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by abelard |
some crowds
are not so stupid
Mencken said:
“ Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual
ignorance.”
However,
“[Surowiecki’s] thesis is that society is able to get along from day to day [New York Times: nominal registration required] because
people exercise a kind of rationality as a group that allows them (or us,
rather) to handle three kinds of problems. Surowiecki defines the first as
cognition problems: questions that have ''definitive'' or factual
solutions. If you ask a group of people to estimate how many jelly beans
are in a jar, for example, the average of their answers is likely to be
much more accurate than any given individual's guess. This seems
counterintuitive, but there is a considerable body of experimental
evidence to support it. Aside from tests involving college sophomores,
there are data from ''Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?'' [...].”
“As counterintuitive as it sounds, however, the mathematics work so long as
Surowiecki's three key criteria - independence, diversity, and
decentralization - are satisfied. "If you ask a large enough group," he
says, "to make a prediction or estimate a probability," the errors they
make cancel each other out. "Subtract the error, and you're left with the
information." In this fashion, the TV studio audience of "Who Wants to Be
a Millionaire," guessed the right answer to questions 91 percent of the
time, torching the "experts," who guessed the right answer only 65 percent
of the time.”
 |
The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki, May 2004,
Doubleday Books,
hbk 0385503865
$17.46
[amazon.com] {advert} / £13.20
[amazon.co.uk] {advert} |
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