USING THE WISDOM OF CROWDS.

USING THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. I am a big fan of James Surowiecki’s book, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. This is the book that used the examples of estimating the weight of a watermelon at a county fair or guessing the location on the ocean floor of a sunken submarine to argue that groups can under certain circumstances analyze problems better than could any individual expert. A first step in doing this is for each participant to quantify his estimate. The kind of thinking is illustrated by futures markets for election results or Oscar predictions. The participants are working with Bayesian statistics. See the Intrade quotes at the left of this site for the “markets” for such events as Labor winning the next UK General election or the United States attacking North Korea by the end of 2007