Vsauce! Kevin here -- and we’re making each other insane. We’re in an era of
constant mass delusions, and the toothpaste of delusion does not go back in the tube.
Mass psychogenic illness is an annual event at one school in Nepal,
where every single year students shout and cry uncontrollably. NOTHING causes this!
Grandmas in Kansas ironed their mail to kill anthrax and this guy drank
silver until he turned blue -- and it’s all because of the madness of crowds.
People are the worst, and a lot of people together are the absolute worst.
Except that… intellectually diverse crowds are also way,
way smarter than individuals -- they have more accurate judgments,
they find cures for diseases faster, they often have a better sense of what people want -- a lot
better than even a carefully-selected group of the top minds in a field.
It’s why William F. Buckley said he’d rather be governed by the first
2,000 names in the phone book than the faculty of Harvard.
I’m often quoted as saying I’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the
Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Figuring out how to get the best out of people without getting the worst
out of people is a seriously delicate science -- and when it goes wrong,
you start swallowing tapeworms to fit into a prom dress.
This bull is named Cat Ballou, and he’s a MONSTER. Most rodeo bulls
are about 1,500 pounds or 700kg. Cat Ballou weighs nearly a ton.
If everyone watching this video got together in a stadium and workshopped a guess at Cat
Ballou’s exact weight, we’d be harnessing the power of crowds to get… a really bad
answer. The more we talk to each other, the worse our collective guess would be.
But if we all guessed from home, separately, and had no idea what anyone else had guessed,
the average of our estimates would probably be right on the money. Francis Galton tallied 787
guesses at the weight of an ox, and the crowd was off by a single pound.
HOW MANY JELLYBEANS ARE IN THE JAR?
The wisdom of crowds is really complex, we’ll get to that -- but the madness of
crowds is NOT complex. Group crazy is super easy.
Paracelsus ran the ultimate con -- partly because he didn’t think it was a con. He was mystified by
magnets… because they’re pretty mystifying. Imagine being a German peasant in 1528,
the leeches ain’t curing the rash on your butt. You see a well-known genius use a magnet to
magically attract metals, defying all the common sense physics you’ve ever seen with your own eyes.
Then he tells you that that same magnet can pull diseases right
out of your body. Why wouldn’t you believe him?
Paracelsus convinced people that magnets could transfer sickness
out of the body and into seeds, and when they were planted in the earth,
the patient’s disease would then go away as the seeds grew.
This sounds insane to us -- but it made a lot of sense back then. The delusion
of magnetism as a healing agent spread throughout Europe. A few
cases of magnets healing what turned out to be psychosomatic illnesses,
and a whole lot of fantastic stories no one could ever verify, and just like that,
you get a centuries-long mass delusion that paved the way for Mesmer to mesmerize.
Science is amazing -- but it’s ripe for mass delusions because we can
almost never see any of it. Sometimes real sickness makes crowds delusional -- like
the possible ergot poisoning that fueled the Salem Witch Trials.
Sometimes we just make it up.
My body is like a garbage bag full of jell-o draped over a skeleton. It turns out that
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So the annual hysteria at that school in Nepal -- it’s an example of social contagion being
driven by strong relationships and close ties. It’s like electricity,
the closer two conductors, the shorter the leap. The 1962 “June Bug” outbreak in
a South Carolina dress-making factory caused nausea and rashes. The workers blamed it on
being bitten by bugs in a tainted shipment of textiles, which… makes a lot of sense.
THAT’S PART OF THE PROBLEM. The more plausible it is, the more social contagion spreads.
Paul Karason believed ingesting way too much colloidal silver was beneficial because it can
be effective topically to treat wounds -- and even prevent conjunctivitis in newborn
babies. Centuries of homeopathic anecdotes and pseudoscience turned him into basically a Smurf.
That’s called argyria, by the way. Argentum is the Latin word for silver,
which is why its chemical symbol is Ag…
TEXTILE BUGS. Right, textile bugs.
So entomologists surveyed that South Carolina dress-making factory and they found nothing…
except for extremely stressed workers, which is fertile territory for social contagion.
And the conditions were there for an informational cascade,
just like with Dust Bowl farmers in the Great Depression who refused to adopt
drought-resistant hybrid seed corn that was significantly better -- researchers from Iowa
State found that it was because there was an informational domino effect among friends and
families. They just didn’t trust experts and salesmen. The dress factory workers believed
their friends’ stories about bug bites, and their illnesses fell like dominoes.
But it’s always everybody else who’s crazy and ill-informed, right?
Wrong. It’s you -- but it’s not your fault.
Herd mentality obviously developed as a survival instinct. Packs are better
than trying to be a rogue. Social relationships are a huge component
to feeling happiness and well-being. And you know from my ‘Invention of Friends’
video that the Dunbar’s Number heuristic means we’re probably cognitively adapted
to only interact with a few hundred people -- NOT millions at once on Twitter or YouTube.
But, uh… please like… and subscribe…
Thomas Friedman proclaimed that the world is now flat -- and he’s
right. Your world – not the Earth. Your social group can be a wildly dispersed
improved-choke shotgun blast of people you don’t even really know and won’t ever meet.
So how do you take advantage of all the amazing parts of crowds without succumbing to social
contagion or even mass psychotic illness? We used to think it wasn’t even possible.
In 1841’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds,” Charles MacKay wrote:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds… they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
And that’s… true.
54 years later, Gustave Le Bon commented on groups from juries to democracies,
concluding that, “In crowds, it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.”
Crowds breed madness and stupidity -- that is absolutely accurate… and absolute nonsense.
James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” laid out the requirements to harness crowds
rather than be victims of them -- we need diverse opinions that are independent of
the opinions of the people around them. That’s why talking about Cat Ballou’s
weight actually makes our guesses worse, and being siloed turns us into a collective expert.
We need to be ourselves -- Surowiecki describes this as
decentralization -- and make use of what we know individually. Then we need a way
to take all those individual judgments and compile them into collective wisdom.
All of that’s the easy part. The hard part -- and sometimes the impossible part -- is
trusting the group to be fair.
It’s a tightrope that’s getting harder and harder to navigate as we’re influenced by
everyone else’s personal death-defying high-wire act between group madness and group wisdom.
You’re probably in some really great communities who are fun and
inspirational and really positive for you. Maybe it’s at work or school or
the World of Warcraft Horde guild you’ve been in since you were 12.
And you’re probably part of some crowds that make your life worse, and
maybe they’re even making you sick.
So are you part of the wisdom of the crowd? Or are you part of the madness?
Probably both.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Thanks again to CoPilot for sponsoring this video and motivating me to get my
fitness on track. click the link in the description to get your own free trial now.