How groups 'cascade' to incorrect decisions

Groups of people like to share their ideas, and reach consensus before deciding what the best way to do something is. Seems like a good idea. More brains on an idea should mean more opportunity to find what is wrong with it, then odds are that the consensus should be better than the choices made by specific individuals. Right?

Maybe not. From New York Times Science section:

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

According to the article, the idea that dietary fat causes heart disease is such an incorrect group consensus. Why?

The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease “does not stand up to critical examination,” the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that “the best scientific evidence of the time” warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.

OK. Back to the steak house, marbled beef, and I'll tell my vegan daughter to STFU. Oh, and Bluebell Ice Cream. (mmmmm! Bluebell Ice Cream!)

Wait!

Eating fat may not cause heart disease, but how many Calories are in that pound of steak?? Being fat may be a whole different thing! Right??

Theories vs. ideology; Which provides better government?

Conservatives and Liberals both try to take the lessons of the past, learn from them, and use them to predict future events. That ability to see reality as being past, present and future is unique to human beings. This plays out in (among many other things) the ways government functions.

Government is always a group experiment in trying to do those things today that provide the best outcomes tomorrow. A good government is one that gathers evidence, develops theories or ideologies of cause and effect and tries to govern from those theories or ideologies.

The difference between a theory and an ideology is (1) how perfect decision-makers expect the ideas of cause-and-effect that make it up are expected to be and (2) how the decision-makers act when it fails. Governing is deciding how to allocate resources and act today so as to achieve a better-predicted future. So let's look at the process of predicting the future and acting today in order to achieve a preferred tomorrow.

That process involves gathering data on events that have occurred in the past, learning which events appear to cause others to occur, and seeing the resulting outcomes. We then choose to take actions in the near future which will be more likely to result is the ultimate futures we prefer. The discipline of General Semantics calls this time-binding and defines it as "the distinctive human ability to build on the accumulated knowledge of others." Every human being does this.

The knowledge that some events cause other events to happen is called a theory. The more often we see that one event, "A", appears to cause another event, "B", to happen, the more certain we are of the theory that event "A" will cause event "B." We use such theories to guess what is the best action to take today to result in the future outcome we most desire. But "theories" come in a wide variety of strength or reliability. Some are pure guesses; some are almost certainties.

Physicists and chemists have developed some very strong theories about the causes and effects in their intellectual realms. Theories in history and the social sciences never approach the degree of certainty that is possible in the physical sciences. Strong theories in the physical sciences result from isolating cause "A" and result "B" from all other confounding possible causes for result "B", then measuring all the objects and forces that remain within the isolated system. Advances in the physical sciences have come from isolating the items studied, identifying every object within the isolated set of items, measuring the forces within that set and then manipulating the forces to a measured degree and measuring the result.

The process of isolating the system, identifying and measuring the objects and forces inside it, and repeatedly testing measured changes in that system to prove cause-and-effect has proven very successful, although it still hasn't worked to give reliable weather predictions.

If theories in weather prediction are not yet perfect, then those in history and social systems are extremely weak. The subjects studied in history and the social sciences are complex systems that do not allow chains of cause-and-effect to be isolated from unexpected outside events. In addition, history does not really repeat itself in detail. On top of that, historical data is, for the most part, whatever is accidentally recorded at the time of an event. Measurements of what event historical event "A" caused another historical event "B" are extremely rough in the best of cases.

Government, however, is an institution designed to do those things today that provide improved outcomes tomorrow, so it sits squarely in the middle of history and the social sciences. Theories of government, history and the social sciences tend to be based on estimates of which guess is better than the others, and cause-and-effect relationships based on such data are rarely very accurate and never precise.

But even with the very best of data, human beings have very limited ability to analyze data and make predictions if the data comes from complex systems. Humans can observe that one event will usually lead to another event as long as nothing from the outside those events interferes, but in human social systems there is always a set of interfering events, too many to take account of. The result is that human beings can predict simple things reasonably well, but cannot identify cause-and-effect in systems very well.

But we are human beings. It is a characteristic of the human being to try to predict what will happen in the future and to cause a better future. Politicians build their careers on providing ideas that if we do something, "A", it will cause event "B" to occur in the future. Or the opposite - if we don't do "A" then "B" will NOT occur. Politicians fight other politicians to apply social resources to their preferred action "A" rather than the alternative "A-prime" proposed by another politician, or to prevent event "X" so that event "Y" will not occur.

Both Conservatives and Liberals play this prediction game. Each takes advantage of the accumulated knowledge from the past on which to base the theories of cause-and-effect they try to sell the voting public. Let's skip the part that describes how the theories determine which facts from history are considered more important than others and go straight to what happens when the theory is used to determine which actions should be taken today fails to achieve the desired future outcomes.

Theories of future outcomes are guesses made with greater or lesser ranges of uncertainty. They are not and cannot be certainties. Performing and action "A" today to cause a result "B" tomorrow is always an experiment. So what happens when the outcomes of an action do not match the results the theory the action was based on? What does the decision maker do when the experiment fails? Here is the difference between conservatives and liberals.

Liberals take the results that don't match those predicted by the theory and go back to revise the theory for future use. Check the measurements. See if all the objects and forces in the theory were accounted for and if any new ones appeared in the experiment. Find out what changed from what was expected, and take the changes into account before using the theory again in the future.

Conservatives reject the evidence that the theory failed. Instead of revising the theory, they defend it. Here are the conservative's defense measures:

• First they attempt to simply ignore the evidence of failure. The first line of defense is to hide the evidence or lie about it. [The Bush administration has sometimes even stopped providing reports that previously were regularly prepared and published in such areas as environmental science and economics.] If others keep bringing it up, they attack those people bringing up the evidence.
• Second is the excuse that the action has not been allowed enough time to succeed. This is usually accompanied by tactical changes in the application of the effort, each of which must be given more time to succeed. [This is the source of the famed "Friedman Unit.' "A slight change and it will be working in six more months!"]
• The next line of defense is to blame those who bring the evidence of the failure and suggest a conspiracy to damage the conservatives for political reasons. Rather than discuss the theory and the evidence for its success or failure, conservatives move the issue to one of who has power and who wants to take it away.
• The final line of defense for conservatives is to blame those who implemented the action for its failure. Conservative ideology is perfect. If the attempt to apply conservative ideology failed to achieve the outcome conservatives expected, then those who applied Conservative ideology must not be "True" conservatives. Any failed outcomes prove that the perfect ideology was not applied or was not given enough effort.

The 'theory' of cause-and-effect that conservatives used has been elevated to the level of an 'ideology.'

The difference is that an ideology is perfect, where a theory is not. The result of this thinking is that while a theory can be revised, an ideology must be defended.

So the blame for the failures of an ideology always lies outside the ideology itself, and anyone who takes responsibility for a failure is proven NOT to be a conservative. The problem is that an ideology will always fail. It is based on the same imperfect information sources as any other tentative and fallible theory. An ideology is just a theory, even after it has been given sacrosanct status as "Perfect, not open to challenge or revision."

Since social systems are too complicated for any theory to work perfectly, people operating from an ideology will always be forced back on the Conservative's defense methods described above.

When the conservative ideology fails, government by conservatives will always be redirected from governing according to the needs of the people governed to defending and enforcing the ideology as it fails. Since the ideology cannot be changed, as it continues to fail the efforts to prop it up become more radical and extreme.

This caused the collapse of the Communist ideology driven government in the Soviet Union. It is causing the collapse of the conservative ideology as the guiding ideology in the United States. It will cause the collapse of any theocracy in the Middle East or anywhere else.

Government is always an experiment in determining cause and effect and attempting to actually achieve the preferred outcome. Ultimately every government depends on being recognized as legitimate by the people governed. When government begins to defend a failed ideology instead of providing the outcomes the people expect they will replace it.

The USSR fought that off for a generation by preventing their population for learning what outside governments were providing for their populations. American conservatives will not be able to keep Americans ignorant and enslaved to their ideology for nearly that long.

Oh, and why do conservatives elevate their theories of government to the level of ideologies?

I have a theory about that. The mass of voting conservatives have a low tolerance for ambiguity. Their leaders play to that by promising certainty. But this is a theory. It is open to revision given better information.