The Wisdom of groups, or the madness of crowds? What is that makes group wise? Find out in this true story about a lost submarine

1. T H E W I D S O M O F G R O U P S A N D
T H E S T O RY O F A L O S T S U B M A R I N E
WA R R I O R S O F L E A R N I N G : L E S S O N # 5

2. 1 9 6 8 :
T H E S C O R P I O N
Back in 1968, a submarine,
known as the “Scorpion”
vanished in mid ocean on its
way home to Newport News
on its way back from a
service of duty. No one knew
how the submarine could
have disappeared.

3. B A S E D O N L I T T L E
O R N O E V I D E N C E
The Scorpion could be
anywhere within a radius of
20 miles and hundreds of
feet deep……
Nothing short of looking for
a needle in a haystack.

4. A L O G I C A L
P L A N :
Would have been to call in
2 or 3 of the smartest
specialists to work out the
“S” solution to the enigma

5. A D I F F E R E N T
P L A N :
However, naval officer *John
Craven had a different plan.
First he put together a series
of scenarios or suppositions
for what could have happened
to the Scorpion, to cause the
disappearance.
* As documented in Blind Man’s Bluff:
Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew

6. B R I N G I N G I N
T H E S M A R T G U Y S
Then John Craven & his team
called in a wide range of
specialists.
But instead of getting them
all to work together to
decide what could have
happened, they did
something else…

7. WA G E R S F O R
W H I S K Y
Frivolous as it may sound, he got each
specialist, individually, to put a wager on
the scenarios they thought more likely,
based on their specialist field and drawing
on the local knowledge available to them.
The wagers were bottles of Chivas.
THE BETS:
What problem had the Scorpion
encountered?
What speed was it causing at?
What was its angle of descent?
…

8. A G G R E TAT I O N
Finally, John Craven
aggregated all the results
using Bayes’s Theorem* to
estimate a final location.
*Bayes’s Theorem is a way of calculating
how new information about an event
changes your pre-existing expectations
of how likely an event was

9. T H E R E S U LT:
F I V E M O N T H S
L AT E R
A navy ship located the
Scorpion less than 220 yards
from where Craven’s team
had estimated it was.

10. C O N C L U S I O N ?
The estimation given was the
result of a collective judgement
made by a group as a whole and
not by individual judgement of
the smartest individual.
The process did, however, satisfy
the 4 conditions that characterise
wise crowds:

12. D I V E R S I T Y
Each person should have
some degree of private
information, even if only in
the form of a personal
interpretation

13. I N D E P E N D E N C E
People’s opinions are not
affected by the opinions of
those around them

14. D E C E N T R A L I S AT I O N
People are able to specialise and
draw on local knowledge

15. A G G R E G AT I O N
Some kind of mechanism
exists to turn private
judgements into a collective
decision

16. S T O RY A D A P T E D F R O M :
– J A M E S S U R O W I E K I - T H E W I S D O M O F C R O W D S
“If a group satisfies those conditions its judgement
is likely to be accurate”
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