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Web Geniuses Or Web Dimwits?
ScribeCity writes "The Washington Post has a provocative piece about online experiments at identifying experts. One wonders when someone will come up with a truly effective formula for measuring human intelligence — or take a stab at doing so — that exploits all the stuff people are publishing online." From the article: "This wisdom of the crowd could be outsmarted by what Michael Arrington, editor of the TechCrunch blog, recently dubbed the 'wisdom of the few.' Sites like PicksPal rely on input from the masses chiefly as a venue for auditioning prospective experts, on the theory that these virtuosos could provide even more accurate information and predictions than the crowd. 'If you figure out which ones did the best and get rid of the ones who have no idea, you'd do even better. Distill it down to the people who really know,' Arrington said."
One wonders when someone will come up with a truly effective formula for measuring human intelligence
It won't happen, not because it's not possible, but because some group or another will have a lower mean score, and the cries of racism, sexism, ageism, redbluestateism, culturalism, OSism, haircolorism, footsizeism, dicksizeism, or whateverism will drown out the truth.
You know... the way it is right now.
Make a group based moderation system, where you moderate in groups.
Step1: Lets say Democrat/Republican. When a Rep mods something up, all other Reps see it modded up. If a Dem mods something down, no other Reps see it modded down.
Step2: Identify posters who say stuff that gets modded up past a certain point. Lets say you get a point for the top 10 posts of each day. Then the posters with the most points are dubbed experts in their field.
Its simple, and I'm suprised no one has done it before. It's like Digg in some ways, but vastly superior as groups don't bicker over what they declare as news, and it identifies experts.... maybe even political candidates.
God spoke to me.
If that chimp picked stocks that way, it would beat something like 80% of mutual fund managers (simply by virtue of not charging for his essentially random results).
(I know, I know, "but not my mutual fund!")
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Isn't this just that same old thing, where for each sporting event, you send a mailer to 50% of the people picking one team, and 50% picking the other, and whoever wins, that 50% of your original audience gets split between the two possible winners in the next mailing? Eventually you end up with a small audience, but they're CONVINCED you have a flawless sports betting "system" and pay you to learn it.
Here, by pretending you're figuring out who the "experts" are, you're not diluting your audience with each round of guessing; instead, you're diluting your potential pool of "experts" (or systems), and eventually everyone decides that person X is always right, when really odds were that at least one person in a large pool of guessers would guess right 100% of the time.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, people.
This sounds like the old scam. Pick 1000 people. On day 1, send 500 of them a prediction that stock A will go up and send the other half a prediction that the stock will go down.
On day 2, the stock either went up or down. Either way, you made a correct prediction to 500 people. Split the 500 and send two more predictions on an all new stock.
Keep repeating this. On the fifth day, you'll have 75 people who have seen you make 5 perfect predictions in a row. Now ask each of them for $10,000 to invest in your next prediction...
Just because one person happens to have hit the mean each time doesn't mean he's got "the knack". Statistically, there's sure to be someone whose guesses approach the mean. But that doesn't mean that their next prediction is any more likely to be accurate.
Stick with the aggregated mass knowledge.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
One thing you have to remember: Perception > Reality. Speaking intellegently and writing intellegently is usually enough to convince someone that you actually know what you're talking about, if you're audience is ignorant or naive. That makes for a lot of percieved experts in the field of technology. Take the example of an internet born initiative to ban dihydrogen oxide in some county California http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html. Read this. If you haven't already heard of this, well, dihydrogen oxide is water. See how easy it is to convince a bunch of soccer moms they need to ban water? (Or that apple needs to abandon hardware... hehe)
Similes are like metaphors
If they are posting stuff on the Internet and sound like an expert, they are most likely NOT an expert.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Moderation(negative or positive) depends mainly on its position in the discussion. If you manage to post near the beginning of the page, you will get moderated.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The Wall Street Journal has (had?) a "Dartboard" feature in which they did just this, then compared the picks to choices made by analysts. Depending on the time-frame you're looking at, just random choices seem to give the analysts a run for their money, as it were.
Dark Reflection