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Re: Invitation to metadata dictionary wiki - meaningfuel.org

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• Subject: Re: Invitation to metadata dictionary wiki - meaningfuel.org
• From: Vladimir Gapeyev <vgapeyev@s...>
• Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 13:07:36 -0500 (EST)
• In-reply-to: <097B5689-6FD9-4DC8-8A5F-34F6FD23731A@t...>
• References: <0DF8CBE327D4654F8567FD8123E328B1014240DF@x...><097B5689-6FD9-4DC8-8A5F-34F6FD23731A@t...>

On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Klaus Backert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am 26.01.2006 um 23:06 schrieb Nathan Young -X ((natyoung - Artizen at 
> Cisco)):
>> A famous early example of wisdom of the crowds was done on a "guess the
>> number of jellybeans" contest.  The average guess was much better than
>> any of the individual guesses.  The simplicity of this masks the fact
>> that "average" is an algorithm that encodes the rule "people will err on
>> the high side as much as they will err on the low side".  The algorithm
>> only works as well as the rule applies.
>
> In the case of tasks much more complicated than a jellybeans contest it may 
> and should be different: An expert performs better than the average in the 
> not so short run. There are a lot of complicated tasks in business today, 
> where the crowd is simply not competent. This encodes the rule "experts will 
> be correct on the high side consistently". BTW so called political experts, 
> as an example, don't count as experts for me ;-)

About everyone is an expert in guessing the number of jellybeans, so what 
you say isn't an argument against the claim that a crowd of experts is 
better than any single one of them.  Does anybody in their sober mind 
suggests pitting "wisdom" of a _random_ crowd against an expert?  (Ok, 
democratic elections do not count ;-)

--vg

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen at Cisco\)" <natyoung@c...>
  • Re: Invitation to metadata dictionary wiki - meaningfuel.org
    • From: Klaus Backert <Klaus.Backert@t...>

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