James Shurovyeski

James Shurovyeski, financial analyst at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, analyzing the results of large-scale and multifaceted research in military history and politics, behavioral economics, biological systems and everyday psychology in the book Wisdom of the Crowd convincingly shows that the collective potential of a large group of so-called ordinary people are always higher than in selected individuals, even if they are members of the intellectual elite.

The idea is simple: if you take a large group of people and ask each one a specific question, and then calculate the average answer, then, with high probability, it will be closer to the truth than the answers of experts.

Stunning experiments are given:
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A group of people are asked to determine by eye the weight of a bull. The average answer is almost equal to the true one. The same, for example, is repeated to determine the amount of drazhe in a bag of sweets. Determine almost exact amount.

Or another example: the submarine disappeared, one of the researchers gathered a group of people with a wide range of knowledge and, based on their answers, made a collective forecast. The submarine was found after 5 months in 200 meters from the place indicated by the group.

The electronic version of the book is easily found by Google :)

He created the blog " Collective Intelligence " in Habré, dedicated to these ideas. Let's repeat these experiments and check in practice how wise the collective mind of the habr will be :)

UPD: Published the first experiment