The Wisdom of the Crowd

Last week, my parents tipped me about a television program of Labyrint (Nederland 2). This turned out to be an interesting topic for my new blog! The program was about the power of a crowd, and how this power is increasingly used on the internet nowadays.

Cow experiment
Labyrint has replicated an early experiment, by which a large group of people had to guess the weight of a cow. The expectation was that the intelligence of a group of people is higher than the smartest person of that group. Requirements are that the group is diverse in knowledge and experience, and that people guess independently.

The wisdom of the crowd was proven by the early experiment. However, the Labyrint experiment failed: the average estimation of the weight of the cow was 552 kilo’s, while the actual weight was 740 kilo’s! How is this possible? Labyrint explains that people might have googled the weight and the study was probably too casual. In addition, nowadays people are not as close to nature and agriculture anymore.. there must be knowledge in the crowd!

Watch the entire tv program:



Crowd sourcing
Foldit is a computer game by which people can collectively help to calculate the development of a protein. This prediction is important because the structure specifies the function of the protein. Foldit is one of the first online initiatives for crowd sourcing. People help each other, mistakes are neutralized this way, and the average is close to the right answer.

Monk is an other example of such an initiative. With this computer program, people can collectively help to decode illegible historical documents.
This way, small contributions result in big solutions.

Developments
A more recent development is the situation in the Middle-east, where one revolution is followed by the next. People share their knowledge via social media and blogs, and provide varied and detailed information this way. Twitter is an other recent development where organizations can retrieve information from groups of people for several purposes. Micro-blogging can for instance predict movements in the stock market.

I think in the future the power of the crowd should be, and will be, used more effectively. I’d say: exploit that crowd! Especially if it’s also for entertaining purposes (computer game) or informational purposes (middel-east), it is an optimal win-win situation.