Decisions, decisions

The Economist posits What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions in Decisions, decisions.

DICTATORS and authoritarians will disagree, but democracies work better. It has long been held that decisions made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals. The idea goes back to the “jury theorem” of Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18th-century French philosopher who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the social sciences. Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making.

The article goes on to describe the two types of decisions:

Animals that live in groups make two sorts of choices: consensus decisions in which the group makes a single collective choice, as when house-hunting rock ants decide where to settle; and combined decisions, such as the allocation of jobs among worker bees.

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The first type of decision would be called democratic centralism in which everyone abides by the majority decision. This is used to set goals.

The second type of decision is used to implement those goals.

For the consensus decisions, it would appear that bees use an iterative decision making process in which ideas are shared with everybody and independently evaluating that information.

... To find out, Dr List and his colleagues made a computer model of the decision-making process. By tinkering around with it they found that computerised bees that were very good at finding nesting sites but did not share their information dramatically slowed down the migration, leaving the swarm homeless and vulnerable. Conversely, computerised bees that blindly followed the waggle dances of others without first checking whether the site was, in fact, as advertised, led to a swift but mistaken decision. The researchers concluded that the ability of bees to identify quickly the best site depends on the interplay of bees’ interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of the best site and their independence in confirming this information.

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In other words, a robust democracy depends on the free flow of information and the critical analysis of the participants. Everyone needs to be involved in the decision-making process through receiving and evaluating the information.

And there is the importance of cadre development:

Dr Franks and his colleagues identified a type of behaviour called “reverse tandem runs” that makes the process more efficient. During the carrying phase of migration, the scouts lead other scouts back along the quickest route to the old nest so that more scouts become familiar with the route. Thus the dynamics of collective decision-making are closely entwined with the implementation of these decisions. How this might pertain to choices that people might make is, as yet, unclear. But it does indicate the importance of recruiting active leaders to a cause because, as the ants and bees have discovered, the most important thing about collective decision-making is to get others to follow.

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So, we have the intellectual flagship of Capitalism describing Leninist party building theory. The success of this depends on:

• Free flow of information
• Critical analysis of this information
• Participation of everybody in the decision-making
• Development of leaders to implement the decisions of the group