Sir Francis Galton was a Victorian-era renaissance man: a person of wide knowledge or learning. The prolific author of over 300 papers and books; he was a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor and meteorologist. And yet it was the concept he developed in the twilight of his life, after a visiting a country fair, for which he is best remembered today. The year was 1906 and fairgoers were invited to guess the weight of a dead ox. Galton, ever the statistician, took the 787 entries and calculated that the average guess (1,197) was only one pound off the correct answer (1,198). The concept has come to be known as “the wisdom of crowds” or “collective intelligence.” He contended that, whatever the problem, when a large group is randomly sampled, the average response is often closest to the mark.
About one hundred years later, James Surowiecki expounded on the concept in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Using case studies and anecdotes, Surowiecki asserted that aggregations of group inputs are often better than those made by any single group member. What caught my eye when researching his work was the principle’s application to cognition. To quote from Wikipedia’s article on The Wisdom of Crowds, “…thinking and information processing, such as market judgment, which he argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.”
Take the ban on the legal sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Prohibition quickly resulted in black market liquor sales, mob-backed speakeasies and rivers of illicit booze flowing south from Canada. A more recent example is Ontario’s ban on the sale of beer and wine in groceries and corner stores. Those who lived close to Quebec simply thumbed their nose at the authorities and hopped over the border to a dépanneur in la belle province.
Then there’s the decision announced recently by Eastern Ontario’s Medical Health Officer, Dr. Paul Roumeliotis that barber shops, hair salons and the like will remain closed until “… toward the end of summer.” Dr. Roumeliotis sits at the provincial Covid-19 roundtable and it was this small group of medical professional’s considered opinion that medical services should get the go-ahead first. (Move along. No professional favouritism to be seen here.) The parallel between a dental hygienist’s chair and a hairdresser’s chair was obviously lost upon them – but not on the general public. I don’t know one myself, but I suspect that a growing cadre of underground barbers, hair stylists, manicurists and the like are safely meeting the grooming needs of ordinary folks. These ‘speakeasies of style’ are one more example of the wisdom of the crowd. I just wish Dunvegan still boasted a barbershop so I could slip down and use a secret knock on the back door.
Backyard tennis anyone?
I had an interesting conversation with Steve ‘Spider’ Merritt the other day. His reading of my recent column on the late Peggi Calder reminded him of an encounter he’d had with Donald Ivor MacLeod, the bachelor farmer whose property Peggi and Bill bought when they emigrated to Dunvegan from Quebec. Steve and his wife Anne had just moved into the house across from the church that they had purchased from Ruth Argue of Ottawa. Her father, Duncan K. MacLeod, had owned the general store on the northeast corner of the crossroads from 1897 to 1938. The white clapboard structure that faced south and featured an impressive covered verandah had been the MacLeod family’s home.
One day Steve noticed Donald Ivor MacLeod chasing after a pig in the church graveyard. Apparently, the old sow had made a break for freedom, headed for the greener grass on the other side of the road and kept right on going. In an effort to be neighbourly, Steve and his dog Poo (for Pugnacious Poocifer) joined in the porcine roundup and together the three of them were able to convince the wayward hog of the wisdom of returning home. As a consequence, from that day forth, Donald Ivor MacLeod, while in no way effusive in his acceptance of “that American,” at least acknowledged him with a friendly nod.
I’m not sure how it arose, but in the course of our conversation Yvon Leblanc’s name was mentioned. Apparently Yvon, Dunvegan’s long-serving barber of record, had once bested Spider in a tennis match. Of course, the first clarification I requested was the location of the tennis court upon which the match had been played. I never knew that Dunvegan had had one. A baseball diamond, yes, but a tennis court, no. I was told it had been at the north end of the Merritt’s property, parallel to Murray Street. And it turns out that Steve built it himself. Blessed with the boundless energy of youth and a love of racquet sports, he installed a regulation outdoor court, complete with backstops and a rolled stone dust surface.
Unfortunately, there is nothing left of the D.K. MacLeod house. It burned to the ground in the early 1980s. And the plot of land on which it — and Dunvegan’s only tennis court — once stood has been repurposed as the Kenyon Presbyterian Church’s parking lot. However, if you look closely at the parking lot’s Murray Street entrance (directly across from the DRA’s Clark-MacIntosh Park), you can still catch a glimpse of the crushed stone that topped the playing surface.
Before the Merritts moved to Dunvegan, they lived in the Montreal area for a couple of years and Steve taught tennis, racquetball and the like at the Snowden Young Men’s Hebrew Association. He was their “pet goy,” Steve quipped. When I asked Spider, how Yvon came to best him at tennis, he replied, “he had a wicked serve!”
-30-