31–40 of 90 posts
Let's look at another toy example, using made-up numbers: Q: Is the earth flat? Yes: 10% No: 90% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 3% No: 97% Analysis: Yes: 10% - 3% = 7% No: 90% - 97% = -7% Conclusion: The earth is flat, I guess ;)
Let's look at another toy example, using made-up numbers: Q: Is the earth flat? Yes: 10% No: 90% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 3% No: 97% Analysis: Yes: 10% - 3% = 7% No: 90% - 97% = -7% Conclusion: The earth is flat, I guess ;)
Let's look at another toy example, using made-up numbers: Q: Is the earth flat? Yes: 10% No: 90% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 3% No: 97% Analysis: Yes: 10% - 3% = 7% No: 90% - 97% = -7% Conclusion: The earth is flat, I guess ;)
I think this a fair criticism which you haven't well explained, that a minority expert might be minority misled .
As you said, knowingly going against the consensus does not an expert make.
It's an interesting heuristic, but without an exposition it's hard to know if there is any reason to believe it. Has this technique been assessed across various domains? Does it work better for political facts than for scientific facts? Where does it fail? It's a provocative article and a cool thought, but it seems more like a hypothesis. (In particular, I'm referring to the assertion at the end of the article: " Bec…
One of the wiki's sources might have been a better linked article. The MIT summary [1] notes "The researchers first derived their result mathematically, then assessed how it works in practice, through surveys spanning a range of subjects, including U.S. state capitols, general knowledge, medical diagnoses by dermatologists, and art auction estimates." Across all those areas, this technique had error rates about 20% l…
I see people mentioning whenever the answer is right or not, but that's actually irrelevant. The heuristic only measures how surprising the popular answer is to the population.
So it is assumed that people using this technique could be inferring the correct answer by finding the surprisingly popular answer. Not just a observation about what the population thinks.
Let's look at another toy example, using made-up numbers: Q: Is the earth flat? Yes: 10% No: 90% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 3% No: 97% Analysis: Yes: 10% - 3% = 7% No: 90% - 97% = -7% Conclusion: The earth is flat, I guess ;)
Q. Is the earth flat?
Yes: 0.1%
No: 99.9%
Yes: 10%
No: 90%
Conclusion: the earth is not flat.
Not sure where you're getting the "10% believe the earth is flat" from, but if that's just your guess then it's pretty reasonable for people to say they think 10% of people will respond yes to the question.
The wisdom of crowds is a truly fascinating thing... the fact that people don't really need to know what they're talking about as long as there's enough of them really blows my mind.
Have any political pollsters ever done this sort of question format?
1. Who will you vote for?
2. Who do you think will win?
I don't know if we can learn anything from the surprisingly popular answer here, but now I wonder if question 2 would be a better predictor of the election result. But it will be tainted by previous polls and news.
Let's look at another toy example, using made-up numbers: Q: Is the earth flat? Yes: 10% No: 90% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 3% No: 97% Analysis: Yes: 10% - 3% = 7% No: 90% - 97% = -7% Conclusion: The earth is flat, I guess ;)
A more realistic example of that would be: Q. Is the earth flat? Yes: 0.1% No: 99.9% Q: What do you think most people will respond to that question? Yes: 10% No: 90% Analysis: Yes: 0.1% - 10% = -9.9% No: 99.9% - 90% = 9.9% Conclusion: the earth is not flat. Not sure where you're getting the "10% believe the earth is flat" from, but if that's just your guess then it's pretty reasonable for people to say they think 10%…
But, interestingly, there may be a symmetry between people who overestimate the amount of creationists and creationists who underestimate their numbers.
So maybe that technique is actually valid. It spots an asymmetry in people who think the majority is wrong on something.
I wonder if this could be viewed as an application of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Nope. That is overconfidence of the ignorant, and this is dealing with trusting the high confidence of the correct. It doesn't really matter here that people answered incorrectly.
There is this core part of the unpopular-but-correct answerers that knows that the incorrect answer is popular. The larger this core part is, the higher the "score" of the "surprisingly popular" answer is. It's about finding something that is "mistakenly popular".