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On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Klaus Backert wrote:
> 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 ;-)
About everyone is an expert in guessing the number of jellybeans, so what
you say isn't an argument against the claim that a crowd of experts is
better than any single one of them. Does anybody in their sober mind
suggests pitting "wisdom" of a _random_ crowd against an expert? (Ok,
democratic elections do not count ;-)
--vg
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