rewrite

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Anthony Marr

An artist turned image censor

A man is in charge of censoring people out of official images and paintings, enemies of the country, people whose beliefs or actions strayed from the regime. He begins to replace the erased faces with that of his brother - in a painting of a hill, in the background of an image of a censored ballerina…

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The granddaughter of the ballerina

A woman becomes the most famous actress to come out of Siberia. After the success brings her out of her hometown, she marries one of the richest men in Russia, but continues to think about her high school boyfriend. The actress is the granddaughter of the ballerina in the censored image, who had survived imprisonment and was eventually freed.

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The man working for the tourist bureau

A man is put in charge of an impossible task: turning a former war zone into a tourist site. His passion for the arts drives him to start this project by turning his own apartment into a makeshift art museum. One featured piece is the same painting of a hill once censored, which was bought by the famous actress when she stumbled upon the museum.

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The actress’ high school boyfriend

A young man was taken as a prisoner, and forced to plant a garden on the side of a landmine ridden hill. His captor attempts to return the site to its former glory, as it was when it was the subject of landscape paintings, including the censored painting of the hill. The prisoner was the high school boyfriend of the now famous actress.

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The prisoner’s brother

The prisoner’s brother reminisces about his childhood, leading him to visit the famous actress. She gifts him the censored painting of the hill, which he used to find the site of his brother’s death, and leads him to seemingly pristine site, now restored to the state in which it was pictured in the painting.

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki

Francis Galton was interested in livestock and how they were bred, and spent much time at such exhibitions. He once stumbled upon a weight-judging competition, where an ox was put on display, and to be the subject of the crowd’s wagers. For a little money, he could place his guess of the weight of the ox, and the most accurate judgements would receive prizes. Among the eight hundred who placed wagers, some were professional butchers and farmers, while others had no knowledge of livestock. Galton was not so much interested in guessing so much as seeing what the average person judged. After the competition, he took the tickets and run an analysis on the data. While no single person, expert or non expert, was able to guess the exact weight of the ox, the average of the group’s guesses was extremely accurate.

Galton’s discovery has powerful implications, that under the right circumstances, the collective knowledge of a group is almost perfect, and can be even more exact than individual experts in a field. This idea can be generalized beyond the estimation of livestock weight, but applies to politics and sports, or other decision markets, but does not necessarily mean that the group’s guess be the best bet every single time.

Several difference factors influence and enhance this effect: the bigger group the better, incentive for doing well will give people reason to keep participating, and learning new information improves the individual and collective performance. For example, the ways in which people behaved in the stock market after the Challenger explosion predicted the faults in the events as accurately as NASA’s later analysis of the event.

Four conditions are essential in facilitating the wisdom of crowds effect:

Diversity of opinion - each person has private information or interpretations of facts
Independence - the opinions of people are not determined by those around them
Decentralization - people can draw from local knowledge
Aggregation - individual answers must be processed and turned into a collective judgement

The mathematical truism of this weighing mechanism allows the wisdom of crowd to be used as a decision making mechanism. However, as the collective decision is based individual contribution, shifts in responses is reflected in the aggregated output.