The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine

lexxyz writes "Apparently the human mind can predict the distribution type for a given sample of results. A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual"

Comments

Re:Cumulative video game response

[stonecypher]

Occam's razor suggests that there was in fact no interplay of minds, but rather that the likelihood that any given person was off by +X was equivalent to that another person was off by -X. The experiment measures only the average of the player's skill; there is no mechanism interconnecting minds, as the people do not have any direct observation of one another's states, nor in fact any observation of their own.

If there was a private monitor on which they saw both the average and *just* their own path, then you'd start getting very, very different results.