Wisdom of Crowds

In 1906 the British statistician Francis Galton was at a fair where about 800 people tried to guess the weight of a dead ox. Galton collected all the guesses so he could figure out how far off the mark the average guess was. The guesses were wide ranging, most much too high or low, but the average of the guesses stunned him:  The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds, the crowd's average, 1,197. Thus was born the concept of the "Wisdom of Crowds."

 

The Good Judgment Project is a sort of variation of this notion. Under the guidance of three psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community, 3000 average people have been tasked with making probability estimates about areas of concern-- Venezuelan gas subsidies, North Korean politics, Middle East tendencies--and the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are said to be often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information.

This has led to the creation of a special team of a super forecasters subset whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than the well informed intelligence officers. There are some very disturbing but obvious possibilities here. What kind of decisions are our elite making? Corruption and graft aside (see Turkey's recent false-flag operation) what kind of risk are our esteemed experts subjecting us to? More, what is the rationale for substituting another layer of experts for the group; isn't that directly opposed to the lesson of the study?

 

But there is a bright side as well. If our education increases we all might start seeing some similarities in the weight of a dead ox and a presidential candidate; there is something reassuring about that.