Wisdom of crowds

What is the wisdom of crowd?

Its about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, one argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

The basic idea is obvious. That two heads work better than one.  However, it is interesting to note that this is nothing like team work.

One criteria for the wisdom of crowd is with independence.

People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.

And obviously in usual teams, we discuss, we criticize and eventually come up with a plan.

It is difficult to compare the two. The conclusion I came up with is that each concept is more effective than another during different situations.

Here’s an example:

10 students were asked to predict the number of jelly beans in a jar. Each was to give a number independently and the mean average was revealed.

Compare this to

A team of 10 students who were asked to predict the number of jelly beans in a jar as a group.  The collective opinions would eventually come up to one number.

Which do you think would be more accurate? My fair guess would be that the team of 10 who worked in a group.

The wisdom of crowd works particularly well when the numbers are large. The more opinions you collect, the more accurate the mean would be. That’s also one reason why this theory is often used online for ratings and ranking systems. However, in most situations that do not allow for an easy method to calculate mean, team work would prove to be more appropriate.

Derren Brown & The Wisdom of Crowds

One of the most interesting theories I learnt about from Derren’s performance would be “The Wisdom of Crowds”.

Derren Brown is one of the most amazing magicians I’ve came by who does a mixture of mentalism, psychological suggestions and showmanship in his brilliant shows. He is probably also one of the only magician who successfully used social media to increase his popularity and create awareness.

At the moment, he has one main facebook account. Another one for his parrot, and a twitter account with more than 160, 000 followers. The interesting thing is that he’s only following 10 of these people.

So how does this tie back to the Wisdom of Crowds? Amongst that many amazing feats he does on his show  in the more recent one called “The Events”, he showed “How to predict the lottery tickets”

If you have the time, i urge you to watch the whole show before it is removed.