
How 'artificial swarm intelligence' uses people to make better predictions - jonbaer
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-artificial-swarm-intelligence-uses-people-to-make-better-predictions-than-experts/
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50CNT
There was this article I read about crowd decision making, but I cannot for
the life of me recall where this tidbit was in, but I found the conclusion
interesting.

Essentially wisdom of the crowds works when the members have at least some
knowledge of the underlying thing. The example I heard first was guessing the
weight of a bull at an auction, where the averaged crowd estimate was
incredibly close to the actual weight, more so than any of the local expert
estimates. The Oscars cited in this article would be another example of
something where members of the crowd have some knowledge of the event, and the
aggregate knowledge may surpass expert knowledge.

But then there's the same kind of crowd predictions in things crowd members
have little to no knowledge of, where things frequently deviate from actual
results. Crowd expert systems will fail at things like medical diagnosis or
aircraft maintenance which require high degrees of specialized knowledge the
average person possessed little of. Applying them to systems like these
results in horrible mistakes happening.

If anyone does recall the book or article this was in, that'd be neat, even
though I think the point stands to a degree. Crowd intelligence isn't
necessarily the panacea it is made out to be.

