I ran three Deadly Sins contests on the site before I canned the whole idea and moved on. Administering a contest turned out to be pretty tedious, mostly because I thought the entries were not all that funny, and reading through a bunch to select one that was marginally better than the rest was a chore. I regret the elitism of my sensibilities in this regard, but there you are.

Once I made up my mind that the endeavor had required too much energy, I couldn't even wait for the last contest deadline to pass -- I chucked it right away and replaced it with the Lust Test. It took about twenty-four hours to receive the first pissed-off email from someone who thought the Test was a serious fundamentalist screed against human sexuality. Who are these people, and how do they manage to use a computer? There was a time when computers were complicated enough that the truly stupid did not attempt to use them, but those days are over now. We're all in this together, like some sort of democracy.

On the night of the first Presidential debate, we had our neighbors Sara, John, and Cathy over to play Debate Bingo. To play, each competitor takes a blank Bingo card and fills in the open squares with various phrases, themes, and names they expect to hear during the debate. Then, as the candidates plod through their rhetoric, you test your predictive political powers and block off the squares containing phrases you'd guessed would be used. Few of us had checked in on the latest hot bites from recent stump speeches, so we spent some time on the web listening to the candidates' recent efforts. The most amusing cards contained a mix of the obvious ("leave no family behind") and the speculative (John predicted Gore would call Bush "dumb as a cat").

No one got Bingo by the end, but John had covered the most squares. We gave him the "dumb as a cat" square in a moment when Gore seemed completely exasperated with the plodding, friendly yet clearly stupid Bush, and spoke to him in the tone of voice that one might use with small children and senseless animals. We felt that Gore, despite his postured exasperation and condescending tone, had made Bush look like a complete fool, the slow kid in class. Of course, the media response was that Bush had succeeded by failing to spontaneously implode or run weeping in embarrassment from the podium. Early poll results indicated that many Americans felt the same way, and I felt thoroughly perplexed by my country.

I suppose I should just accept it -- despite a public-school education, web-based admissions of my own fuck-ups, and humble Appalachian roots, I'm a snob. I don't think other people's contest entries are very funny, and I want the smart guy to win.

I read a recent article that compared the success rates of the "Lifeline" strategies offered to contestants on TV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The informal study asked: given a question you could not answer, would you rather call a very smart friend or poll a bunch of random people whose only qualification was proximity? To my great elitist surprise, polling strangers produced a correct result significantly more often than the smart friend. It seems that groups are often better decision-makers than individuals, reducing the inconsistencies of single-organism behavior into a melting-pot communal path of action that improves on what most individuals would select.

Another study allowed subjects to propose the shortest distance through a maze. The average individual response was, say, 9 moves. When the researchers averaged the group's choices for any given move, they came up with a total path that was more like 7 moves long. In other words, if the whole group had been placed in the maze and ordered to pick a direction at every move, the group would select the shorter path than the averaged individual effort of all the subjects.

There is something wonderfully democratic and profoundly un-American about this. It implies that a group system dynamically produces results that are measurably superior than the cumulative individual capacities of its members. Maybe it says that there is strength in unity when all members have an impact on decisions. And it suggests that individual choice is too fallible to be reliable in matters of importance. Perhaps it might mean that the Whole is more fit to run the individual lives of its component Parts.

I think that the question of what one would do when given a tough question on the game show illustrates something deep about our faith in us. Ask a smart friend or a lot of strangers? The smart guy or the friendly guy?