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What makes group decisions go wrong and right

nautil.us

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Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right

#21

Post by AlbertCory »

yboris wrote: post #20
ghaff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the "wisdom of crowds" vs. groupthink thing really interesting. Wisdom of crowds is definitely a thing but under fairly narrow conditions that I've never seen rigorously defined although I think people have some sense for it. When it works it tends to work really well (e.g. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predictio... ) but it's not very generalizable. ADDED: To your example, I'm guessing th…

Have you read "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki? The book is focused on just the question of what conditions seem to be beneficial/detrimental to sourcing the "wisdom" from crowds.

I have, not sure about @ghaff but I suspect he has, too.

This "researcher" is attempting to go deeper and quantify it, maybe (I suspect) as a way of devaluing individual thinking.

Re: What makes group decisions go wrong and right

#22

Post by ghaff »

yboris wrote: post #20
ghaff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the "wisdom of crowds" vs. groupthink thing really interesting. Wisdom of crowds is definitely a thing but under fairly narrow conditions that I've never seen rigorously defined although I think people have some sense for it. When it works it tends to work really well (e.g. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predictio... ) but it's not very generalizable. ADDED: To your example, I'm guessing th…

Have you read "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki? The book is focused on just the question of what conditions seem to be beneficial/detrimental to sourcing the "wisdom" from crowds.

I have although, as I recall, while the book touches on some of the conditions for the wisdom of crowds to work I didn't leave with a strong sense of a definitive list.

However, as noted upthread some of the things would seem to be independent solutions, an ability to meaningfully aggregate those solutions, and some level of expertise in the crowd (i.e. if everyone's just making completely random guesses it won't work).

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