Cognitive Science: Collaboration at Work - The IMD Contest

Yesterday a good friend of mine asked me to help her get votes in a contest launched by IMD, so after doing that I arrived to join the contest too, and not only for the prizes totalizing a number of 9 iPads to which, for the first two places, adds also a place within IMD OWP Program, respectively 3 World Competitiveness Packages, whatever they mean. What is interesting in this contest is that in a total of three steps, excepting the first step comprising a set of 20 general questions related to politics and business, and the third step, in which people have to match a set of image pairs representing pioneers in a field and their discovery, the second step involves a collaborative task. Namely, people have to compose a statement of maximum of 300 characters with the subject “Imagine you could be someone else for one week.  Who would you be and why”.  The collaboration resides in mobilizing your friends and acquaintances to vote you, they could vote you once per day, the vote being anonym so no need for them to login or join the contest, unless they really want to.

Even more interesting is the fact that not only the individuals are competing but also the groups/communities they are belonging to are competing against each other, and could happen that two or more members of a group compete against each other, stirring a conflict of interests and eventually some divisions with the group, but that’s less important for this post. To use a mathematical syntagm I learned during the course of Linear Programming done in university, I was wondering what’s the optimum solution in this case. Unfortunately there are a few years gone since University and the few classes on Game Theory and Linear Programming done in school are somewhere in a dick fog. So, I tried to approach the problem logically: what’s the best choice for a given group of groups to win the 9 prices?!

 Intuitively it seems that the best win-win situation is when all the winners are belonging to the same group, and let’s say that the group contains only 9 members. Each day each member will receive 9-1=8 votes (a person can’t vote for himself), which for the next 75 days of contest cumulates to 600 votes, which I bet will be more than some of the winners of the prices will win in the end currently. Why 9 members and not more? Because each member added to a group, means that one member of the group will not win, and as I suppose that all the people want to win, the conflict of interests could lead people to sabotage the voting. On the other side several members could sacrifice themselves for the sake of their friends and let’s say they will vote daily without taking part in the contest, thus resulting (n-1) votes for each of the 9 members, each day.  It’s quite a simple formula:

Total number of votes = number of days * (number of members-1)

The numbers are ideal ignoring the situations in which one of the members won’t vote and don’t include the additional votes added by other people, external to the group, who like the quote.

A special case of such type of group in which the number of members is greater than the number of winners could be formed for example by the families of the people winning the contest, thus if each family would comprise two members, let’s say husband and wife, the number of votes would be then multiplied again by 9 (just multiply the above numbers by 9). This is the perfect scenario because once a family wins the contest, both husbands will take eventually advantage of the won iPad. There are more variations on this subject, for example when also the members of the family of the competitor participate, in such case the winning group would be ideal when the family of its members is as bigger as it gets.

I wonder how many of competitors use any of the above approaches. I have several reasons to believe that this won’t happen, but who knows?! Anyway, you are free to join the contest and even vote my quote (here), if you like it. Any vote counts and it’s more than appreciated!

PS: The funny thing about voting contests on Internet is that the participants could easily break the rules voting more times per day by using dynamic IP addresses combined with other techniques. On the other side, the trickery could be found if the organizers are having the adequate mechanisms in place. If I remember correctly, there were such cases in the past when surveys or contests were in this way tricked, in several cases the trickery was discovered. Be careful, after the deed, and retribution!

♾️Cognitive Science: On Crowds (Quotes)

"We are more wicked together than separately. If you are forced to be in a crowd, then most of you should withdraw into your self." (Seneca , cca. 65 AD) 

"The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar." (Niccolò Machiavelli, "The Prince", 1513)

"The crowd plays the tyrant, when it is not in fear." (Baruch Spinoza , 1677)

"Public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it." (Voltaire , 1748)

"Every numerous assembly is mob, let the individuals who compose it be what they will." (Lord Chesterfield , 1751) 

"The pretence of collective wisdom is the most palatable of all impostures." (William Godwin, 1793)

"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." (Ralph  Emerson, 1840)

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." (Charles Mackay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", 1841)

"A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason." (Ralph W Emerson , 1841) and 

"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." (Edgar A Poe, "The Works of Edgar Allan Poe", 1849)

"Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water."(Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs", 1882)

"The larger the mob, the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of unreason." (Sir Francis Galton, 1889)

"Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics." (Cesare Lombroso, "The Man of Genius", 1891) 

"If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds." (Alice Meynell, "The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays", 1899)

"Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men." (Edward Carpenter, "My days and dreams: being autobiographical notes", 1916)

"The masses […] neither should nor can direct their personal existence, and still less to rule society in general." (José Ortega y Gasset , 1930) 

"When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"Crowds can push the merely good to unearned fame, but they’ll rarely get wholeheartedly behind the terrible." (Albert-László Barabási, "The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success", 2018)

"Beauty is not defined by the masses but by the opinion of the individual." (Rune Leknes)

"Business today consists in persuading crowds." (T.S. Eliot)  

"Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them." (Gustave Le Bon)

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people [...] they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." (Thomas Jefferson)

"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses." (Johann Kepler) 

"In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

 "It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people." (Giordano Bruno) 

 "If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas." (Jean Cocteau)

"In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind." (Edward L. Bernays)

"[It] is impossible for us to establish a living vital connection with the masses unless we will work for them, through them and in their midst, not as their patrons but as their servants." (Gandhi)

 "Men whose counsels you would not take as individuals lead you with ease in a crowd." (Cato)

 "Non-cooperation is an attempt to awaken the masses, to a sense of their dignity and power. This can only be done by enabling them to realize that they need not fear brute force, if they would but know the soul within." (Gandhi)

 "Observe the masses and do the opposite." (James Caan)

"Only those who leisurely approach that which the masses are busy about can be busy about that which the masses take leisurely." (Lao Tzu)

 "Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods, moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former, but no opinion." (Hannah Arendt)

 "Quotes are empty and meaningless. It is how they are used that gives them purpose, how the person repeating those words gives them meaning. Good quotes do not offer the author immortality. Instead, they give the author limitless rebirths on the tongues of the masses." (Andy Clark) 

 ‎"Two’s a company, three’s a crowd" (saying)

 "The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception." (Walter Benjamin)

 "The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself." (Bertrand Russell) 

‎ "The only certainty about following the crowd is that you will all get there together." (Mychal Wynn)

"The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been." (Alan Ashley-Pitt)

"The mob has many heads but no brains." (Thomas Fuller)

"The wisdom of the masses is not always [...] wise [...]" (Jon Stewart) 

"Truth happens to individuals, not to crowds." (Osho)

"We should not listen to those who like to affirm that the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the tumult of the masses is truly close to madness." (Alcuin, Letter to Charlemagne)

‎"What if the 'wisdom of crowds' turns out to be the ignorance of the masses? In fact, what if the Internet is a 'really bad thing' for the world and its population?" (Stephen Saunders)

 "When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute." (Walter Lippmann)