I’d like to perform my own experiment regarding the wisdom of crowds. This crowd, in fact.

Other than a CBS crime drama, the “wisdom of the crowd” is the idea that the averaged opinions of a large enough group of people can be more reliable or yield better results than the opinions of any single expert. Planet Money even showed that the wisdom of the crowd could be better than even the average opinion of a group of self-identified experts, at least as far as guessing the weight of a cow.

The concept appears to go as far back as Aristotle, who said that a pot luck dinner would be a more satisfying feast than any feast planned by an expert. Obviously, Aristotle never went to a pot luck put on at my church.

In modern times, we use crowd wisdom to set the values of our largest companies (the stock market), predict the future or our economy (Consumer Confidence Index), recommend entertainment (Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon, …), and error correct all the information in the world (Wikipedia, search engine rankings).

The wisdom of crowds seems to work through some kind of error correction inherent in the law of large numbers. Continue reading →

Hermann says please like and share!