Group items tagged

"Decisions about political, economic, legal, and health issues are often made by simple majority voting in groups that rarely exceed 30-40 members and are typically much smaller. Given that wisdom is usually attributed to large crowds, shouldn't committees be larger? In many real-life situations, expert groups encounter a number of different tasks. Most are easy, with average individual accuracy being above chance, but some are surprisingly difficult, with most group members being wrong. Examples are elections with surprising outcomes, sudden turns in financial trends, or tricky knowledge questions. Most of the time, groups cannot predict in advance whether the next task will be easy or difficult. We show that under these circumstances moderately sized groups, whose members are selected randomly from a larger crowd, can achieve higher average accuracy across all tasks than either larger groups or individuals. This happens because an increase in group size can lead to a decrease in group accuracy for difficult tasks that is larger than the corresponding increase in accuracy for easy tasks. We derive this nonmonotonic relationship between group size and accuracy from the Condorcet jury theorem and use simulations and further analyses to show that it holds under a variety of assumptions. We further show that situations favoring moderately sized groups occur in a variety of real-life situations including political, medical, and financial decisions and general knowledge tests. These results have implications for the design of decision-making bodies at all levels of policy."

"The researchers created two experimental groups. Group 1 included profiles with some demographic similarities to the study participant (ex. a single male in his 20s viewing a profile of a user with comparable age, gender and marital status). Group 2 included profiles with completely different personal traits from the participant, but with better reputations - conveyed by impressive star ratings and number of reviews - than those in Group 1. (Profiles from Group 1 were included in Group 2 for comparison). To test for evidence of bias, participants played a behavioral game where they were asked to invest credits in the various profiles. The amount of credits a person invested in each profile served as a measure of trust. In the first group, participants invested greatly in the similar profiles. The more similar the profiles were, the more the participant trusted them, succumbing to bias. In the second group, however, the researchers noticed a shift. Participants invested significantly more in users whose characteristics were completely different than their own, but who had better reputations. Those profiles' reputation mechanisms counteracted people's penchant for favoring users similar to themselves."

There's little correlation between a group's collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.

We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end-that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.

"We have become a nation of victims, with officially protected victim groups adding up to 73% of the population (p.6). According to a new book by the independent think tank Civitas, victimhood today is a political status that is sought after because of the advantages it brings, including preferential treatment in the workplace, the possibility of using police power to silence unwelcome critics, and financial compensation. Some groups are claiming to be victims of multiple discrimination: if their claims are taken seriously, 109% of the population have victim status (p.7). According to David Green's book We're (Nearly) All Victims Now!, politicised victimhood undermines liberalism, weakens our democratic culture and subverts equality before the law, as well as police and judicial impartiality. From 2007, the government intends to establish a Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) that will protect six groups: women, ethnic groups and disabled people, plus those defined by sexual orientation, age, and religion or belief."

What seems to have happened is that many feminist interest groups have taken on this concept of 'intersectionality' but interpreted it in a simplistic way. They acknowledge how 'feminism' cannot represent all women as a homogenous group. They identify themselves as a minority who is 'othered' by the dominant feminist ideology, and is seen as 'troublesome'.  But their reaction is to retreat into their own 'ghetto', where they feel safe and are not 'troubled' by anyone else's differing identities and opinions.  So the radical feminists, trans women, 'womanists' , liberal feminists, anti-sex industry feminists, pro-porn feminists, trade union feminists all inhabit different discursive and physical spaces. In some cases they are patrolled by guards and have high fences round them, to keep out intruders. But I have no interest in 'ghetto' politics.

"Male students are "manning-up", setting up men's groups to celebrate and explore the concept of masculinity amid accusations of sexism and gender stereotyping. Manchester University has created the first official MENS Society - Masculinity Exploring Networking and Support - despite outrage from critics who claim the existence of such a group undermines women's ability to speak out for equality. Meanwhile, at Oxford University the formation of Man Collective - Oxford (MC-O), launched "as a response to the current state of masculinity" has been branded "reactionary and ridiculous"."

Writing on Facebook, playwright and poet Alfian Sa'at said of the gay-affirmative event Pink Dot, "like so many things in Singapore, [it] has ended up reproducing the power structures that it should aim to challenge." He was referring to the way Pink Dot has written all over it the social ascendancy of the English-speaking ethnic-Chinese middle class. He reported a comment from a friend: "Pink Dot is as much a celebration of the LGBT community to love as it is a display of the self-love of Chinese, middle-class, English-educated liberals. What is inclusive in the term 'LGBT' is problematised by the fact that what is supposed to stand for the queer community in Singapore is almost exclusively 'CMEL'!"

if we bother arguing that the Bible supports us, we're conceding its validity as a moral text. And once we free ourselves from its shackles, fundamentalists can just use it to abuse the next minority group unfortunate enough to stumble across their path. The key point is that it absolutely does not matter what the Bible says about LGBTs or any other grouping of people. We don't even need to spend time denouncing the Bible's abhorrent stances on everything from slavery to rape, because it just isn't important. The Bible is an epic historical text that traces the way a large group of religious people understand their general genealogy and evolution of identity. Taking a single ancient anthology as an evergreen moral blueprint is a problem that cannot be understated. Whether or not the source is good or evil isn't the issue. Ethical perspectives evolve over time and shouldn't be bound by the musings of ancient writers who had absolutely no imagining of our contemporary world.

Anti-bullying backlash doesn't only come from Christian groups. Orthodox Jewish and Christian groups came together in Toronto last year to protest an anti-bullying measure "as a vehicle to indoctrinate children into embracing a new sexual revolution." It focused on the measure's call to establish a gay-straight alliance, and add support for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities. "To force, especially Christian, classrooms or schools to have homosexual clubs would, of course, be an affront to their family values," said Charles McVety, president of Christian Canada College. "And what does this have to do with bullying? Nothing."

CPAC and GOProud - strange bedfellows

"The survey found various religious groups support marriage equality, including 84 percent of Buddhist respondents, 77 percent of Jews, and 60 percent of Catholics. Jehovah's Witnesses (12 percent), Mormons (27 percent), and white evangelical Protestants (28 percent) reported the lowest levels of support for same-sex marriage. Other groups, such as Muslims (42 percent) and Hispanic Protestants (35 percent), were more closely split on the issue, but still reported majority opposition."

What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but "group reliance," according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. "[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others," he says. This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This "distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance," Dixon says. Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they'll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.

At Western Washington University, a public institution with roughly 15,000 students, a group of leftist activists calling itself the Student Assembly for Power and Liberation has issued a sweeping list of demands that would radically reshape its school. The demands pose a direct challenge to academic freedom; threaten free speech; and would arguably harm the very students from historically marginalized groups that the activists truly want to help. Whether one thinks that the campus climate at Western Washington is wonderful or requires reforms, however, the particular agenda put forth by these activists is deeply misguided.

" he was Mark Kennedy, an undercover policeman who had been sent to spy on her circle of activist friends. For seven years, he had adopted a fake persona to infiltrate environmental groups. Their unmasking of him five years ago kickstarted a chain of events that has exposed one of the state's most deeply concealed secrets. Back then, the public knew little about a covert operation that had been running since 1968. Only a limited number of senior police officers knew about it. Kennedy was one of more than 100 undercover officers who, over the previous four decades, had transformed themselves into fake campaigners for years at a time, assimilating themselves into political groups and hoovering up information about protests that they had helped to organise. More than 10 women have discovered that they had relationships with undercover policemen, some lasting years, without being told their true identity. On Friday it was announced that police had agreed to give a full apology and pay compensation to Lisa and six other women for the trauma they suffered after being deceived into forming intimate relationships with police spies."