Crowd Wisdom (CW)

To understand everything, let’s go back in time to 1906 when an experiment by Sir Francis Galton took place:

In the UK almost 120 years ago, Sir Francis Galton observed a weight-judging competition in which a live ox was on display and participants could guess its weight.

About 800 people participated, including butchers, farmers and the general public. Each participant wrote their guess on a ticket, submitting it with the hope of winning a prize if their estimate was closest to the actual weight of the ox.

After the ox was weighed, Galton analyzed the tickets. He found that the median guess (1,207 pounds / 547 kg) was extremely close to the actual weight of the ox (1,198 pounds / 543 kg). This was particularly striking because individual guesses varied widely, yet the collective average was remarkably accurate.

This accuracy is due to a phenomenon called “Crowd Wisdom”, which emerges from the collective opinion or decision of a group (a collective brain/intelligence if you will).

Crowd wisdom is a very powerful phenomenon that is way more effective than the opinion of a single individual in almost all cases (even experts most of the time).

This is because the group aggregates diverse viewpoints, knowledge, and information, which balances out individual errors and biases.

It's effectively used in predictions, problem-solving, and decision-making, the key is having a diversity of perspectives and a method to aggregate these views effectively.