Phil Cooke

Need to Make an Important Personal Decision? Crowd-Source It!

Is doing an online poll to help decide whether or not to abort a child a smart idea? Pete and Alisha Arnold did it. They created birthornot.com when Alisha got pregnant and they couldn’t agree about having the baby. So in a digitally driven crowd-sourcing world what do you do? Do an online poll of course. Some have criticized it as a hoax, but more than 2 million people took the poll, and the results are interesting:

The total votes were 2,006,363 and were tracked by IP address so they knew the duplicates. The end result was 74% for having the baby, and 26% for an abortion.

But when you tossed out the duplicates, the margin widened to 78% to have the baby and 22% to have an abortion.

So what have Pete and Alisha taught us? Forget personal values. Forget ethics or actually struggling with important issues. Just outsource it to complete strangers. In an online world, what else would you expect?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2010 at 4:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.