Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just get a chimp to throw darts at the wall...
In order to effectively determine the rate of experts vs. everyone else, you could simply scan through all previous Slashdot posts (while removing those prefaced by IANAL) and easily determine those that are experts.
;)
Make sure you are browsing at -1, *those* people are the real experts
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.
A sword cuts both ways, after all. I fear this tech.
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.
I'm not an 'expert' in anything, yet I read far and wide enough to pick up lots of random & indepth tidbits that 'experts' have not heard about.
Ever heard the joke about the phd professor who studied more and more about less and less, until he knew everything about nothing? Yea, many people would consider that professor an expert.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
There is a certain logic to this. How many times have "experts" told us screwy nonsense, and had lousy track records, and yet the public at large retained them as experts? Sometimes, the untrained may be able to see things that the supposedly well-trained can't.
;)
Or to put it another way, it all becomes a set of probabilities. If person X has guessed the outcome of something (say, a football game) correctly 80% of the time, then you're safer betting on his predictions than you are betting on expert Y who is only correct 30% of the time. If you aggregate the probabilities and successes, you should be able to develop a model with a high probability of being correct. You'll never be able to gain 100% accuracy, but that's just the nature of the Universe.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... you sound like you could be an expert.
sigs, as if you care.
'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.
I've always said that elections should qualify each voter's ballot to make sure the decision is made by the people who are best equipped to decide. The first page of a voting ballot should be a questionnaire that asks simple unbiased questions that require the voter to demonstrate knowledge of who or what they are voting on. "What does candidate X say their stance is on abortion?" "When did you first hear about initiative I-456?" "Please specify which political party each candidate below belongs to", etc. The score a voter gets on their questionnaire would then be used as a "weight" factor when counting their ballot, so that people who know the candidates and the issues better get more of a say, which is clearly how things ought to be.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
1) Read old threads at +5, new threads at +2
2) If a person has a lot of insightful/informative posts, check their posting history
3) If they are consistently +3/4/5 informative/insightful, add them as a friend
4) add points to friend's posts so they start out +2.
OK, seriously, I don't do that but if I did, I'd see posts of "wise ones" and ignore posts from those that don't make the cut.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yes, but who decides which issues make the questionnaire?
The questionnaire's authors would in-effect be defining the criteria for election.
Maybe I vote for someone based upon whether or not they annoy the crap out of me.
That's my prerogative.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Let's say you have a pool of 10,000 prognosticators. You ask each one to pick the winner of 10 football games. The odds of getting all 10 correct are 1 in 2^10=1024. So out of the pool of 10,000 people, by random chance alone you're likely to get about 10,000/1024 = 10 people who pick all 10 games correctly. Are these people "geniuses"? No, they just got lucky during this particular trial. The odds of them getting game #11 correct are just 50-50.
BTW, this can be used as the basis of a scam against the "geniuses" if you can convince them that they have special powers as a result of the trial.
Moral of the story: Be very careful with statistics.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
My mother is a professor of education at a college in California and this is something that educators have been talking about for a long while. Google for "multiple intelligences" for a lot more information, but basically there's a theory that says that "intelligence" can be divided up into a number of categories and that people tend to excell in one or two of these areas, but few are outstanding in all of them.
The standard breakdown is something like:
Atheletes tend to excell at Spatial and Kinesthetic, while the stereotypical geek is strongest in Logical-mathematical and weakest in Interpersonal.
I'm not sure I completely agree that this is the end-all-be-all for understanding intelligence, but it does provide an interesting look into ways to classify people who might not be "book smart." For instance, a terrific ballerina might not have excellent Interpersonal or Linguistic intelligence, but she certainly has some special "intelligence" that allows her to excell in an area where I would certainly be an abject failure.I encourage anyone interested in this idea of multiple intelligences to poke around and do some research. Again, it may not be the final answer, but it provides an interesting framework for thinking about the topic.
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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
Didn't Slashdot solved this problem with their moderation scheme? Oh, wait, nevermind... that would mean "Karma Whores" would qualify as experts. Nevermind.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
This quote, headlined today on google, is instructive: It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. - Neil Gaiman I find that 'Experts' are largely chosen based on qualities other than their expertise. Usually they have good personalities and make friends easily, especially with leadership. The leadership prefers to pick and talk with experts who generally agree with their views and look good. So, it is very difficult for me to look at a given expert and think 'Hrmmm...this guy must really know something about X and that is why he is on CNN'. More likely he was friends with a CNN producer.
They have tried this before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test and it was flawed.
"The theoretical basis for them was that illiterate persons were not sufficiently informed about the candidates and issues involved to be able to make a truly informed decision. In practice, however, the literacy requirement was often used to prevent those determined by the ruling class to be undesirable, such as the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and other groups that it wished to see disenfranchised, from voting."
Never trust a system rife with potential for abuse not to be abused.
And how can you have one definitive correct answer to a question like "Where does candidate X stand on this issue?" - it is impossible. Have you seen how long current voting takes at some voting places? Hours long lines and that is with just having to prove who you are, and not how smart you are...
"But this one goes to 11!"
It is much different than requiring eyesight on a driver's test, because it presumes a motive.
Remember that freedom is really about choice. My right to vote does not presume WHY I vote. I have the freedom to vote however I want. I could vote for someone because of their stance on an issue, or because they have great hair, or because they're a buddy of mine, or because I once dated their sister, or because I like their accent, or because they're in the same party I'm in, or because I think their last name sounds good in that lame rap song I wrote in high school.
The government cannot decide for me that I must vote based on their position on issues. To continue your analogy from before, this would be like the DMV requiring me to take a test on the locations of grocery stores in my area before I would be given a drivers' license, thus presuming that the reason I would want to drive is to go to the store. What if I only want a drivers' license so I can get into bars more easily, and never intend to drive? What if I only want to drive to my grandmother's house 8 hours away, and walk to the store? The state has no reason to decide WHY I would drive.
Freedom is about choice, and that means I can choose to vote for a stupid reason, even if it's a reason you disagree with.
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> Web Geniuses and Web Dimwits
Don't you mean Webiniuses and Webimwits?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.