Crowd Wisdom Principles
Hypermind1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2023–2025
explainer · general · evergreen · 2023–2025 on HN
A ten-minute explainer from Hypermind on the wisdom of crowds, covering Galton's discovery and the diversity theorem. It argues that collective intelligence comes from diversity, independence and aggregation.
HN people cite it as a short explanation of how aggregated individual guesses approach the truth.
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3 comments from Hacker News
Human social psychology, aka. "The wisdom of crowds, and the stupidity of herds" (1), in which the average opinion of large groups of people is closer to the truth, than each individual opinion. By informing all individuals of the propaganda you wish to spread, you can influence that average, hijack, and change it to the stupidity of the herd aka. Gleichschaltung (2), which is why these people want to decide what is and what isn't "dangerous" speech. Fuck'em. 1. link A shorter explanation: ▶ this video 2. link Edit to add a gamification of this for collaborative fact checking link
Enabling people to make individual decisions, ensures the soundest decisions to be made in aggregate. (1) This is not unlike the spontaneous order occuring in all natural systems. This process can be subverted, but only to great detriment of the whole. 1) ▶ this video
The wisdom of crowds is a well known principle, used in engineering to overcome something that is extremely difficult to measure (noisy data for instance), considering only one single measurement would be very dangerous, since it might be extremely imprecise. However, if you measure 1000 times and take the average, the errors cancel out and you have a pretty accurate measurement :) ▶ this video