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"Wisdom of Crowds" Works For Individuals Too
ideonexus writes "Take a crowd of people and have them guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, and the average of their answers will be remarkably accurate. Now researchers have found the same goes for asking one person to guess about the same thing several times. Accuracy improved when the individual was given longer periods of time between guesses." The anonymous author of the Economist piece, not quoting the researchers, says the finding bolsters the "generate and test" model of creative thinking.
Wisdom of crowds only works when the crowd has some information about the situation. Look at polls about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for more details.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
The idea that a group guessing is more accurate than an individual guess, and if you make more than one guess the mean or average of the guesses is more accurate than a single guess?
So, in real world terms, 1000 rednecks are going to be more accurate than one Harvard graduate? (assuming the graduate in question isn't our current President) (if we were guessing the number of pickled eggs in a pickle jar, I'd have to agree... Otherwise, I'm somewhat skeptical of how well this translates beyond the estimation of things.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Not quite... but you are close. It sounds like you're pointing out that anyone will get lucky if given enough chances. These guys are claiming that the average will converge to the ground truth over time. This would need to have guesses with some Gaussian distribution about the correct answer.
If the guesses were uniformly distributed then the average wouldn't tend to the correct answer over time. Of course what is described in the summary has nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds as it is commonly thought of (i.e in markets) where shared information is vital. Instead it is simply an artifact of sampling (which is why the longer gaps are necessary for better accuracy)
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Um, three weeks is plenty of time to look up such an intriguing factoid on the Internet.
I thought this was understood.
This is how you are able to catch a ball. Your brain doesn't do a physics calculation and determine where the ball will land. It guesses, watches, refines the guess, repeats, and eventually the guess is close enough so your hand is in the right spot to catch it.
In fact there is some research that suggests for certain kinds of decisions, more thought is actually counter-productive. That is, initial "gut" decisions are sometimes more optimal than carefully-considered ones (where "optimal" is measured by longer-term happiness/regret of decision). (For instance, check this writeup of this paper, or the associated Slashdot submission.)
The point is that while thinking long and hard about some problems can be helpful (e.g. designing something complex and technical), for other kinds of problems, added thought can hinder (e.g. when there are many confounding unknowns).
No, I don't think so. It wouldn't be "one of them is bound to be right" -- it would be something more along the lines of "with enough posts, the consensus is likely to be close to reality."
This assumes, of course, that everything in life is like a jar of jellybeans.
They didn't say that the second answer was better. They said that the average was better. It would be interesting to know if the second answer was, on average, better than the first.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Har har, but that's not the idea. If only one of them is right it's not the average. I interpret it more like this: intuition is a product of subconscious information processing. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, and is generally very good at that. I would hazard a guess that if you average out everybody's intuitions ("first guesses"), some of the people are "overthinking" things, but many are just going with their gut, and the pattern recognition and extrapolation that's going on constantly anyway in your brain is often onto something.
The "generate and test" idea is something I've made great effort to more consciously embrace in my creative endeavors. People decry "quantity over quality," but what I've found is that you simply can't just brood over an idea and "work on" the idea until it's "perfect" and then execute it--you have to create prototypes and test them, and the more you do this, the better you get at creating good prototypes in the first place. Still, it's remarkable how difficult it can be to convince yourself of this.
Limina.Log
You state the really cool thing about this but somehow completely miss it!
You say, "If the guesses are distributed around the correct value...." Well, why would they be? They're guesses! There's no reason to expect one person's guesses to be centered on the correct value if they don't know the correct value. But this study shows that they are centered near the correct value, even though the person doesn't know what that value is.
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That would be a flaw if I ever discussed "a bunch of people", but I never did.
The interesting thing here is not that the individual can guess a number close to the true value. What's interesting is that if he guesses more than once, the average is closer to the true value than his initial guess. This is unexpected and a little weird.
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