Back to Three Toed Sloth again, this time to question it's applauding of this Abstract Factory post by Cog about 'the wisdom of crowds'. Not the book itself, mind you. Both think that:

"The wisdom of crowds" is a phrase precisely calibrated to mystify the thing it denotes. Consider the diction: "crowds", suggesting spontaneous, informal, natural gatherings; and "wisdom", suggesting a folksy knowledge born of experience, as opposed to, say, "intelligence", "cleverness", or "expertise". The phrase "wisdom of crowds" carries within it the seeds of the message that gosh darn it, if you just got those elitist social engineers out of the way, and let everybody alone to act on their common sense, everything would be just peachy. In fact, if you read the blurbs from the publisher's page, this is exactly the message that's being pushed --- if not by Surowiecki himself, then by his promoters, with his tacit assent.

Cog prefers 'the behavior of distributed algorithms' - neutral, accurate, un-mystical and, for him, sitting nicely on the right side of the fact-value split. No 'markets good / planners bad' overtones here.

While I do find it heartening that they appreciate the importance of language, Cog's suggested replacement could only demystify the concept for technicians and academics. The Wisdom of Crowds wasn't targeted at them, and I think that's a good thing - for the same reason 'the Selfish Gene' is good name for a book. (Though perhaps there are similar arguments against 'Selfish Gene': a lovely Thatcherite phrase, underscoring that there ain't nothin' but people and their families, fighting for evolutionary supremacy....)

I'm always a little irritated by over-accurate use of language, when one of the most vital aspects of any word is the context it is used in. No word has any meaning in isolation. TTS is against 'sociologese' - as he says here, it 'may be demanded by the audience, but it is not a demand which should be met'. Damn straight: certain kinds of writer can make a career out of obscuring what they're saying. I'm not implying technical language deliberately obscures, but it's somewhat narrow-minded to demand theorists stick to it. No-one's going to communicate systems thinking to a wide audience with a talk on 'the behaviour of distributed algorithms'. Such a talk might be superbly relevant to learning about markets and planning, would no-one would know from reading a poster. It misses the point entirely: it's the interaction of people we're talking about, not 'agents' or 'actors' or 'utility-maximising spherical moon-units'.

People are sensitive to the language, too. On a project I visited before starting here at Leeds, an attempt was being made to represent the local social structure in network graph form, looking for the well-connected nodes. One person did not react at all well to being called a node...!

Starhawk has something good to say on this; currently away from bookshelf, so will paraphrase: all speech should have an option for those who can't read, and those on the outside of the academy. Economics does this surprisingly well; most of its 'utility-maximising spheres exchanging voluntarily' foundations are deep below, doing their academic load-bearing and supporting the much more melodious, intuitive and popular pillars of 'supply and demand', 'market forces', 'comparative advantage', 'entrepreneurship', etc.

So. Yeah. Just goes to show.