So today we listened to another radiolab that focused on the supposed accuracy of group wisdom. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, went to the town fair and saw this game in which people guessed the weight of an ox in order to win prizes. About 800 common people guessed, but the closest individuals were significantly off. However, Galton was interested in calculating the average of these predictions. As a eugenicist, Galton believed that the average of the guesses of these stupid people would be way off. To his surprise the average was one pound off the actual weight. The group as a whole was more accurate than the closest individual. This experiment has been redone a lot and the same conclusion is drawn almost every time.
For more info on crowd wisdom click here
In order to recreate this experiment, I could take a jar of jellybeans to a public event and ask people to guess the number of jelly beans in the jar. I would probably make the guesses free and have to give out a prize in order to get as many diverse people as possible. I would then average the scores and compare it to the actual.
Another really cool possibility is determining whether this crowd wisdom holds true for future events. If I asked the crowd how many days would it snow over 2 inches, would the crowd be correct? If crowd wisdom, applied properly, is extremely accurate, can crowds determine future events?
No comments:
Post a Comment