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Yes. The argument for the wisdom of crowds can enshrine the fallacy of the excluded middle. A Google search potentially returns as much superstition as fact, today, after the China decision, truer than ever. len From: Klaus Backert [mailto:Klaus.Backert@t...] 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 ;-)
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