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0 pointsalexashka11y ago0 comments

"It's an observation that crowds who know something about the question being asked will often do better than experts who are also 'guessing.'"

Can you give some examples of this? I don't think that works at all. If you ask me and 100 strangers about programming, I'll do better than 100 strangers every time. Unless one of them is a better programmer than me and has the authority to convince the others that they should listen to him/her OR! they work together to solve the problem. In which case um yeah.

So either way it boils down to 2 groups of experts, not the crowd.

The 'particular set of circumstances' are not well defined in the article from what I can tell - which renders the whole thing worthless doesn't it?

It's like saying it is going to rain. When? Well, under a particular set of circumstances it will. lol :)

When it comes to guessing numbers - there are no experts, so who is the crowd's opinion better than? I still feel like I'm 5 and not getting it.

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ghaff11y ago

I'll give you one very specific example from data that I crunched myself.

A friend of mine has run an Oscar contest for about 25 years.

Everybody picks their choices in the usual manner. In addition, he has a score for "consensus"--which is a virtual contestant which predicts each category winner based on the most popular pick. For example, if 30 people picked Birdman and 20 picked Boyhood, consensus would pick Birdman.

Here's the thing. A few people usually beat consensus in a given year. However, over the course of 25 years, no single person has a better average score than consensus and, in fact, not even a small panel of those who (retrospectively) were the best pickers do.

As others have said, in contests like how many jellybeans are in a jar, the median or mean tends to do better than the vast majority of individuals as well.

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