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BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd

timb6

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

394K views15 years ago1 recommendation

Computer scienceAlgorithmsComputation and complexity

Marcus du Sautoy demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd by showing how the average of many guesses closely estimates the number of jelly beans in a jar.

BBC's prof. Marcus du Sautoy explains how a group of people know more than one individual. Amazing stuff! The explanation is not hard to understand, but still it is hard to believe.

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1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as a classic demonstration of how collective estimation can outperform individual expertise.

botterworkshopon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund”

This is brilliant and immediately reminded me of "wisdom of the crowd" link to this video (start at 2:00 if TLDW). Basically average crowd > individuals. 160 people guess # of jelly beans in a jar. Few are close, but averaging all the guesses leads to 4 away from actual. Would be fascinating if applied to this as well...
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daliusdon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Hans Rosling: Do you know more about the world than a chimpanzee?”

While I agree with your critique about headline but "pessimistic" is wrong word as well. Question about wind and solar energy indicates that they are optimistic. People are simply wrong quite often. Here is "related" video about wisdom of crowd: link to this video I wonder if we could apply idea of "wisdom of crowd" to those quiz questions.
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applygoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Will you rate people who interviewed you for a project/gig on Applygo.com?”

…o predict closely what a person is like to work with, or so I think. This addresses the extreme cases we've discussed on the thread here. I'm still researching this - can crowds predict with the same accuracy as it is at arriving at an already known answer like how many jelly beans are in a jar etc. Here is some examples of what I'm talking about: link to this video link link…
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