One Million Penguins - One Failed Experiment

PaidContent has information about “A Million Penguins” – which is book publisher Penguin’s experiment to see “whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a believable fictional voice."
Thing only launched last Thursday but I’ll do Penguin a favour and save them six weeks of waiting by telling them “No, it can’t” – or at least not in the way they want it to.
Just as a reminder, or a cheat-sheet for those who haven’t read it, The Wisdom of Crowds sets out some very specific criteria for crowds to be smart. They are: -

1. Diversity of Opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of known facts

2. Independence (People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)

3. Decentralisation (People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)

4. Aggregation (Some mechanism exists for turning a private judgment into a collective decision)
Essentially, the way this works is that under these conditions, when you average out everybody’s contribution, everybody cancels out everybody else’s errors so that you’re left with a “pure” answer.

Now, while I disagree with a lot of what Jaron Lanier says in his essay “Digital Maoism” (his opinions can be summed up by the opening line on the site - “The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it”), there are some valid points within it…if you look hard enough. The points I refer to revolve around the type of information created by wise crowds which ought to be given credence. For instance, there is a difference between guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar and writing a creative fictional story. Actually, I should clarify this by saying that Jaron lumped writing books and writing wikipedia articles into the same basket, but I don’t think that is accurate so I’ve modified it a little. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be attempts at creating pages of fact. Fictional stories, like the one being “created” by Penguin, are quite the opposite.

That doesn’t mean that smart crowds ought not exist and play a part in the creation of fictional works. What it does mean, however, is that they can’t play the same role they might in creating a wikipedia article.

I predict that a small cabal of writers will lead the story and the inputs and that is how the work will progress. The other authors will contribute by acquiescing (I think that can be considered a valid form of contribution) either because they believe that the writing is better than they can contribute or because the style of the book moves away from something they want to contribute to.

Either that, or there will be a massive mess of a work that will be funny because of its discontinuity over and above anything else, which brings us to an interesting paradox - Penguin will only succeed with this book if their experiment to get the crowd to write it, fails.

Despite that paradox and the fact that this is clearly just a marketing stunt aimed at a market that is decreasingly interested in reading traditional books, props to Penguin for trying…