New CrowdIQ metric rates break conditions from 1 (manageable) to 10 (stay home, call a friend, have a quiet day)
LA County Surf Forecasting App Now Includes Crowd Stupidity Index Alongside Wave Height
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — The Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors released an update Monday to its official surf conditions application that adds, alongside the traditional metrics of wave height, swell period, wind direction, and tide stage, a new proprietary measure called the Crowd Intelligence Quotient — or CrowdIQ — described in the update notes as “an aggregate behavioural assessment of lineup conditions based on real-time observational data.”
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What the CrowdIQ Measures
The metric, developed over 18 months by the county’s Beach Operations Analytics division, rates crowd conditions at 47 monitored surf breaks on a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 1 indicates a lineup composed primarily of experienced local surfers operating within established etiquette norms. A score of 10 indicates conditions that the app’s documentation describes diplomatically as “elevated risk due to high concentration of inexperienced participants demonstrating low situational awareness.”
The internal working document from which the app was developed used different language. A leaked version, circulated enthusiastically through surf community group chats, referred to the 10-end of the scale as “the full prat experience” — a term that county communications staff removed from the final public-facing documentation but which has now entered widespread use among app users, who rate breaks to each other in exactly these terms.
The British word being borrowed here has a precise history. The psychology of foolishness as captured in the word “prat” describes a specific cognitive profile: the person who does not know what they do not know, who mistakes their own enthusiasm for competence, and who is therefore dangerous in proportion to their confidence. The surf break version of this profile is so common as to have become a defining feature of the Southern California coastal experience.
Data Sources
The CrowdIQ score is generated from several data inputs. These include: lifeguard incident reports (weighted by severity and whether the incident was caused by conditions or by another surfer); drone footage analysis using computer vision to count boards, detect collision events, and classify surf equipment by type; and a voluntary crowdsourced reporting system in which registered users can flag specific conditions at breaks they have visited in the past 90 minutes.
The crowdsourced component has proven the most popular and, predictably, the most problematic. Within 48 hours of the feature’s beta launch, the Malibu First Point listing had received 340 reports, generating a CrowdIQ score of 9.4 — the highest on record for that location and contested vigorously by nobody. Manhattan Beach, by contrast, held steady at 6.1, which locals described as “fair but generous.”
User Response
The surf community has adopted the metric with the enthusiasm typically reserved for features that validate existing opinions. Screenshots of high CrowdIQ scores circulate on social media under captions that require no additional commentary. The score for El Porto on the Saturday after a major swell, when experienced surfers had been replaced by a weekend population described by one local as “everyone who watched a surf movie and bought equipment that afternoon,” reached 9.7 and was shared by approximately 800 people within the hour.
One user, posting under the name PacificCoastRegular, offered a review of the feature that has become something of a summary statement for the app’s broader appeal: “Finally. A number for the thing we all knew but couldn’t prove. The ocean was fine. The humans were 9.2.”
The Philosophical Question
The CrowdIQ metric raises a question that county officials have been careful not to answer directly: what, if anything, should be done with a score once it exists? The app currently provides the information without prescribing action. A 9.4 at Malibu is presented as data. The implication — that perhaps today is not the day to drive 45 minutes down the PCH to fight for a wave with 200 people who are more likely to hit you than the wave is — is left to the user to draw.
“We’re not telling anyone not to go,” said Department spokesperson Rachel Kim. “We’re providing information that allows people to make informed decisions about their beach experience.”
Experienced surfers noted that the people who most need the CrowdIQ score are the ones least likely to check it, and that the people who do check it are precisely the ones who already know to check it because they already understand what it measures. This is, several observers noted, a specific type of information paradox that the British have a word for — British slang for “stupid” including a useful taxonomy of the category, of which “prat” is merely one entry, and one that applies with particular accuracy to the person who ignores available information and then is surprised by predictable consequences.
Future Development
The county plans to add two additional metrics in the spring update: a Parking Stress Index and, at the specific request of lifeguard supervisors, a Drone Density Indicator. Both are expected to produce numbers that nobody will find surprising and everyone will share immediately.
The CrowdIQ feature is available now on the LA County Beaches app, free on iOS and Android. The county notes that the data is updated every 30 minutes during beach operating hours and that conditions rated above 8.0 are accompanied by a gentle notification suggesting users “consider alternative beaches or alternative times.”
The notification for scores above 9.5 is worded more directly. Its exact text is not available for publication, but sources within the department confirm it involves the phrase “genuinely, please reconsider,” which represents, by county communications standards, an unusually strong editorial position.
For further context on the specific human behaviour being measured, why “prat” sounds exactly as funny as it is offers a linguistic analysis that applies, with minimal adjustment, to the experience of reading a 9.4 CrowdIQ score next to a location you were planning to visit.
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SOURCE: https://prat.uk/the-meaning-of-prat-in-the-uk-psychology-of-foolishness/