#wisdomofcrowds

The Ox Weight Contest – A Timeless Lesson in Collective Intelligence

In 1906, statistician Francis Galton asked nearly 800 people to guess the weight of an ox at a livestock fair. No one got it right—but the average guess was just one pound off the actual weight.

This remarkable event proved that collective wisdom—when diverse, independent individuals contribute—can be more accurate than even the best experts.

At MetaBetter Technologies, we’re inspired by this principle. Our prediction platforms are built to harness the power of crowd intelligence—for forecasting markets, insurance innovation, and beyond.

A mathematical BS detector can boost the wisdom of crowds

Wisdom of crowds is an old concept. It goes back to Ancient Greek and, later, Enlightenment thinkers who argued that democracy is not just a nice idea, but a mathematically proven way to make good decisions. Even a citizenry of knaves collectively outperforms the shrewdest monarch, according to this proposition. What the knaves lack in personal knowledge, they make up for in diversity. In the 1990s, crowd wisdom became a pop-culture obsession, providing a rationale for wikis, crowdsourcing, prediction markets and popularity-based search algorithms.

That endorsement came with a big caveat, however: even proponents admitted that crowds are as apt to be witless as well as wise. The good democrats of Athens marched into a ruinous war with Sparta. French Revolutionary mobs killed the Enlightenment. In the years leading up to 2008, the herd of Wall Street forgot the most basic principles of risk management. Then there was my little Skittles contest. It was precisely the type of problem that crowds are supposed to do well on: a quiet pooling of diverse and independent assessments, without any group discussion that a single person might dominate.

Dražen Prelec, a behavioural economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is working on a way to smarten up the hive mind. One reason that crowds mess up, he notes, is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge. In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates. It’s a common scourge in social settings: think of dinner conversations that consist of people repeating to one another the things they all read in The New York Times.

Dražen Prelec, a behavioural economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), started from the premise that some people’s judgments deserve greater weight than others. By no longer averaging everyone’s judgments equally, you can avoid overcounting redundant or otherwise extraneous information. You already do this all the time, whenever you trust opinions that are expressed with confidence and spurn diffident-sounding ones. There’s something to be said for that kind of trust. In psychology experiments, people who are more accurate at a task – say, remembering a list of words – tend to express more confidence. Unfortunately, the converse isn’t true: confident people aren’t necessarily more accurate.

The solution, Prelec suggests, is to weight answers not by confidence but by metaknowledge: knowledge about knowledge. Metaknowledge means you are aware of what you know or don’t know, and of where your level of knowledge stands in relation to other people’s. Metaknowledge functions as a powerful bullshit detector. It can separate crowd members who actually know something from those who are guessing wildly or just parroting what everyone else says.

The article expands a lot further around this idea and is fascinating to read. It has implications too for many assumptions we make during the daily course of our lives, and decisions we make (including around political corruption, choice of music, political and economic forecasts, climate change, etc). The most interesting, is the test that could be used to determine who you should give extra weight to in terms of their knowledge.

Read the full article at https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds

#metaknowledge #climatechange #economicforecasting #wisdomofcrowds

I am considered a social person by many. I am usually an extrovert. You can hear my voice in a loud party room. Sometimes I might get a guitar and start singing. The public attention is flattering to me rather than frightening. And yet, I am really terrible in what is considered the number one skill for entrepreneurs, businessmen and job seekers -  mingling. If I get to a large conference and there is a room full of people at the conference party, I would never randomly approach people and start a meaningless conversation. I will gladly talk to someone if they ask me questions after my talk. I will readily participate in a conversation when I am dragged into it by an acquaintance. But making the first step is hard for me. So is it good or bad? Well, probably neither. It is pretty natural. Many psychologists will tell you that we as human beings are always tangoing - we want people close to us but not too close, as we also need our space.

The first chapter of the famous book “Master and Margarita” by the Russian writer Michael Bulgakov is called “Never Talk to Strangers”. It is a wise advice in general, especially when we train our kids to be safe on the streets. But very often talking to strangers can buy you a new friend, a new experience and maybe a useful information that does not exist in your social world. A very famous study by Mark Granovetter from 1974 (which I already mentioned a couple of times) is called “The Strength of Weak Ties” suggesting that casual acquaintances can sometimes bring more value to us than close friends.

The Web in general and Social media in particular, actually enabled us to talk to strangers on the whole new level, without really challenging our lack of confidence. It is called talkbacks and comments. We can react to a Facebook post or a newspaper article. We can stay anonymous if we chose to. We can engage in argument with the author or a fellow commentator feeling completely safe. More often than not it leads to an ugly discourse full of insults and bad words. Some journalists were even arguing that talkbacks should be banned. But this ability to express your opinion is, to my mind, a hidden gem, that if used wisely can bring us a lot of value as individuals or as businesses. And here is why.

Douglas Adams in his famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stated that Planet Earth is just a giant computer built to find an answer to Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer the computer came up with was 42. Could it be that Adams, a brilliant man by many accounts, was actually right? What if we are, in fact, a giant computer with an ability to calculate and find answers to universal problems? What if the very popular and maybe somewhat overused term Wisdom of Crowds is the key to something big we have realized but not put to any practical use yet on a large scale? A simple but powerful example that suggests the correctness of this theory is the ability of large crowds “guess” things like “How many candies are in the jar?” To realise the potential of this computer we should be able to do two important things: a) encourage many different people to express their opinions in online communities on a particular subject or a problem and b) being able to process and analyze their contributions to find the crowd solutions to the aforementioned problems.  

Before we continue, there are two theories I will briefly mention here. One is called “Spiral of Silence” by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a german political scientist. It suggests that since we as human beings are afraid of social isolation, we would be silent if we hear a very vocal expressions of opinions different to our own. Simply speaking, if there are people around us talking loudly about, say, expelling a certain group of people from the country, we would assume that it is a majority opinion and will remain silent even if we strongly disagree. If we map this theory to social media, the violent culture of talkbacks and comments very often cause good people to stay silent and not participate.

The second theory is a theory of “lurkers” in virtual communities, to which I was fortunate to contribute as part of my MA thesis (which is cited in this Wikipedia article). This theory studies the reasons that cause people to stay silent. And while there are a lot of reason to get people from silence to participation, a right culture and a great content is one of the major reasons to get people start talking.

We need to define the right culture of the community, showing people that good, different and civilized comments are cherished while violence is banned. We also need to touch people to make them say something. A great example of this is Humans of New York, a Facebook page of photographer Brendon Stanton, where he documents stories of various people by photographing them on the street and briefly interviewing them. He brings stories of real people, with real problems. As a results, thousands (!) of users feel emotional connection and post comments. Another example is a movie star and model Gal Gadot, whose Facebook page is so genuine that it also generates not only Likes, but many many comments. When you touch people - they respond.

 If you've never heard of Radiolab, you owe it to yourself to checkin out their podcast on emergence (another good one is on numbers).   

Well all that to explain why we value the wisdom of crowds, which is to say we're excited to be on Reddit now and launch our own subreddit!  

For the uninitiated, Reddit is an online community that works by people posting comments, and those comments getting upvoted or downvoted by the community of interest. Having our own subreddit means we can hear our community loud and clear - something we're extremely excited about.  

Registration takes about ten seconds, and doesn't even require email confirmation - although an email address might make for a better experience.

Hope to see you here.