Wisdom of Crowds Monday, November 02, 2009
10:48 pm
Well, the thing that I've learnt and impacted me the most during NCT module would have to be the Wisdom of Crowds. So what is the Wisdom of Crowds?
The average answer from a group of people is proven to be more accurate than the answer from one expert on that particular subject. Amazing isn't it?
I think this is quite true because Viha and Vera carried out an experiment in class. It's about guessing the number of jellybeans in the jar. Messiah was appointed as the 'expert' in the subject, while the rest of us are the people from diverse backgrounds.
So the average of 20 0f our guesses proved to be closer to the number of jellybeans in the jar than what Messiah has guessed. For this to work, there has to be these 4 factors, Diversity of opinion, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation.
Diversity of opinion - Everyone should have their own set of beliefs and information Independence - People's opinions should not be influenced by others around them Decentralization - Drawing on local knowledge Aggregation - The average of everyone's opinion
Wisdom of Crowds is used in several websites that we frequent, namely, Wikipedia and Amazon.
