Dear Santa: Please Send J.J. Abrams a Copy of "The Wisdom of Crowds"

May I stray away from the law -- kind of* -- for a second, and talk about why Lost is ticking me off so much these days?

Take this situation: a relatively small, certainly manageable, number of people is stranded on an island.  They have among them a variety of skills and talents.  Aside from all the usual travails of survival, it becomes clear to them, both individually and as a group, that the island is...unusual.  For one thing, it's not a "deserted" island: it's inhabited, and the mysterious inhabitants are lethal.  They discover evidence of some bizarre experiment, program, what have you on the island.  Moreover, individual members of the group have seen and experienced things that seem to defy reason and that often turn out to have important implications for the survivors and/or to be connected to other relevant facts or experiences.  This has become fairly clear to many of the individuals in the group. 

Now, one thing such a group would need is a leader, and there at least a couple of those within the group.  But another thing the group would want to do is pool and aggregate its freaking information!  Leadership sometimes requires decisiveness; but the better the information on which the leader is drawing, the better his or her decisions are likely to be in urgent situations.  And many non-urgent situations arise in which the group does have an opportunity to pool and sort through disparately gathered pieces of information, deliberate, and come up with some aggregate sense of collective wisdom.  The more counterintuitive aspects of these points may require some specialized knowledge of social psychology and so forth; but just about any moron stranded on a mysterious and sometimes lethal desert island would, at some point, wake up to the idea that it's useful to share information.  ("Folks, Shannon and I saw Walt before she died.  I know that sounds crazy, but having already seen a polar bear I'm inclined to share this information with the group.  Any thoughts? Anyone else had anything strange happen to them?"  "Uh, yeah.  I couldn't walk before we crashed."  "Interesting.  Thanks for sharing.")  Granted that some of these data points would seem incredible (say, the whole walking thing), and so draw skepticism; but even a rational individual would at some point want to draw some conclusions from the repeated evidence of the independent experience of many observers -- and all the more so given the high fatality rate on the island.   

This stupidly obvious fact seems to elude the survivors on Lost time and again, and it is beginning, as should be evident by now, to drive me nuts.  I absolutely reject the argument that this is necessary for the sake of the storyline or to preserve dramatic tension.  Cliches are not ultimately great aids in maintaining dramatic tension, and the old character-failing-to-communicate-a-basic-fact-in-the-face-of-all-logic-and-reason trope is a commonplace on TV.  (I'm a big Buffy fan, but this was a sadly common feature on that show.)  Indeed, what makes the suspension of disbelief so possible on a show like Lost, when it's at its best, and what makes it compelling, is that it puts believable characters, acting believably, in an unbelievable situation.  If someone doesn't call a group meeting pretty soon, I'm going to put my boot through my TV screen.         

* I say "kind of" because much of my work these days, and much work elsewhere in the legal academy, has involved thinking about the relationship between group decision-making and the law, whether in corporate governance or in broader constitutional law issues such as freedom of association or separation of powers.  So, once again, primetime TV is a superb vehicle for thinking about cutting-edge legal scholarship, and no time spent "vegetating" (hah!  if they only knew -- we're actually "ruminating" and "interrogating") in front of the so-called "idiot box" (another terrible misnomer  -- it is in fact a "site" for "exploration" of important issues) is wasted time.