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Conventional Wisdom of Crowds

Doc

Doc

Bottoms Up
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Do you think the conventional wisdom of a crowd is worth anything.

I didn't, but I just saw a report on the CBS show 'Sunday Morning'.

In this report it talked of a study done in England around 1900. At a fair they had a contest to guess the weight of an ox. The man doing the study took everyones guess and averaged it. The ox weighed 1197 pounds, the collective average came out to 1198. Closer than any other guess.

So fast forward to today. Someone (I didn't get the name) is studying the conventional wisdom of crowds. He took a jar of jelly beans out on the streets of NY city. They allowed anyone to guess, and averaged the guesses. The jar had 1371 jellybeans. The average of all guesses was 1247. And this was closer to the actual amount of jelly beans than any other guess.

We have plenty of collective conventional wisdom here. How can we put it to work for all of us?
 
Doc said:
Do you think the conventional wisdom of a crowd is worth anything.

I didn't, but I just saw a report on the CBS show 'Sunday Morning'.

In this report it talked of a study done in England around 1900. At a fair they had a contest to guess the weight of an ox. The man doing the study took everyones guess and averaged it. The ox weighed 1197 pounds, the collective average came out to 1198. Closer than any other guess.

So fast forward to today. Someone (I didn't get the name) is studying the conventional wisdom of crowds. He took a jar of jelly beans out on the streets of NY city. They allowed anyone to guess, and averaged the guesses. The jar had 1371 jellybeans. The average of all guesses was 1247. And this was closer to the actual amount of jelly beans than any other guess.

We have plenty of collective conventional wisdom here. How can we put it to work for all of us?
Click to expand...

Taking you idea to heart Doc, I went over to the Debate & Discussion forum. I re-read every post there and noted the posters opinion.

Ifter several microseconds of math (in my head even!), I have concluded that the crowd average is very accurate....POLITICIANS SUCK!

:yum::yum::yum::yum:
 
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