The Crowd Sourcing Conundrum

I've been wrestling with a question for years now, and what better to do with our complex musings than to air them out in the confused, liminal space that is the internet.  The head-scratcher boils down to this - it seems like large numbers of more or less ordinary people collaborating can achieve incredible results, but so many people just seem so... stupid!

One widely published story over the last few years that gets at the heart of what's eating at me is the results achieved by the protein folding game FoldIt.  Programmers designed an online game that allowed regular joes to prototype protein configurations in enzymes.  Within months, the crowd-sourced protein folders had surpassed the best results of experts in the field, scientists with many years of education and specialization.

Remember that adage about monkeys and type-writers?  The FoldIt story suggests that a million monkeys at type-writers might not only be able to produce Shakespeare, but that they might be able to do even better and in less time.

Another illustrative example - Wikipedia.  Considered unusable as a citation in most academic anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.

contexts because of the fact that it can be freely edited by anyone with an open-ended information vetting process.  After all, anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.  We're programmed to defer to authority and expertise, even though collective efforts have often proved more effective.

What is it that makes a big enough group of normal people into a collective manifestation of genius?  Some of us in the bunch of real dumb-dumbs, but somehow that doesn't seem to ruin everything.  It reminds me of an analogy Douglas Hoffsteader uses in his absolutely brilliant Goedel, Escher, and Bach.  He creates a character named Aunt Hillary, that is actually literally an ant hill.  It was the first time I really imagined a multitude of individuals as constituents of a larger organic whole.  What if we are all just cells in the global earth human symbiotic organism?  Each of us a neuron, busily adding to the collective computational and creative energy of the greater whole.  Viewed in this light, as we continue to consume and process information all the live long day, we can at least imagine we're contributing to something bigger than ourselves.