This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
Foolishness of Crowds
Mar
13
2018
There are some things that everyone just knows, like tetanus is caused by rusty metal and planes can fly because of the Bernoulli principle. And of course everyone knows that the wisdom of crowds means that a bunch of people who agree on a topic must be right.
Not so fast though.
I learned something recently about the supposed wisdom of crowds. The book that started all this – by James Surowiecki – highlighted that phrase but the concept is a little more nuanced. Crowds are not wise because they are a large group of people, rather, crowds are wise because (or more correctly, if) the individuals bring unique information.
Consensus is useful if all parties have arrived at the conclusion independently, using their own methods and data sets. If everyone looks at the same data, you don’t have a wise crowd – you have a crowd of average intelligence.
When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at His teaching.
Matthew 22:33
This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 6:51 am and has been carefully placed in the Life category.
March 14th, 2018 at 10:32 pm
I don’t like crowds.
January 1st, 2020 at 6:30 am
[…] “wisdom of crowds”. But I already posted about that earlier, so you can go read about the wisdom of crowds if you […]
January 6th, 2021 at 6:26 am
[…] knowledge does not mean it’s right, or the best thing. Like I’ve mentioned before with the foolishness of crowds, common knowledge can be […]