peter,
well, since you asked, here's a response from the world of philosophy.
the issue has arisen in the context of moral and political decision-making, specifically, the topic of majority rule and its relationship to expertise. it was most prominently brought to academia's attention by john rawls in " a theory of justice" in 1971 with his discussion of condorcet. as rawls outs out, kenneth arrow, the economist, has also written on the subject. john stuart mill also discussed related ideas in "on liberty" in his arguments for free speech.
a contemporary reference to condorcet's argument:
Let us look again at the fourth premise: that the people are not experts. Now in the parallel example we accepted readily enough that the people do not have sufficient expertise in medical matters to make it rational to rely upon them. They don't have the training and haven't acquired the specific medical knowledge to qualify them to have their opinions taken seriously. But should we assume so quickly that the people don't have the right sort of knowledge to qualify them as political experts?
At first sight, attempting to establish this positive case looks like a fool's errand. The people, in general, seem to have little interest in political matters, and don't show much inclination to spend the time and trouble necessary to come to terms with the detail of policy or principle. They have little knowledge, real experience, or interest. How on earth can we justify relying on the decisions of such a group?
Interestingly there is an answer. Although we may rightly have little confidence in any one person taken individually, if we take the group collectively we may do rather better. Indeed we might put it this way: although no individual in the group is an expert, nevertheless under the right conditions the group as a whole is an expert. An example will spring to the mind of anyone who has watched television in the last year or two: 'ask the audience' on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Although it would hardly be rational to stake much on the opinion of a stranger, picked at random, when 80% of a group of strangers are urging one choice over, say, three others, then you somehow feel entitled to have a great deal of confidence in the group decision.
But why should this be so? The answer was first provided by the 18th Century French Philosopher and Mathematician Condorcet, who showed how probabilities accumulate in a very interesting way. Imagine we are to take a vote on a particular issue, for which there are only two possible answers. Now although we cannot always rely on a vote, under the right circumstances we can have almost absolute confidence that the majority will reach the right decision. The key variables to note are, first, the size of the total group, second, the average competence of the voter, and third, the size of the majority. Consider the following examples, from the philosopher and political scientist Brian Barry:
If we have a voting body of a thousand, each member of which is right on average 51% of the time, what is the probability in any particular instance that a 51% majority has the right answer? The answer, rather surprisingly perhaps is: better than two to one (69%). Moreover if the required majority is kept at 51% and the number of voters raised to 10,000 ... the probability that the majority has the right answer rises virtually to unity (99.97%). Brian Barry, ‘The Public Interest’, p. 122 in A. Quinton (ed.) Political Philosophy Oxford University Press, 1967.
Does this show that the people as a whole are experts? Potentially, possibly, but it is a big step from potentiality to actuality. First of all, the average competence of the group must be above 50%. If not, then as Condorcet himself points out, the argument works in reverse, virtually guaranteeing that the wrong decision will be made. In fact this point is tacitly known by the contestants on Millionaire. If their estimation is that the average member of the audience cannot be expected to have a reasonable chance of knowing the answer to the question in hand then they will not waste their 'lifeline'. If the average competence of each individual is too low, then the group as a whole is useless. Whatever this tells us about TV quiz shows, clearly the general point indicates the importance of education to democracy (at least if it is be defended on this basis).
excerpted from jonathan wolff
royalinstitutephilosophy.org
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