Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Klaus Backert wrote: > Hi, > > Am 26.01.2006 um 23:06 schrieb Nathan Young -X ((natyoung - Artizen at > Cisco)): >> A famous early example of wisdom of the crowds was done on a "guess the >> number of jellybeans" contest. The average guess was much better than >> any of the individual guesses. The simplicity of this masks the fact >> that "average" is an algorithm that encodes the rule "people will err on >> the high side as much as they will err on the low side". The algorithm >> only works as well as the rule applies. > > In the case of tasks much more complicated than a jellybeans contest it may > and should be different: An expert performs better than the average in the > not so short run. There are a lot of complicated tasks in business today, > where the crowd is simply not competent. This encodes the rule "experts will > be correct on the high side consistently". BTW so called political experts, > as an example, don't count as experts for me ;-) About everyone is an expert in guessing the number of jellybeans, so what you say isn't an argument against the claim that a crowd of experts is better than any single one of them. Does anybody in their sober mind suggests pitting "wisdom" of a _random_ crowd against an expert? (Ok, democratic elections do not count ;-) --vg
|
