The Delphi Method

The Delphi Method was one of the first methods to be explicitly described as Social Technology, by Olaf Helmer, in his 1966 book, Social Technology, with contributions by Bernice Brown and Theodore Gordon. It followed an earlier book, The Delphi Method, by various authors, in which this method for combining the expertise of several experts to produce a more accurate prediction better than any one of them could provide on their own.

The Delphi Method relies on a panel of independent experts. They must be carefully selecte to provide answers from different points of view. Experts answer questionnaires repeatedly in a small number of "rounds". After each questionaire round is completed, a carefully chosen and anonymous facilitator provides a summary of the experts’ views, including their reasons supplied in defense of their judgments. This summary is then read by each of the experts involved in its production, then the questionaire is given again. Experts are intended to revise their earlier answers in based on the summarized judgements of other members of their panel. In theory the range of the answers will decrease as they converge towards a single best and perhaps correct answer. When the process is stopped at some predetermined point, the median questionaire values are taken as the result.

There are many flaws in the method. Most conspicuously, the method includes an attempt to collect a team of independent experts, but makes no attempt to verify their supposed low level of error-covariance. Also the role of the facilitator is suspect. People tend to summarize other people's views in a way slightly avourable to their own. Also some of the experts will not honestly revise their views from round to round but will stubbornly stick to earlier answers they have given.

Not long after the Delphi Method was first descriped it was mentioned in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock which inspired science-fiction author John Brunner's novel Shockwave Rider. In that book the idea of combining the views of experts is expanded to a a method for combining the views of ordinary people. A group of people interested in given question will be considered a Delphi Pool vote on the answer to some question, any question that might be asked, from the mundane to the remarkable. The validity or likelikehood of the answer given is taken to depend mostly on the size of the pool.

There is some validity to this rather democratic process, which also has resemblence to betting on some sporting event, where the odds are posted publicly and updated continuously. But the lack of structure makes this version of the method suspect. A small pool of people structured according to well-tested error-covariance values would be more reliable than a larger pool of people whose error covariance is unknown, completely untested, and highly suspect.

A great improvement on Brunner's method would be to weight a person's vote according to their successes or failures on similar questions. Those who frequently guessed right on related questions should have their votes given a higher weight than those who frequently guessed wrong.

It seems in Brunner's book that people can also bet on the outcome of a Delphi pool. It is not clear whether this bet should be about the pool's resulting decision, or upon the correct answer, when known. Perhaps it should be either, both, or the "point spread" between prediction and ultimate known fact. Such betting could be a part of the Delphi pool method, if people have to put down money on the line to vote, or entirely outside of the method. Again, perhaps both methods or a combination of them could be used.

Rather than using any kind of Delphi Method, it may be better to simply combine the views of small numbers of people who have known low values of error-covariance, even if that combination comes about from the actual person-to-person discussions the Delphi Method was originally designed to avoid.

Please See These Web Pages:

The main Social Technology page.

Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained

Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology

Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.

Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:

Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.

Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.

Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.

Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.

I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.

Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.

By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.

As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.

In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.

I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.

This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.

Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology

I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.