The “Break it Down” Blog

This is a brilliant paper (Evolution and the Wisdom of Crowds) written by a software developer that looks at how the people that tend to reject Darwin’s theory of evolution also reject “wisdom of crowds” systems like Wikipedia/Netflix-recommendation-system/etc for the same reason: They simply don’t see how such processes could work (but they obviously do).

Here’s a snippet that I think sums up the piece:

The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought “I doubt I could improve this much,” and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a “selection event”, and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia — as well as Darwinian evolution — work.