Podcasts Technology Astral Codex Ten Podcast Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)

Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)

Published: Feb. 7, 2023, 11:53 p.m.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd

The long road to Moscow

The \u201cwisdom of crowds\u201d hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they\u2019ll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you\u2019ll be off by less.

I was intrigued by a claim in this book review that:

You can play \u201cwisdom of crowds\u201d in single-player mode. Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses.

This is spooky. We talk a lot about how to make accurate predictions here - and you can improve your accuracy on anything just by guessing twice and averaging, no additional knowledge required? It\u2019s like God has handed us a creepy cow-weight oracle.

I wanted to test this myself, so I included some relevant questions in last year\u2019s ACX Survey: