This came in on the Metafilter feed a few days ago:
“The wisdom of crowds and the miracle of aggregation, arguably, are the reasons why markets and democracy work as well as they do. As New Yorker James Surowiecki explains in his new book, “consider the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When a contestant on the show is stumped by a question, he has a couple of choices in asking for help: the audience or someone he’s designated as an expert. The experts do a reasonable job: They get the answer right 65% of the time. But the audience is close to perfect: It gets the answer right 91% of the time, even though it’s made up of people who have nothing better to do than sit in a TV studio and watch Regis Philbin.” The new, new tipping point? ” [Link]
The Wisdom of Crowds is out on June 4th in the UK and is avialabale on Amazon .co.uk / .com
The post above was coincidental with a post over on Abelard.org about collctive decision making using the KJ technique: how not to analyse data – by yourself
“Back in the late 1970’s, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy’s troop movements.“Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report. The commission then “scored” each report on how well it reported the actual troop movements. They found that the average military expert only got 7 out of a 100 elements correct.
“Each expert then reviewed all of the other experts’ reports and rewrote their initial assessment. The average accuracy for these revised reports was 79 out of a 100.
“What was different between the first report and the second? The experts didn’t have any new information. All they had were the perspectives of the other experts. When they added those perspectives to their own, their accuracy increased ten-fold.” [MORE]
I thought the two would be happy together in one post.
Post a Comment