[pjc50]

The "wisdom of crowds" thing is supposed to work like those fairground games of guessing the number of sweets in the jar; everyone has their own answer, but you'd expect the answers to be roughly in a normal distribution around the true mean.

Suppose you have a bunch of sincere answers of 1867, 1957, 2101, 2057 sweets, and then someone comes along with an answer of two million. They get a bunch of astroturf accounts, a few celebrity retweets, and suddenly thousands of people are claiming the answer to be two million, skewing the average up. They can even start using the fact that the other answers are different from each other and the average as evidence of their bias!

It is extremely difficult to determine honest effort vs dishonest spin, but it's absolutely vital to the process because you have to exclude the spin guys and all their sockpuppets before you do any kind of averaging or consensus.