One of Dan Drezner’s summer reading recommmendations is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Dan quotes part of the text:
What was missing from the intelligence community, though, was any real means of aggregating not just information but also judgments. In other words, there was no mechanism to tap into the collective wisdom of National Security Agency nerds, CIA spooks, and FBI agents. There was decentralization but no aggregation and therefore no organization. [Senator] Richard Shelby’s solution to the problem — creating a truly central intelligence agency — would solve the organization problem, and would make it easier for at least one agency to be in charge of all the information. But it would also forgo all of the enefits — diversity, llocal knowledge, independence — that decentralization brings. Shelby was right that information needed to be shared. But he assumed that someone — or a small group of someones — needed to be at the center, sifting through the information, figuring out what was important and what was not. But everything we know about cognition suggests that a small group of people, no matter how intelligent, simply will not be smrter than the larger group…. Centralization is not the answer. But aggregation is.
There was, not too long ago, a an idea for an informal, decentralized aggregator that would function very much like what is called for in this passage. Of course, I am referring to the Terrorism Futures Market.
We all remember what happened there- the idiots won and the project was cancelled. The usual suspects, of course, were loud and wrong, which is usually the correct combination to defeat anything that might do good:
“There is something very sick about it,” a clearly angry Boxer said, adding that those responsible should be fired…
“I couldn’t believe that we would actually commit $8 million to create a Web site that would encourage investors to bet on futures involving terrorist attacks and public assassinations,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said on the Senate floor. ” … I can’t believe that anybody would seriously propose that we trade in death … How long would it be before you saw traders investing in a way that would bring about the desired result?”
Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said, “The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque.”
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota, called the idea “stupid.”
Wyden and Dorgan brought the proposal to public attention Monday.
The ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said that as reports surfaced about the plan, “Our first reaction was that it was a hoax.”
*** Update ***
Turns out it is not surprising that passage reminded me of the terrorism futures market. Last year, the author himself wrote a lengthy piece in Slate defending the plan.