JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad, here with Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hello?

JAD: Thank you. [laughs] This hour, we're trying on a way of looking at the world that has nothing to do with presidents or queens or mayors and everything to do with ants. In science, this is an idea called emergence, how many, many stupid things can add up to something very smart like a colony or in our case, a city. Now speaking of us, it is often—and was often—assumed that leaderlessness is a bad thing, a very dangerous thing. And this was especially the case in the late 19th century/early 20th, which is our next stop. It was a time when throughout Europe, hostile irrational crowds were everywhere in the streets.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: You really see this enormous backlash, in large part in reaction to the rise of democracy.

JAD: This is James Surowiecki, author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds. And he's talking about the people on the other end of the riots, the intellectual elite.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: Look at people like Thomas Carlyle, Gustav Le Bon of France, Nietzche obviously. For all these people, crowds were really the epitome of irrationality and stupidity.

JAD: But that was about to change. And he tells this story of a guy named Sir Francis Galton.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: Yeah. Sir Francis Galton, who was this sort of British scientist and is actually most famous because he was the founder of what we now know as eugenics.

JAD: Wow! Is that so?

JAMES SUROWIECKI: Yeah. He's sort of a notorious elitist, and what's funny is that this is a story about him finding the opposite of his basic assumptions to be true.

JAD: Story goes: on a nice fall day in 1906, Sir Francis Galton, a guy who truly believed that only the better classes should be allowed to vote, rule or even have children, he decides to spend the day in the country.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Ladies and gentlemen, step right this way. Right this way.]

JAD: At the county fair.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Right over here. You know, this is going to be quite an experience for you, young man.]

JAD: The thing that caught Dalton's attention that day was a competition involving an ox.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Right this way. You might want to avoid that unfortunate plop right there, madam. No, pass over it, really. Now what I want you to do, please, is I want you to examine this very fat ox.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Ow!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Don't touch it. We never touch the ox. What we do is we look at the ox, and we weigh it in our minds. Yes, in your head.]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: Now the group was—was a really diverse crowd. Family members, local merchants.

JAD: Most of whom were not experts at all in weighing oxen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Young lady, you know how to weigh a package, don't you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Of course I know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Well, if you can weigh a package then you can weigh an ox. Here's how you do it: you take, I don't know, a couple of packages and put them in your head.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Of course.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: And you say, "Well, this ox seems to be about 70 packages." So multiply the weight of a package by 70.]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: I think they paid six pence, and they would, you know, make their guess. And the people that had the best guesses would win prizes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Large cash prizes.]

[audience oohs]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: So quite a few people guess. There's something like 800 people, almost 800.

JAD: And while none of those 800 or so people guessed the exact weight of the ox, prizes were awarded. People went home, but the ever-inquisitive Sir Francis hung around.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: After the contest was over ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: Excuse me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: Hmm?]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: ... Galton went up to the organizers ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: What?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: Would you mind terribly ...]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: ... and said, "Can I have the guesses?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: If I take possession of all 787 tickets ...]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: You know, the slips they had written the guesses on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, barker: All right, you can have them, I suppose. I don't see anything wrong with that. But why?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: Because I'm wondering something.]

JAD: See, Sir Francis figured these common people wouldn't have a clue. Most of them were overwhelmingly uninformed and unexpert in bovine matters, and he just assumed that if you added up a lot of uninformed, unexpert individual opinions, you'd get a very uninformed, unexpert group opinion. That's what he was counting on.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: One of the things he did was he just calculated the average guess.

JAD: That is, the midpoint, the mean of all the guesses. He figured they'd be way off. But when he did that, it turned out that collectively the citizens of Plymouth said the ox weighed ...

JAMES SUROWIECKI: 1,187 pounds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: Hmm. 1,187 pounds.]

JAD: 1,187 pounds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: How peculiar.]

JAD: Which was astonishingly close.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: The ox's actual weight was 1,188 pounds.

JAD: Wow, so they were a pound off?

JAMES SUROWIECKI: They were basically perfect.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: My!]

JAMES SUROWIECKI: And they were actually better than any single individual in the group.

JAD: Galton was stunned.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sir Francis Galton: Oh dear!]

JAD: This went against everything he knew to be true. But you have to give him credit because he did publish the results.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: He was, you know, curious enough to acknowledge possibilities.

ROBERT: That—this experience that Galton had where he went up to a lot of dumb people and collectively they somehow were smarter as a group than any one of them ...

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT: ... is an experience that has been experimentally tested over and over and over. So at liberal arts colleges all over the United States, professors ...

JAD: Why liberal arts colleges?

ROBERT: Because that's where these kind of things happen.

JAD: [laughs] I see.

ROBERT: A science professor ...

JAD: Never happens at vocational schools, just at the liberal arts colleges.

ROBERT: All right, so—all right. I'm being a snob. At schools everywhere, a science professor, a psychology professor usually, puts a bowl of jelly beans in front of the room and says, "How many people here can just guess the number of jelly beans?" And over and over and over again, no one in the room gets the exact number, but everyone in the room at the mean comes closest. Somehow the group is smarter than even the smartest kids in the class.

JAD: And, according to James Surowiecki, this is not just a history lesson.

JAMES SUROWIECKI: But that it actually is something. You can see it work in a lot of other places, and can be used to solve much more complex problems.

JAD: Much more complex problems? Well, let's just take one example: the internet.

STEVEN JOHNSON: If you go back and read a lot of the discussion on the internet from 1995 to 1998, it was totally dominated by people saying, "Yeah, the internet's neat, but you can never find anything." And nobody does that anymore, but it's just a problem that Google just completely solved. It's an amazing thing.

JAD: This, if you remember, is Steven Johnson, author of the book Emergence. And he argues that that exact same mysterious crowd smarts that was present at the ox-guessing contest is what allowed Google to become such a great search engine almost overnight.

STEVEN JOHNSON: So what Google decided to do was to solve the problem of organizing the web in a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. And what Google said was anytime somebody decides to link to a page, we're gonna count that as a vote, as a positive endorsement of the page that they're linking to.

JAD: Oh, so this is like a little democracy small-d thing.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It's a little democracy. Exactly.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And so what they said is: pages that have a lot of people pointing to them are going to be more highly valued in the Google kind of system or algorithm than pages that nobody points to.

JAD: So if some guy has a blog which is really great and a ton of other people link to him, he gets, in essence what you're saying, a lot of votes.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Exactly.

JAD: He wins the election.

STEVEN JOHNSON: He wins the votes. And they added a second layer to it, which is that when that guy points to somebody else, his link is more valuable than your average schmo's because a lot of people point to him.

JAD: Huh!

STEVEN JOHNSON: So he has more kind of Google juice. When you think about the way that city neighborhoods form, you asked the question, "Where do city neighborhoods come from?" And the answer is, you know, well, everybody and nobody at the same time is kind of creating this.

JAD: Hmm.

STEVEN JOHNSON: When you search for something on Google and you get a list of results that is often really, really good because Google gives these great results, ask yourself: who decided that this result here is number one and this result is number two? Well, the answer is everybody and nobody. It's nobody on staff at Google. You know, Google isn't deciding that this is the premier site for if you search for "Steven Johnson," and this is the second-best site if you search for "Steven Johnson." Collectively, all the people who are authoring documents on the web have decided that this is the best site by choosing to link or not link. Basically, the intelligence of Google is an emergent property of all these local decisions to link, none of which were made—until recently—with the intent of influencing Google. Now what's happened recently is that people have started to try and trick Google.

JAD: Yeah, that was my next question. I mean, you can manipulate the site, I imagine.

STEVEN JOHNSON: You can manipulate it. So I—I actually had this experience. This is one of the most annoying things that's happened to me in the last year, and it's ironic because it comes out of precisely the thing that I celebrated and championed and have been an advocate for for the last, you know, five years. [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: I have a website that a lot of people link to, and thus I have a disproportionate power over Google.

JAD: [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: So when I point to something, it will jump up, and ...

JAD: Really?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah.

JAD: Have you seen this in practical terms?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Oh, absolutely. Well, one way you can tell is that for a stretch of time if you searched Google for "Steven" I was the number one result.

JAD: Just "Steven?"

STEVEN JOHNSON: Just "Steven."

JAD: Of all the Stevens in the world?

STEVEN JOHNSON: All the Stevens in the world, the Steven Spielbergs, the Stephen Kings, I was the number one Steven.

JAD: Wow!

STEVEN JOHNSON: And obviously on some level Google is wrong in thinking that I'm the number one Steven in the world. I mean, I think very highly of myself, but I'm not the most important Steven in the world. But it's because I have a website that a lot of other bloggers and people in the kind of internet community point to.

JAD: Well, maybe you are the number one Steven.

STEVEN JOHNSON: I—according to—I'm no longer. Actually, I've dropped to number five or six, which has been a great tragedy in my life.

JAD: Who's number one now?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Uh, I think at last I looked it was this—I think he's a country music star, like Steven Curtis Chapman.

JAD: Oh.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. I'm still up there so, you know, it's all right. But anyway, so because I have this power with Google, on my website there's an open comment area where anybody can come and post a thought in response to something that I post. And about a year ago, people started posting these random kind of nonsense posts that would have a link in it pointing off to some, you know, free Viagra site or to a porn site or to, you know, kind of get a mortgage cheap.

JAD: Oh, I see. Uh-huh. So it was a coattails thing. Like, "This guy's good, so I'm gonna get on his coattails."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Exactly. And initially I was like, look, I don't have that many people coming here that it makes sense to advertise in my comments area, but I finally realized that they weren't trying to attract the people who were hanging out on my site, they were trying to attract Google. They were talking purely to Google's automated kind of searching. They were saying, "Look, Google will see this as an endorsement from Steven Johnson pointing to this free gambling site."

JAD: See, this is what separates us from the ants right here is that we're aware of the colony.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yes. Yes, you can step out and play the system. Because people are smart and they have this ability to kind of reflect on the system that they're a part of we're able to advance faster. But you also have cheats and spoilers who will destroy the system. And I eventually—you know, this is this tragic thing, but I had to—I had basically to shut down these conversation areas that I had on my site because—because I would get literally a hundred of these spam posts in a day. And a lot of them were really obscene, so it was like, you know, my mother would come to my site and be like, "What—you know, what is going on?"

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Steven Johnson is the author of the book Emergence, as well as Mind Wide Open. And he's working on a new one, which will be out soon, about how everything that's bad for you is actually good for you.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So it is no surprise that he is currently number four Steven on Google behind Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, Stephen King, but ahead of this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Steven Curtis Chapman: [singing] I will hold on to the hand of my Savior/And I will hold on]

JAD: This is Steven Curtis Chapman.

ROBERT: So from a crowd, even a pretty dumb crowd, can emerge—magically—beautiful complexity. And this after all was the great insight of Adam Smith. Wealth of Nations? 17 ...

JAD: No, you don't have to tell me ...

ROBERT: 1776, he wrote a book in which he proposed that there's an invisible hand. When everybody wants to buy something and everybody else wants to sell something, somehow it all comes together in a perfect balance.

JAD: Speaking of which ...

BEN RUBIN: My name's Ben Rubin. I'm a sound artist in New York City, and what you're about to hear is a piece I made called "Open Outcry."

JAD: We'll hear an excerpt.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Open Outcry"]

WOMAN: Sometimes I say to people, "Didn't you hear me bidding?" And I know if they say, "I didn't hear you," I know they're not telling me the truth because people always hear my voice. It's unique and it's a strong voice, too. If I'm selling October, you know, you don't say—you say, "Oc." And you don't say the full handle, you say, like, "Oc at 10." So I just yell out, "Oc at 10!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Oc $70 bid.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Play by, play by!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Sell $25. Oc $75 instead of $78.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, trader: Oc at nine! Oc at nine!]

BEN RUBIN: You're not listening to one person at a time, you're hearing everybody speak at the same time. It's like going to a symphony and hearing every piece of the orchestra but yet hearing the music at the same time.

MAN: And in the midst of that you may observe, for instance, a broker that you've traded with for years. You know what his face looks like when he's laughing, you know what his face looks like when he's upset about something at home. And suddenly he's got a nervous look.

BEN RUBIN: You can tell when somebody's bluffing, when somebody's not bluffing. And this is—these are all skills that are, you know, learned over time. It's really an eternal gut feeling, and as far as just seeing the expression on somebody's face, the way that somebody's breathing, the way that somebody's leaning on someone else. I always knew when a guy behind me had a real order because when he had a big, big order, he used to take my shoulder and shove it to the ground trying to hold himself up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: traders shouting]

JAD: Thanks to sound artist Ben Rubin and The Next Big Thing for letting us borrow that piece. Coming up, the story of the biggest search—and possibly discovery—since the double helix. And it involves the same guy. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a minute.

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