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Yes. The argument for the wisdom of crowds can
enshrine the fallacy of the excluded middle.
A Google search potentially returns as much superstition
as fact, today, after the China decision, truer than ever.
len
From: Klaus Backert [mailto:Klaus.Backert@t-online.de]
Hi,
Am 26.01.2006 um 23:06 schrieb Nathan Young -X ((natyoung - Artizen
at Cisco)):
> A famous early example of wisdom of the crowds was done on a "guess
> the
> number of jellybeans" contest. The average guess was much better than
> any of the individual guesses. The simplicity of this masks the fact
> that "average" is an algorithm that encodes the rule "people will
> err on
> the high side as much as they will err on the low side". The
> algorithm
> only works as well as the rule applies.
In the case of tasks much more complicated than a jellybeans contest
it may and should be different: An expert performs better than the
average in the not so short run. There are a lot of complicated tasks
in business today, where the crowd is simply not competent. This
encodes the rule "experts will be correct on the high side
consistently". BTW so called political experts, as an example, don't
count as experts for me ;-)
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