James Surowiecki
speaker
55 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2013
last heard Jan 2013
James Surowiecki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As he was walking through the fair that day, he came across this contest.
An ox had been placed on display, and the crowd around the ox was basically placing wagers on the weight of the ox.
There was actually a huge crowd there that day, something like 800 people.
And what's important about this crowd is that it was a relatively diverse crowd.
While many of the people in the crowd were butchers and farmers and probably had some skill in being able to guess the weight of something like an ox, there were also a lot of people in the crowd who were not, at least on the surface, experts at all.
So Galton, as he was watching this contest, it struck him that this made an interesting natural experiment.
The crowd had guessed that the ox would weigh 1,197 pounds.
And when all was said and done, the ox ended up weighing 1,198 pounds.
So in other words, the crowd's judgment was essentially perfect.
It was actually better than any one person in the crowd.
And this is a phenomenon that you can actually see over and over again.
But the Galton example, I think, is a kind of perfect crystallization of this idea of the wisdom of crowds.
As he was walking through the fair that day, he came across this contest.
And the contest was that an ox had been placed on display and the crowd around the ox was
was basically placing wagers on the weight of the ox.
So as Galton described it, there was actually a huge crowd there that day, something like 800 people actually tried their luck.
And what's important about this crowd, at least from my perspective, is that it was a relatively diverse crowd.
While many of the people in the crowd were butchers and farmers and probably had some skill in being able to guess the weight of something like an ox, there were also a lot of people in the crowd
who were not, at least on the surface, experts at all.
So Galton, as he was watching this contest, it struck him that this made an interesting natural experiment.
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