I was tickled to see Crooked Timber, one of my most-frequented blogs, report on Cosma Shalizi reporting on Scott Page’s ana­lytic work on diver­sity. Back home in Ann Arbor, the com­plexity reading group is meeting on patios to dis­cuss Page’s new book “The Difference”, and I gather Scott (if I may call him Scott) has been showing up to some of the events. Or per­haps he was there for the san­gria and decided to stick around. Scott (and I sus­pect I may call him Scott, I’ve only briefly met him but he seems like a super nice guy) is one of the most engaging pre­sen­ters I’ve seen and a crack­er­jack thinker and I’d love to be in on that dis­cus­sion, whether with or without him. And hey, I like san­gria. I’ve not read the book but Cosma Shalizi does his usual great job of boiling down to the sauce of essence, and the basic pitch seems to be: mul­tiple diver­gent weak hueris­tics applied seri­ally can solve prob­lems with mul­tiple inter­acting fac­tors better than a single strong hueristic. Thus groups com­posed of diverse people can be more suc­cessful than homoge­nous ones. With the caveat that there must be some degree of agree­ment on what the goals and suc­cess cri­teria are. Cool.

As a perhaps-interesting test case of the idea, Wired has a big fat report up on the results of their “Assignement Zero” project. The idea was to let any­body con­tribute to an effort to gen­erate a large body of high-quality reporting on a sub­ject, that sub­ject being the ability of dis­trib­uted crowd­sourcing to pro­duce high-quality work. Apparently it played out a little rocky. Apparently there was a great many lessons learned, a cer­tain frac­tion (esti­mated at between 1 and 3 quar­ters of the total) of decent mate­rial pro­duced, and appar­ently a lot of the prob­lems related to people not knowing or agreeing on… what the goals and suc­cess cri­teria for the project were. Interesting.