Metaknowledge - Crowds aren’t as smart as we thought

[BridgeTroll]

Pretty cool essay... 

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

Metaknowledge
Crowds aren't as smart as we thought, since some people know more than others. A simple trick can find the ones you want
by George Musser

A few weeks ago, I thought I'd do a demonstration of the wisdom of crowds. I was at a bat mitzvah reception and, as a game, the hosts asked each table to guess the number of Skittles in a big Tupperware bowl. I got everyone at our table to write down a guess and then averaged the results. Based on what social scientists have been saying, our collective answer should have been spot-on. Each of us had a vague hunch about how to pack small objects into big boxes, subject to much uncertainty. Taken together, though, our scraps of erudition should have accumulated while the individual errors cancelled out. But my experiment was an abject failure. Our estimate was off by a factor of two. Another table won the cool blinking necklace.

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. Nevertheless, my crowd failed.

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.

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