01/30: Becker

[jmausolf]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[chun-hu]

Thank you for the interesting paper. My question is also related to talkativeness as an influencing factor in the centrality of the group. In some cases, the loudest individual in the group is not necessarily the expert in domain knowledge. However, he or she can still be influential when making group decisions. I'm wondering how do people value domain knowledge and talkativeness in this case?

[HaowenShang]

Thanks for your presentation! At the end of the paper, you mentioned that 'The potential to calibrate strategies to both groups and tasks depends on several as-yet untested hypotheses.' Could you please explain what are these hypotheses and how to test them in the future?

[mingtao-gao]

Thank you for your presentation in advance. The statistical measurements and methods are applied to the argument about whether group discussion will foster accurate belief formation, which appeals quite interesting to me. My question is, in the Discussion section of the paper, you mentioned the performance of network centralization can be influenced by the number of people who are in the right direction. However, it is unlikely to know if the majority is in the right direction, does it mean we should generally not take centralized discussion as a way to form beliefs?

[TianxinZheng]

Thanks for your presentation in advance. I am interested in what do you think would be important in terms of team organization to improve collective accuracy?

[harryx113]

Thank you! My question is regarding to the cultural norms in team dynamics and group leadership. The "alpha culture" in the U.S. might not generalize to other cultures, and hence, there might be different patterns to be observed. How do you view the necessity of cross-culture studies on this topic?

[ChivLiu]

Thank you for the presentation! The question I hope to ask is that if the majority of people trust the unaccurate news and show strong beliefs and interests in spreading it, how should we try to stop spreading the misleading news? On the other hand, if the experts are normally less active than the common people, how should we suggest them to become more active and open to public questions?

[ruixili]

Thank you for your presentation. The study is really interesting! I have two questions regarding the paper. How do you adjust for individual abilities when estimating performance between individual and group study? The other question is, how do you deal with different combinations of group members? Is this study replicable in other groups?

[jsgenan]

Hi Joshua! I'm excited to read about collective intelligence, and also from a social network perspective. My question is: can you incentivize the individual decision making process in this model? If yes, what are the necessary assumptions and priors that have to be made?

[hanjiaxu]

Thank you for your presentation. In the hypothesis, you mentioned the "true side of the mean". I am wondering how to operationalize the truth in the experiment? Also, in real life, the truth is hard to define, if there is one. There are some gray areas that things can either go right or wrong. I am wondering how does your model capture such ambiguity?

[nt546]

Thanks for your presentation! I was wondering if you have any recommendations on the number of tasks to be estimated in a group discussion, in order to yield accurate beliefs.

[minminfly68]

Thanks for your presentation. I would like to ask two extrapolation problems: 1. How would it extrapolate to other different cultures? How can we design experiments to different scenarios? Thanks.

[fulinguo]

Thank you for your presentation. My question is regarding the measurements of success of a group discussion. You consider the accuracy of belief in your paper, but there might be other dimensions of success and benefits. I am curious about whether using different dimensions of benefits will result in divergent findings with regard to how group discussions impact overall performances. Thanks!

[nswxin]

Thank you for your presentation! My question concerns whether there's a relationship between the accuracy of the estimation and the target issues to be estimated. In fact, I do think economic forecasts and job candidate assessments are intrinsically different.

[Yiqing-Zh]

Thank you for your presentation in advance! I am wondering whether the theorem and result of your research can be applied in analyzing the benefits and shortcomings of different political systems with different degrees of concentration of power vary.

[jtschoi]

Thank you for your insightful paper (and for your presentation, in advance). Having an economics background, Bayesian belief updating or (trans)formations are considered in many of the papers I encounter. While slightly different from the setting that you have in your paper, what do you make of this Bayesian approach in general? Would you say that your network-based models or models that deviate from standard Bayesian settings (such as that in Galperti 2019, AER) is more realistic?

[Panyw97]

Thank you for sharing this research. Your result is really in line with our common belief and intuitions, as the effects of discussion depend a lot on the group itself. However, as you used the data from the previous experiment in another different research, is there any adjustment you have made to use this dataset more appropriately?

[ziwnchen]

Thanks for the presentation! Your research reminds me of the two longstanding views (interactionism and structuralism) of studying network organizations. In the specific case of forming "collective opinions", we learn that different network structures/positions will influence intelligence formation. But do you think will more "individual" level things like feelings/emotions also play a role in such process?

[sanittawan]

Thank you in advance for sharing your research with us! Collective intelligence is a research area that always perplexes and, at the same time, amazes me. On page 20, you mention that

...centralization is rarely beneficial.

Could you give a scenario where centralization is indeed beneficial?

[luxin-tian]

Thank you for the presentation. The most impressive part of this research on me was it provides evidence-based implications for practice, even though, as you mentioned in the conclusion section, inference based on laboratory experiments does need further evaluation in providing general suggestions. I wonder is there any way to introduce social choice theory as well as voting theory into this research to better characterize the process and provide implications?

[yongfeilu]

Thank you very much for the presentation. It's really impressive how you resolve the inconsistencies of the previous theories. My question is that in the long term, people's career choice is a dynamic process. We respond to external incentives as well as the information on the job market we receive. However, sometimes we leave our choice to open discussion with families or peers, but other times we just keep it to ourselves. How will your theory explain this scenario? Thank you very much!

[weijiexu-charlie]

Thank you for presenting this interesting topic of collective intelligence. My question is that is the conclusion drawn in this study generalizable to other cultures or nations? Or how could the factor of the cultural norm influence the collective intelligence and decision?

[bazirou]

Thank you for the presentation in advance! It’s an interesting and novel topic! It really gives us insight on how future working teams should be organized to improve collective accuracy! Looking forward to it!

[cytwill]

Thank you for this presentation. I have a similar question as someone else's: how can we generalize the conclusions to broader areas. And also for the paper, I wonder do these theories that communications could contribute to communities' belief have some special conditions? Because you do mention the existence of counterpart theories. I hope you can talk more about these case conditions in the presentation.

[ShuyanHuang]

Thank you for presenting. I am thinking about your predictor variables combining my real-life experience. And I am wondering if other statistics of the initial belief distribution matter. I feel that in a group discussion, people with average, or most common believes are more likely to convince the rest of the group with diverging believes. So maybe as an extension to your model, the network centrality and and talkativeness of those people can be considered as additional predictor variables.

[wu-yt]

Thank you so much for presenting this interesting paper! Could you tell us more on how your conclusion can be applied with voting system or election results? Thank you so much!

[yalingtsui]

Thank you for your presentation! This is a novel finding and I am curious the limitation of the research, it can be the assumption or method.

[ellenhsieh]

Thank you for this interesting presentation! In this study you use the estimation task to measure the difference between the group and individual belief. However, in the real life, there are plenty of decisions that might not be able to quantified. Then, how can you measure whether the result of group discussion is more accurate than the individual one or not?

[boyangqu]

Thanks for your presentation! The research on belief is really interesting, and I wonder have you cross-validated the results in any ways? SInce it is a subjective matter, and I suspect it a bit hard to analyze it quantitatively.