Teplitskiy: Psychologists and organizational scholars call this “task relevance.” It’s the idea that diversity in ideas should help only for tasks for which diversity is relevant. You expect ideological diversity to be most relevant for politics, less so for social issues, and less so for science. The surprising feature there is that it’s at all relevant to science, but generally we expect it to matter less and less the farther you get away from task relevance. . . .

Speaking of books, I was recently reading my son one about the inventors of LEGOs and I was very impressed with the vision that give rise to them. Awesome Minds: The Inventors of LEGO Toys by Erin Hagar.

A System
When he returned to Billund [mid-1950s], Godtfred challenged himself to create a LEGO system of play. What traits should a system have, he wondered? He came up with 10:

1) LEGO = unlimited play potential
2) LEGO = for girls, for boys
3) LEGO = fun for every age
4) LEGO = year-round play
5) LEGO = healthy and quiet play
6) LEGO = long hours of play
7) LEGO = development, imagination, creativity
8) LEGO = the more LEGO, the greater its value
9) LEGO = extra sets available
10) LEGO = quality in every detail

With these traits in mind, Godtfred considered every toy--more than 200 in all--that his company produced. The best fit? The LEGO Mursten, or LEGO brick. It was a risky idea. At the time, LEGO bricks made up only a small portion of the company's sales, about 5 to 10 percent.

Speaking of diversity, I find this absolutely fascinating:

A Brainless Slime That Shares Memories by Fusing

The plasmodium is essentially a flat, liquid-filled sac, but as I wrote a few years back, “it behaves like a colony. Every part rhythmically expands and contracts, pushing around the fluid inside. If one part of the plasmodium touches something attractive, like food, it pulses more quickly and widens. If another part meets something repulsive, like light, it pulses more slowly and shrinks. By adding up all of these effects, the plasmodium flows in the best possible direction without a single conscious thought. It is the ultimate in crowdsourcing.”

This simple behavior can produce extraordinary results. The slime mold can make effective decisions, comparing different options and selecting the best one. It can balance its diet, solve mazes, and escape from traps. It can be integrated into microchips and machines and used to drive robots—not quite a driverless car, but certainly a vehicle with no brain behind the wheel.

It can also rival organisms with brains—like human engineers. . . .

“I think we’re beginning to realize that brains are not prerequisites for complex and interesting behavior,” says Tanya Latty, from the University of Sydney. “The majority of life forms on Earth are brainless, but we know very little about how this brainless majority are able to adapt their behavior in changing environments. I really hope studies like this one encourage other researchers to investigate that.”

Brains are not prerequisites for complex and interesting behavior.

Why are the highest quality articles overseen or written by an ideologically diverse group of people?

Evans: More collective insight is generated when you draw people who have non-random and minimally overlapping sets of information or knowledge exposures and you put them in a forum that’s well-regulated by a set of norms, which can be appealed to and are, in fact, appealed to. I was really struck by the fact that people often experience this. When they experience balanced debates on these sites, they really described the process as painful and beleaguered but the outcome as satisfying.

Teplitskiy: Ideologically diverse teams end up debating more. These people are carrying different bits of knowledge. When they bring it together, they’re spending more effort to aggregate it into good content. Even aside from increased effort, we’re also finding that the kinds of debates they have are a bit more focused. They zero in on a smaller set of issues and really hash out those issues that are presumably most problematic. They end up having more conflict and rely on policies more for regulating what we call their “task conflict,” or conflict that’s oriented around creating content, and they also have a lower relational conflict—they gang up on each other less and harass each other less on a personal level compared to more unbalanced teams. Those that are more balanced have a lower harassment prevalence. . . . 

As the Wikipedia article indicates, we need each other to get a fuller picture of the truth. That's not all, though. We also need each other get a fuller picture of ourselves.

Descartes Was Wrong: ‘A Person Is a Person Through Other Persons’

According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’

We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues. The self I take grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviours from the self that talks to my PhD supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticise, or those who praise me. . . .

Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.

So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. ‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929). Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world. . . .

There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’

A requisite bit of Inspirobot cynicism:

source

If we all do our part we can make the human race a thing of the past

I hope that we can begin to persuade people, with this kind of paper, to really value the importance of bias, that bias is critical to how we view things, that there isn’t an unbiased position. Only when we begin to demonstrate the value of bias can we battle the cloud that bias is bad. Everything’s biased, so we have to reach into our core values and use those to guide our way through this world. There’s a strong scientific value behind bias, so our hope is to begin a conversation about the value of polarized crowds. . . .

My hope is that not just scientists, but people with opinions and political stakes in general, can seriously consider the fact that people who don’t share their political viewpoints have something valuable to say—and even if they don’t have something valuable to say about a particular political topic, that their different experience and perspective has likely given them access to other kinds of information that will be valuable and new to you. That’s the key to unlocking the potential of polarization: to allow people to constructively contribute to knowledge projects and other projects together. If you know enough about Wikipedia to open up the talk page, which anybody can do but almost nobody does, you’ll see extensive discussions going on. You’ll see people carefully, painstakingly employing diverse perspectives that are perceived by experts as being systematically better. It just produces more robust knowledge because there’s less ideological filtering going on.

So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. ‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ . . . Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.