codzienność: The Wisdom of Crowds

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology. The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when the median of their individual guesses was taken (the media…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 88

On the Quantification of Crowd Wisdom, Optimal Crowd Size, and the Mean-Median Dilemma. Crowd wisdom is a fascinating metaphor in the realm of collective intelligence. However, even for the simple case of estimation tasks of one continuous value, the quantification of the phenomenon lacks some conceptual clarity. Two interrelated questions of quantification are at stake. First, how we can quantify the degree of crowd wisdom in a sample and how it can be distinguished from the individual wisdom of its members? Two measures will be presented and discussed. One can also be used to quantify optimal crowd sizes. Even purely statistical, it turns out that smaller crowds are more advisable when in…

Evidence: 34 • authority: 88

Small Crowds are Wise When the World Can Surprise. Decisions about political, economic, legal, and health issues are often made by simple majority voting in groups that rarely exceed 30-40 members and are typically much smaller. Given that wisdom is usually attributed to large crowds, and that technological advances make group meetings easier than ever before, shouldn’t committees be larger? In many real-life situations, expert groups encounter mostly easy tasks on which average individual accuracy is above chance, and some surprisingly difficult tasks where most members guess wrongly, such as elections with unexpected outcomes or tricky knowledge questions. We show that, when groups cannot…