Primates, Swarm Behavior, and the Wisdom of Crowds

/Rant

On the short flight today I finally took the time to read the much-referenced National Geographic article on Swarm Behavior, which (uncharacteristically for N.G.) manages to intermingle stigmergy with Wikipedia.

I am going to don my best Asbestos suit for this one and go out on a thin flammable limb in saying that:

"SWARM BEHAVIOR AND THE WISDOM OF CROWDS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT"

If you are reading this, the odds are strongly in favor of your ancestors having descended from primates of some species, which means that we have our own pecking order on how we figure out who is giving orders and who is taking them.  Who gets to mate with that pretty female over there?  Easy, the big silverback.....and woe betide the little ape who tries to bypass the pecking order.

I'm currently sitting in a frequent traveler lounge in Chicago O'Hare international airport.  In fact, I've been sitting in these lounges for so much of my life that I should be able to claim this as residence on my taxes.  It USED to be that you could walk into these lounges and the pecking order was clear.....the silverback CEO in the pinstripe, his #2 in the blue blazer and gray trousers, the #3 in the taupe suit with spiffy tie.  Then, about 15 years ago, a new species was introduced into the pecking order....the guy in the jeans with the $500 pen and leather journal.  He disturbed the explicit status regime because no one could place him in the pecking order.

Vignette- In 1996, I moved from Southern California to Northern California.  In SoCal, if you walked in to a fine mens clothier, you had better look the part already or no sales rep was going to take the time to come and speak with you.  I once waited 30 minutes for a sales rep to approach me at Fashion Island in Newport Beach because I had stopped on a whim while wearing jeans.  When I moved to NoCal, I strolled into Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto to pick up some new corporate armor and was pounced on by sales reps repeatedly, also while wearing jeans.  Why?  Because in Silicon Valley, that unshaven guy in jeans may be the recent community college dropout, or the recent dot-com multi-millionaire retiree.  It's better to err on the side of not ignoring him.

So what does this have to do with Swarm Intelligence, you may be asking yourself?  Exactly nothing.  That's my point.  We have a complex, hard-wired program of non-verbal cues and social behavior that underlie the structure of human interaction.  We don't sniff each other's privates to say hello, follow pheromone trails, or dance a jig to signify when we've found a new hive for the family unit.  We do unconsciously move (or not) when walking straight at other primates, we do defer to the silverback in the room and adjust the tone of the conversation when he/she enters, we do follow a complex program of picking the EXACTLY RIGHT urinal when confronted with a busy public restroom.

I agree with half of the article's argument that pervasive network connectivity and web 2.0 technologies allows us to engage in a public dialog and discourse on a scale unprecedented in human history.  This will be the killer application of the information superhighway that we all painstakingly built in the last two decades, just as the secondary commerce that arose from the highway systems worldwide was the real societal benefit, and not the highways themselves.

I disagree that this has anything to do with swarm behavior.  We may be clever primates and build tools and bots to leverage swarm behavior to forward our primate ends, but we can't deprogram millions of years of evolution and hard wiring and begin to act like networked honeybees, pigeons, or ants.

/Rant off

Comments

[GP]

Thanks for making the case for why we won't be attaching electronic virtual money to our emails in order to get them read. :-) Ultimately humans are wired a certain way and systems that violate that wiring are either doomed to failure or multi-generational incubation cycles.